There’s definitely a critical issue in this build as all transmogged armor is reset to default appearances on log in, campsite options are all greyed out (only saw this happen once so far), the Collections UI doesn’t open and produces an error, transmogging isn’t available, collected transmog appearances are showing as not collected, and even the Trading Post vendor UI doesn’t open.
I hope this kind of Collections apocalypse doesn’t hit live servers because this looks really bad.
This does sound like a standard aspect of PTR. Copying characters does not maintain certain cosmetic effects, and your characters are now in a new warband on that PTR’s server group. Trading Post only works when Blizzard wants us to test something on there.
Attempting to open Collections brings up a LUA error, so the only “standard aspect” here is that there’s a major bug with some features at the moment.
It’s possible that the Collections UI is broken due to work towards the upcoming housing feature, and a lot of times adding new features to something can break everything that already exists until whatever new work is finished.
The thing with the Trading Post may or may not be related to the LUA errors, but the Collections UI and transmog system are both broken in the current PTR build.
I agree that the Collections UI is broken, and was going to mention something if the issue persisted into the next build.
It is the kind of bug, however, that they can’t not fix before the Release Candidate phase. If I click any icon on my UI and I get an error, that is not ready for release - full stop.
Why would it be at “Release Candidate” phase? It’s on PTR, months and months away from any release version.
It would need to be fixed before going to RC, in the sense that if that bug is still there the team can’t bump it to RC until that bug is fixed for everyone.
I would hope the error gets fixed with the next build, but if it persists that reporting it through F6 will make it clear it’s still happening. If we keep getting the error after a few incremental builds, then posting about it here with clear feedback about what’s happening will, again hopefully, make it clear it’s still an issue.
The OP was worried that this bug would survive long enough to be on the live servers. My point is that reports of this bug, without adequate proof of resolution, would be enough to block the team from marking the build as an RC (i.e. before reaching Live). It should get fixed in the next build. Possibly the one after that. But if we get two more builds and not only clicking the Collections icon gets the exact same error but also we don’t have a blue post acknowledging the issue; then you might want to be worried.