Hard disagree. They clearly are not doing their best. If they did, they would take their time to get as much restoration as possible. Instead, it’s a few bread crumbs; some guilds are getting NOTHING back. They sure were quick to restock the banks of a few streamers within a couple of days.
Again, as I stated, I have more things in other areas I have invested. For me PERSONALLY, an emptied guild bank pisses me off a bit, but I am not outraged enough to quit. Am I addicted? Hell no. I started playing three weeks into launch in 2004. I have a huge mount and pet collections, tons of maxed out professions…
My circle of longtime friends I still play with and enjoy my time immensly…
Their handling of this situation is deplorable. That doesn’t take total enjoyment of the game from me. I’m not saying you are over-reacting; you are well within your right, if this is how you feel.
Even in real data centers, when data is lost or something crashes, the only two options are:
Client lets it slide and prays it does not happen again, or
Client sues for damages
So unless someone plans to whip out a lawyer, and sue a game company whose EULA literally says,
THIS AGREEMENT CONTAINS A BINDING ARBITRATION AGREEMENT AND CLASS ACTION WAIVER IN THE SECTION TITLED “DISPUTE RESOLUTION.” THIS AGREEMENT AFFECTS YOUR RIGHTS WITH RESPECT TO ANY “DISPUTE” BETWEEN YOU AND BLIZZARD AND MAY REQUIRE YOU TO RESOLVE DISPUTES IN BINDING, INDIVIDUAL ARBITRATION, AND NOT IN COURT.
and goes on to say
For purposes of this Agreement and any agreements referenced herein, “Custom Games” includes all content created using the Game Editor(s), including but not limited to all digital files associated with such Custom Games, as well as (1) all content contained within such files, including but not limited to player and non-player characters, audio and video elements, environments, objects, items, skins, and textures, (2) all titles, trademarks, trade names, character names, or other names and phrases associated with or included within the Custom Game, and (3) any other intellectual property rights contained within the Custom Game, including any and all content, game concepts, methods or ideas.
Translation: “It is ours and we are letting you use it.” WoW is little more than a time sink, that we pay for, and hold them completely harmless for ALL loss, even their own pixels. Do I agree with it? No. Should we have to put up with it? No. Is there anything we can do more than lodge a complaint? I’ll give you three guesses and the answer starts with an N.
I understand absolutely nothing about systems, but something else happened here.
I say this because in real time I was making comments on the original thread; My guild was first missing 99% of everything, but there were 4 loose items left in 1 tab. Four that were there for 4 days and then also disappeared.
I didn’t touch the gv after the first error I saw. I neither put things in nor took things out. I left it intact.
I don’t know what they did or how they did it. If I knew they would also disappear, I would have taken them.
There was an “original mistake,” and then they made another mistake on top of it.
That also happened with my main Horde guild, although the exact quantities were different. There were two distinct, separate stages in the disappearances.
(Editing for detail: found screenshots)
Soooo. I have two screenshots of that guild’s first tab up and am comparing timestamps.
I noticed the issue on the morning of the 14th and -immediately- started to act on the item loss.
I started the original 2000+ post Bug Report thread on 08/14/2024 at what should be 9:46 am PST (I believe that the forums display local time zones). This was partially to 1) create a timestamp for as close to the initial occurrence as possible and 2) to see if anyone else had noticed this.
I then took my first screenshot, captured on 08/14/2024 at 10:08 am PST. 33 slots remained occupied in the first screenshot out of a 100% full tab.
My original ticket was submitted on 08/14/2024 at approximately 10:27 am PST (the screenshot of the ticket window states ‘4 hours ago’ at the screenshot’s time of 2:27pm PST).
The second screenshot was captured two days later on 08/16/2024 7:12 am PST. 14 slots remained occupied in the second screenshot.
I am certain that the second batch of disappearances happened within the 6 hours prior to that screenshot because I was, at that point, logging in and monitoring all my guild banks at least every 2-3 hours and did not see the need to get screenshots where there had been no change (egg on my face, I know better for next time).
So whatever it is that they did, they DID do it twice, and while I have a good idea of the time span, I’m not comfortable enough with that estimate to publicly speculate (yet).
Fallout is a single player game, so yes saves are client side. There isn’t anything that Bethesda could do to recover data that is deleted on your PC. Totally different situation than here, where the loss happened on Blizzard’s servers.
I would be more understanding if this was something totally unforseen. Like, if we heard that a tsunami had hit the datacenter or something. But that’s not what happened. Instead, untested code was pushed live. And when items started disappearing, the servers weren’t shut down, instead they tried to sweep it under the rug and refused to even say anything was wrong for a month. This is extremely unprofessional. I’d be angry even if a single person indie studio did something like this.
Not just that, but they ran their bad code at least twice. If they had stopped whatever it was that they were doing on the 14th, many guild banks would have been in far better shape than they are now.
I honestly just realized this was an issue. I don’t generally look on the forums or pay too much attention to bug reports, etc. I was just blindly playing the new expansion, working on delves in my own little solo world and hadn’t been back on one of my alt bank toons since before the pre-release patch came out. I happened to see something about this and went and looked, and yeah, 7 tabs full of crafting mats and collectibles from every expansion back to vanilla are gone.
I had 2 haunted mementos in there, among what all else I can’t even begin to remember. I have 1 haunted memento left on one of my toons that I was using to auction stuff, but, wow what a sucky feeling. I had zero items in the mail on my character that is the GM of that guild. I get that this is all digital stuff and in real life terms has no meaning, but after 20 years of being a packrat in a game that you would assume would take care of your stuff, still kinda stings. I imagine the fallout of this isn’t going to become apparent for several months at the least.
I think the biggest disappointment is the lack of any real accountability from Blizzard. There will be many people like me who generally remain silent, doing their thing in the background, who will quietly slip away and find other things to do with their time and money. This will erode a large part of the player base who aren’t doing all the flashy things and watching streaming esports and whatnot, that has kept this game thriving for 20 years. Maybe not right away, but it will come. We might be seeing the beginning of the end of an era in gaming that will never come around again. It makes me sad. Trust is something that is very difficult to earn back.
This is all just a guess, looking at how things have been going.
First, I think this was HUGE. We can see how many people JUST in this and the old Bug Report forums, were affected. And I bet there were a TON more. Not everyone thinks to go to the forums. Some put in tickets (as difficult as it is now). Some put in in-game bug-reports. Some may have gone to outside sources, such as Reddit or Quora to ask questions. Maybe some got fed up and just quietly quit because they didn’t have enough to keep them here. I’m guessing many guilds were AFFECTED but due to the possible lesser scope (maybe 50% or less of their items missing) and a lot of traffic, or the way they managed the banks (for example, as it happened during prepatch, they may have already been clearing out some of the DF and older stuff to make space for things from the upcoming expansion) they may not have noticed.
Also, I think they have less people / less experienced people working there. They’ve had a lot of issue regarding their treatment of workers and waves and waves of layoffs, including the big ones after MS bought ABK. They may have lost a LOT of people who would have been more experienced with this sort of thing. A lot of companies try to go “cheaper” and don’t value people who have had SPECIFIC experience with certain systems or departments. Maybe the people who had seen or experienced this sort of error are no longer working at Blizzard, or in the right department? To people looking at spreadsheets and graphs, how much so and so knows about this particular thing is of no importance. It’s “what can we cut and still get the game out?”"
Along with the expertise, with the mass layoffs come less HANDS to do the work. I’m sure such restorations take time, and if it’s just one or two, they might handle it, but with THOUSANDS of guilds losing THOUSANDS of items, and being short handed, when disaster strikes, I imagine they just aren’t prepared, and really, they don’t care. They consider it all acceptable loss.
They have also been putting out content MUCH FASTER. While for some (thought not for me) this might seem like a POSITIVE thing, there was some value to the “we’ll release it when it’s ready” philosophy. Now, it seems they don’t wait till it’s ready, till it’s adequately tested, but probably to meet some corporate deadline - quarterly reports, earnings call, that sort of thing. And having less or less experienced people rushing out a product to meet some deadline that has nothing to do with the actual readiness of the product . . . at some point, something had to give.
Unfortunately, I’ve heard of lost characters lately (read somewhere in this or the other forum thread) along with other kinds of lost data. So it’s possible that NOTHING is safe. Everything is data, and this is a huge data loss. That means ANYTHING in game - achievements, mounts, gear, characters - can vanish and they can decide that that too, is acceptable loss.
The value of the “paying customer” to a company, even a long-time, loyal customer is no longer that great. In fact, they’ll take a Whale (person who spends a lot of real money within the game, even if they don’t play for as long) over someone who had steadily paid their $12.99 to $15.00 every month over the span of 18 or 20 years. They will value someone who brings them publicity (such as a well-known streamer) over people who just want to pay their money and try to have fun in the game, often with friends. They also don’t value what players who may be “glue” bring to the game - the people who may have a lot of friends, or is a fun, chatty person in the guild, or a guild or raid leader who does what they can to make the game more FUN or more organized for others, the people that bring MORE VALUE to the game for other people, but isn’t shown on a graph somewhere. It’s all about numbers and image.
They may have the back up, but either don’t have the eyeballs to look over the data and hands to restore them, or they SIMPLY DON’T THINK IT’S WORTH THEIR TIME AND RESOURCES. In other words, it is not important to them to make us whole.
This is NOT to excuse them because all of these were CHOICES they made. Who to value (both players and workers), what they thought was disposable, what they thought could be sacrificed without big enough drop in numbers / bad enough publicity / legal issues / pissing off big investors.
A lot of people are quite vocally unsubscribing, but yes there will be a lot of people who just silently leave too.
It may not affect the player numbers for this expansion that much right away…but you can bet it will severely affect the next one. There is a chance that this could end up killing the game if they don’t show some sort of accountability and attempt to do something for the affected guilds. Heck even doing something like making a pet or a toy would be something (even if it’s not enough).
Dang funny they were able to returned all the lost stuff of a big name streamer when this happened 5 weeks ago…supposedly just two day or so of the bug happening and that person losing all their stuff from a private guild bank they had it was all returned 2 days or so into the bug…meanwhile 1,000’s of other players waited 5 weeks to get back a stack of old world cloth in some cases and others nothing mailed back…funny how certain players get all the help they need right off the bat.
That’s because people like you and me and the rest of the everyday playerbase don’t hype their game via the eSports equivalents of Dancing with the Stars.
That issue likely had to do with unique items phasing out, if you already had one in your inventory. This is something I figured out with warbanks very early on, that if you have a unique item in your inventory, you will not see it in the warbank, until you remove it from your inventory. I doubt this has any relation to guild banks, as you can deposit multiple unique items into the same bank/tab.
If you came to the conclusion that some items were deleted in such a way they aren’t retrievable… which items? do they have gold value? can you compensate said gold value? Vague responses of some stuff but not others because we don’t know…
This whole merging stuff has been a crap show. Insane that you backed up NOTHING? before attempting this.
Weird how if I have an issue, you tell me to back up my WTF folder. Why did you not backup yours?
This pains me horribly, because I had been trying to get attention to THIS problem many years back, and people trashed me for it; they just kept pushing the “more is better” (quantity over quality) ideology. This expansion and launch has been a prime example of the rabbit hole that problem takes us down. I was hoping it NEVER got this bad, but evidently, it has …
Blizzard needs to slow down with pushing content out. I’m probably in a minority, but I’m of the mindset that, I am totally willing to wait an extra year, if that means the expansion will be better. This biannual expansion business is just a rhythmic sales generator, and not because they had genuinely invested (at least what I think should be) the necessary time to make another expansion to this game.
I’m with you there. It’s like they never heard any of their Pandaren NPC speech clips before in their lives. “Slow down…!”
For me, it has nothing to do with ‘oh noes mah immersion’ - it has to do with being able to proceed smoothly through a questline or a zone or whatever without the problems of discovering an issue, stopping, re-checking to see if I’ve gone wrong, and then having go to any random number of the usual sites to see if it’s me or if it’s the game.
