Latecomer to this thread, I’ve posted here already.
In short, I didn’t think I had been affected. As soon as Warband banks came out, I managed to extract all my gold and just dump that into my Warband bank and didn’t pay too much attention to my (private) guild bank. Not much had been selling prior to the expansion anyway.
I got restoration mails yesterday, containing:
2x Pink Mageweave shirts
1x Wildvine Potion recipe
1x Wildthorn Mail recipe
1x Schematic: Dark Iron Rifle
That’s it.
What I’ve actually lost includes (and is certainly not limited to): old patterns and recipes like Lifestealing and Greater Fire Protection Potion, just to name a couple, along with dozens (perhaps hundreds) of old dragonscales of various colours (my main is a dragonscale LW from Vanilla and I have all the patterns learned).
My guild bank tabs are virtually empty. I had lots of mats from other, old expansions. But what really kills me are my patterns. Some are no longer obtainable. Some are really hard to get.
It has never once crossed my mind that Blizzard would lose my stuff. I’ve been playing off and on (but mostly on) for almost 19 years, having started just after the ZG patch in Vanilla. Not for a single moment did I ever think anything I had to my name in the game had a chance of being compromised or deleted or anything of the sort. More, Blizzard has been exceedingly good about this kind of stuff in the past – errors with master loot back in the day where a 2H sword got given to the wrong person in MC, restoration of a pattern that a tailor wasn’t able to loot again after he got pulled into combat in Karazhan, the explanation as to where someone’s Vashj vial vanished to even though she was there with us for the kill (she had dropped the quest, so the vial was destroyed)… Blizzard has, over the years, built up their trust with me. I have trusted that if I log out one day and log back in five years later, my stuff will still be there.
And now, all of that trust they’ve gained with me over almost 19 years? Gone. Poof. Just like all the stuff in my guild bank.
Look, I work in tech. I understand how difficult some of these restorations are. But players spend hours, days, weeks, months, years, and now decades, playing this game. We farm herbs and ore and leather. We store things away in our various banks. We put them there FOR SAFEKEEPING. Blizzard, you cannot justify not spending time and energy (and money) on these restorations. Everything we do in this game is in the pursuit of pixels. These items, titles, pieces of gear, weapons, patterns, materials, do not exist anywhere but in a world that you created. It is up to you to fix this and restore the pixels we have pursued for years and decades, in some cases.
I just don’t understand why hundreds of paying customers are getting screwed over. Blizzard, you have logs. You have data. Use it. Restore us all in full. This is absolutely unacceptable for a game about to celebrate its 20th anniversary.
Do you expect me to celebrate with you when so much of my Vanilla stuff is just gone now? Do you think that I’m so blinded by the shiny new stuff that I will just drop this and will cease to care? Because none of that is going to happen. I am going to make some noise about this.
Guild name: Royal Bank of Mogh
Realm: Eldre’Thalas
GM: Kurnbank
(Thank you to Vaelhaeyn for compiling things.)