After a recent update resulted in a number of Guild Banks having their inventories completely emptied, unlucky players are finding themselves left out to dry by Blizzard’s recovery efforts.
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The story begins August 13th, with the launch of Patch 11.0.2 ahead of the game’s prepare the game for The War Within expansion. Shortly thereafter however, players began to notice their Guild Banks were missing large numbers of items.
As reported by IGN, while the issue didn’t affect all players and guilds, hundreds of players found themselves on the receiving end of said misfortune, as per player-run surveys (meaning many more may have been unreported). The number of items missing ranged from half the Bank, to its entirety. Those Banks can hold up to 784 item slots, along with money, and the efforts of players over several years.
To make matters worse, as in-game logs didn’t record any items being taken out, players who weren’t making their own records of what was in the bank were left struggling to remember exactly what was missing.
This in turn could also have made the submissions of damage claims to Blizzard Entertainment even harder, especially if that Guild Bank held something extremely hard to get.
Reportedly, Blizzard Entertainment didn’t make any statements at first, leaving players to run the aforementioned surveys of the damage on their own.
Then, over five weeks after the disaster, September 20th saw Community Manager “Linxy” finally issued a statement on the official World of Warcraft forums.
“About a week after we launched patch 11.0.2 in August, we began receiving reports of an issue where some players were discovering items missing from their guild banks,” Linxy opened. “As we investigated over the next couple of days, we found the culprit—a technical update that was made to support cross-realm guilds. An unexpected bug caused one of our maintenance processes to make some items disappear.”
“Many of these items were related to professions materials from prior expansions, but it was possible for players to lose other items from their guild banks as well,” he added.
Linxy then insisted that “for the last few weeks, we’ve been packing up the missing items that we’re able to identify as lost by this process, and we will soon mail those to the guild leader character for each affected guild” before hitting players with a the reveal of a major issue.
“Due to how some of the data was lost, we’ve reached a point where the result will be an incomplete restoration for some guilds, and we do not have a way to restore the remaining missing items for them,” said Linxy. “We apologize for that and for the long wait here. We really appreciate your patience as we’ve worked through this difficult issue.”
However, since late September, players have begun to realize how little is being returned and subsequently sharing their findings on social media, particularly the /r/WoW subreddit.
Some players lost 773 stacks of items (leaving just 11), while others showed surviving items remained in the exact same inventory slot in the Guild Bank.
One player only recovered their decorative Halloween jack-o-lanterns, while another claimed to have lost everything, showing only their logs to prove what they had. This prompted others to wonder why Blizzard couldn’t use those logs as evidence of what was missing.
One player, Different_Ad_9469, shared how they had lost all their items from thirteen years of playing World of Warcraft, lamenting “Support said there is nothing they can do about it aside from making noise. Please don’t forget they wiped many guilds out.”
In an alleged support email shared as proof to his claims, a Blizzard employee supposedly wrote, “Hello, game master Ar[redacted] here, thanks for contacting us! Apologies for taking a bit longer than normal to respond. I completely understand the frustration on this matter and the fact that you are disappointed. A forum post explaining the investigation into this issue and the outcome has been posted on the US forums”.
The game master then told the player “Please make sure that you post your feedback in there. We as support will be unable to provide any kind of restoration on this matter, and creating a ticket about this, will not resolve this issue for you. We will also be unable to escalate a request like this internally.”
“We will additionally be unable to accept any kind of screenshot or list as evidence of missing items,” the support team member concluded. “I appreciate that this may be a disappointing outcome, regrettably there are limitations in what can be provided back due to the lack of logs. Thanks for understanding. Take care.”
And worst of all, for some, the results of this glitch ended up ruining some of their most treasured memories.
AltharaD noted that many of the pets and books his guild had gathered were from a Rogue player who was no longer playing World of Warcraft, and that those items not only held emotional value, but that some were also no longer obtainable in the game.
FarLengthiness4839 recited what could be the most heartbreaking story of all regarding their friend, a 72-year old player who collected rate mounts, pets, and toys to give to new players in her guild, either for free or via competition.
Even under an alternative character with a filled Guild Bank, Blizzard Support issued an automated reply to her support ticket, saying they were working on it.
Numerous players on Reddit offered to donate their items to help her rebuild, and while she was initially going to rebuild her collection as she always had, by hunting and crafting, the outpouring of support saw her eventually relent.
She also noted “As I froze the 3 banks the minute things went missing, my log history should be pristine for them to rebuild from. We shall see what happens.”
One player, Blubbpaule also noted that the value of items lost could be tracked to real-world value.
“Out of all people hit by this some definitely spent money on token gold [purchasable for $15 USD worth of cash or in-game gold, these tokens can be redeemed for 30 days game time, with extra tokens able to be traded and sold between players] and stored in the bank,” Blubbpaule theorized. “Now we may have people who spent upwards of $100 on token being now without the gold they paid money for.”
“A mere ‘Sorry, here, you got 3 Runesilk’ won’t cut it,” he declared. “There are most likely people who now have paid for something they have lost due to Blizzard’s error. People are paying monthly for this game. I believe they are entitled to a product that isn’t eating their money (tokens) and just for Blizz to say ‘Thanks for the money k bye.'”
Magnumwood107 also came to this same scathing conclusion, writing “As a consumer, allowing Blizzard a ‘whoopsie’ with no method of compensation for these losses is insanity.”
“With the introduction of the WoW token and its continued support, Blizzard’s unequivocal stance on their own virtual economy is Real Money = Gold, and Gold = Real Money,” they argued. “‘Incomplete restoration’ should not exist in the vocabulary of anyone representing Blizzard on issues like these.”
“Would you accept your bank to ‘whoopsie’ your savings account, replace it with a fraction of what it had, and have the end all be called an ‘incomplete restoration’?” Magnumwood107 championed. “You are insane to allow Blizzard to have this both ways. If their data is worth real money, then by their definition, their data loss should be their monetary loss.”
