The only thing that’s worrisome is that if players dropped items into slots that appeared empty but actually had things, they may have done something bad to whatever was in that slot before. If I remember correctly, this has happened before.
Maybe this is part of the issues rhe developers are trying to figure out how to fix.
Just logged in today, the guild bank and personal bank missing items that I spent hours collecting on Darrowmere.
This makes me very sad
The thing, though, is that cross-realm guilds require a new approach to managing the contents of guild banks.
In the early days of WoW, realms were independent, and instances of items had unique IDs on those realms. An item belonged to its realm and would never move.
Adding cross-realm functionality requires allowing items to be “rehomed” by atomically destroying them on one realm while recreating them on another. By “atomic” I mean that this operation must either complete in its entirety, or fail in its entirety. Otherwise you have items vanishing, or, worse, being duplicated.
A cross-realm guild bank is from this perspective potentially a big, chaotic mess.
Which realm owns the items in the bank? Are they all assigned to a particular realm, say, the GM’s realm? Or do they live on the realms of whoever deposited them? The latter is unlikely, because there are a fair number of instanced items on a server (let’s say, 1 million), and a region-wide DB would have ballpark 70 times that, and would not necessarily be as responsive as desired. So DBs handling items are probably separate per realm, and having items from multiple realms in a vault would require hitting a bunch of different DBs just to display contents, so, anyway, nahhh probably not.
And more to the point, which account owns them. A warband bank is one thing but at least everything in it belongs to a single account. A cross-realm guild bank, on the other hand, has to deal with multiple accounts and items from multiple realms. Is ownership transferred to the GM when items are deposited?
Like moving items from realm to realm, moving items from one account to another also provides opportunities for inadvertent destruction and duplication, so the coding involved has to be rock-solid and impervious to network shenanigans, server hiccups, DB hiccups, and so on. This kind of code is tremendously difficult to write in a way such that it handles all imaginable edge cases. What happens with a DC? What happens when some enterprising hacker fiddles with the packets in the client-server connection? What happens when the DB server fails, or hangs for a minute? What happens when code on a server crashes?
None of this directly provides a basis to explain spontaneous vanishing of guild bank contents. But if the realm or account affinity of items is somehow being corrupted, maybe they are being yanked into limbo or simply destroyed.
Why some slots become unusable and/or items are “frozen” in them, I wouldn’t necessarily assume this is the same bug; it might be two.
Of course it could be simpler.
We don’t know how the visual representation of a guild bank maps to an internal representation. Is there a table somewhere with item UIDs, tab, row, column, and whatever is necessary to associate a guild vault? What happens if some aspect of that is corrupted? Well, for sure, it won’t be displayed correctly.
Is there client-side caching of guild vault contents that could be corrupted? What if there was a back-end change but the client side code doesn’t match it? People often assert that the client is “dumb” but when you stop and think about it, you quickly realize that it is extremely complex. Much of the communication from client to server is “here’s what happened, just so you know,” and the server has the opportunity to roll that back if something isn’t right. If it didn’t work this way, the game would crawl under the very best of network conditions.
Anyway, I worry that the no doubt complex coding needed to reliably support cross-server guild vaults necessitated changes that have unexpected side effects that were somehow not caught either by testing or careful “what if?” thinking.
I also think that this expansion was (and is) not ready for release, but the decision to go GM at X date was made a while ago and was set in stone by management, perhaps while high on hopium.
I don’t want to cause false hope, and be advised that this was in response to a Warband Bank comment and not for guild banks, but it is possible that our lost items still exist, we just can’t see them. Possibly because of unique IDs/ownership conflicts?
I just don’t understand how a new expansion is supposed to launch with guild banks not working. I’ve been here for a while and I can’t remember a bug like this that has such a broad impact.
The behavior described here would fit the scenario of a client-side cache being out of sync with the back end.
That would be a best-case I think, as long as the back end isn’t materializing client side changes in a destructive way.
Well said! If you scroll up and look at two previous posts I suggested the same thing for the same reason. Will it be a factor? We will see. I did not put anything new in a slot where an item vanished from JIC. But if the item is just invisible and the slot is offline and unresponsive it may just catch up on all the commands once the connection is established again or do nothing because the commands were never recognized.
I turned in a ticket and they had me delete my WTF and Cache and that didn’t do anything. I don’t like the idea of going into an expansion not being able to use my guild bank. The need to at least tell us they working on it.
Deleting the WTF and Cache is like their cliché response. Does nothing, but gets an agent’s ticket reply count a +1. Gotta pump them numbers. Figured with the acquisition by Microsoft, they’d moved on to “Check for Windows Updates”, “Update your drivers”, and “Try turning it off then on again”.
Blizzard did at least respond that they are aware of the problem. But this was over a week ago and things are still vanishing regularly from the Guild Banks. Somehow not reassured by their statement
We apologize for any inconvenience while our developers work as quickly as possible to resolve the issue
I’d guess all the developers are putting in massive overtime hours just trying to make TWW work.
“scheduled” maintenance again tomorrow maybe the third time will be charmed.
likely early access related rather then Gbank fix 
Hello, both of my guild banks are experiencing the same thing. One guild is “Lunar Paradiction” in Dragonblight, the other is “Minervas Masterminds” in Kel’Thuzad. It is a guild for me and my sister and there is nothing listed in the logs. Both guild banks were almost completely filled with random items (reagents, gear, consumables, etc.) and now are almost completely empty.
i took video of my guild banks … after sometime perhaps i can do a time lapse … nah, just kidding about the time lapse, i took video, but its just for reference and as a record, that it is still ongoing, like a leak, slowly and surely, removing things, either piece by piece or chunk by chunk, it is still ongoing, i have proof
Our guild bank has also experienced this disappearance. At first, certain items were locked, except a few pieces of pocket lint, and then they disappeared. I submitted a trouble ticket a few days ago and have not received a response.
Tickets will not help, there is nothing GM’s can do. The developers have to resolve this for everyone. They are working on it, Vrakthris replied last night.
I got a good response email from a GM, known issue with no work around. He stated he could “see” my vaults items.
I also took a look at Refugees of Auberdine and I see that the bank still has the items.
In order to speed up this process, I would also recommend that you to file a bug report in order for our development team to take a look at the underlying issue here so that this can get resolved afterward.
I still can’t see them
So here I am, again…
Simply not true on the GMs response, items are still disappearing. The problem is still happening. People are taking screen shots, videos and seeing items disappear still, eight days in.
Vrak isn’t a GM, he’s a support forum agent on the CS forums. He is not a GM, he is not a developer. He is just passing on what information he was given.
Still not fixed, do not use guild bank, been setting my banks up on several alt toons (all tabs) with cheap mats and watching items disappear everyday, including today.