Since you have now edited in questions, I will respond to your reply to answer them as best I can.
Any bugs you might have encountered in the game would need to be reported in the Bug Report Forum.
That feedback would need to be included in the survey you would have received after your ticket was marked as answered.
Any other feedback about changes you wish to see concerning the policies by which the GMs must abide would need to be posted either via the in-game suggestion tool: ESC-->HELP-->SUBMIT SUGGESTION or via an appropriate non-Support Forum. General Discussion is the catch-all Forum for feedback that doesn’t fit within the categories of the other Forums.
I think part of your frustration is that you don’t remember how the pet transition worked.
Old - Pets dropped as an item that was Bind On USE. So, you could sell or trade it until you used it which bound it. However, the pet stayed as a physical item in your inventory. There was no Collection. I still have many of these in my bank. Back then, when they were individual items, they were character bound - which is what you might be thinking of.
Transition - The Collection feature was unveiled! To put a pet into your collection, you had to click the pet cage in your inventory, including ones you had already been using. There was no automatic transition. Once the item went into your collection it was account wide, with few exceptions.
Now - many pets still drop as items that you have to click to add to your collection. Others are automatically added to your collection via a rewards system when you buy them, or earn them through an achievement.
The only way your Oozling would have gone missing is if you somehow misplaced the item in your inventory that summoned it. Maybe you forgot which character had it?
Regardless, you can get a new one. It now comes from Oozing Bags that drop off slimes found in what were the old 50 to 60 zones, and the AQ 20 instance that you can solo yourself (for now). Each bag has a chance to contain the pet item that will add it to your inventory for all chars.
For more fun, running old dungeons gets you lots of new pets that are part of achievements that result in…more pets!
Dang, dude. That sucks. Sorry that happened to you. It’s unfortunate that Blizz was unwilling to restore it. But the strict policy is understandable to avert the inevitable flood of requests, both ligitimate and false.
The pet is definitely account wide. And I feel obligated to suggest something rather trivial, but could you perhaps go log on to every single character you have? It could be that the character that actually had the oozeling was a different one than you remember (it’s been 7 years after all), and if you log on to that charcter, the oozeling may populate into your account wide collection. It was a long time ago, but I think that’s how all the account wide stuff worked: i.e. you had to log in to every character to get that character’s collectable items to populate into the account collection. I suspect you would have checked that already or that the GM would have checked for you, but I figured I’d throw it out there. It may not work, but it’s worth a try.
Or, from what Mirasol noted, it might be an item sitting in the bags or bank of another character. It might even be a deleted character that you might be able to restore. Not sure if that would work on character’s that are 7 years gone, but always worth a try.
The transition automatically filled the pet journal. I remember because I still have more than three of at least one pet from it. What happened during the conversion is that pets disappeared. Blizzard mailed affected pets to all players, whether or not their pet was missing. I know I wasn’t missing pets but I was mailed a bunch of duplicates.
If you were not logged in during this transition, and were missing the pets, and were not there for the mailing, you are likely out of luck. The mail decays. Depending on the item, mail from Blizzard decays after 30/60/90 days usually. At most, the mail might still be retrievable for a few days after it expires, depending on the logs. So at most, if you were not logged in for the pet mails, you last chance for them would be between 37 and 97 days after that mailing that happened years ago.
Edit:
I still have five creepy crates in my pet journal.
My recollection is that before the pet collections, the Disgusting Oozeling was character specific. Bind on use. So, it was bound to me, but when it was converted, it went missing? I think Rufflebottom had the idea. I wasn’t logged in during the conversion, and it didn’t populate into the journal. Maybe I would have got it in the mail. Oh well.
I’ll admit I got wound up by this. Unfortunately, I got this pet while I was playing with my daughter, who committed suicide, and then I stopped playing… so the two losses may be conflated together in my emotional mind. PTSD is a funny thing, the way it develops.
It happens, no need to apologize. I am sorry for your loss and my heart truly goes out to you. Hopefully the game can bring you some comfort. Good luck to you.
Perl, thank you so much, I have received it. You are too kind, and your sympathy and gift have sincerely made me feel better. Thank you to Mourningg and Rufflebottom too. I am also hoping the game can bring me some pleasant distraction.
thank you for the explanation, Kyzera, that does help. I am new to these particular forums, for some reason, I never explored them much before. I honestly never had an issue that was ticket worthy before this, and I probably surmised they were primarily for support. I see they are much wider ranging than that.
And I apologize for my snarkiness to earlier posters. You were all trying to help. I just wasn’t ready to listen.
Just to follow up on this. If the vanity pet was part of a purchase package, or a buy by date, those are generally very easily verifiable factors that would more than likely be noted on the account. Very much like owning a Collector’s Edition for us. We’d be able to verify that your license was a Collector’s Edition for a specific expansion and if you had the pet in your collection already. Obviously, if you did not and it was part of the license, we’d be able to grant it. The pet in question is not part of any package.
I am very sorry for your loss, Corlicious, and that we weren’t able to help in this situation. Good luck to you.
I was just filling out the post ticket survey… things become clearer with reflection. While the GM’s responding to my ticket were sympathetic with my frustration at losing the item, they couldn’t acknowledge that it might have been a Blizzard bug, because if they did, they’d have to do something about it.
Getting sympathy from a few people here that it could have been Blizzard’s fault made me feel better. Didn’t matter that I wasn’t getting the pet back, I think if Blizzard had said, well, it could be our fault but we can’t do anything because of policy, proof, etc, that I would have felt less frustrated. Maybe not, but that’s why I’m following up, because I wanted my thoughts heard. The sympathy didn’t ring as true, because they couldn’t fully acknowledge my POV as valid, whether or not it actually happened that way.
I appreciate that, Corlicious. We can certainly say that it could be a bug, though we’d have no way of verifying that at this point. As I mentioned, I’m not aware of any known bugs that may have caused an issue like that but it isn’t about assigning blame, just trying to provide likely scenarios.
It’ll take an hour to get there, but it should show up.
