Guild Bank Missing Items Bug - Aug/Sept 2024

I’m still playing because I’m commited to my guild as a tank but as far as i know as soon as Queen is dead (in HM, small grp of friends) the game is over

I’ve got the exact same feeling, like being stabbed in the back by a long time friend

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since they closed the big thread, here we go!

on patch 11.0 blizzard just deleted all the items in our Guildbanks.
6 weeks in and no compensation.
they are just censoring this big issue like it didnt happen.
how can a multibilliondollar company do this?

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I suspect they’re trying to keep everything for that now in one place … it’s no longer classed as a bug, and CS basically can’t do anything … it’s down to the devs themselves and higher … and they don’t really care (or not enough to do something about it) as far as I can tell.

You will need to add your comments relating to the missing items from guild vaults in this thread:

I’ve mainly made this post to highlight the issues with the actual guild vault log itself.

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We were told previously that we didn’t need to raise anything to Blizzard … tickets or anything else … because they knew which guilds were affected. Are you saying now that in order to get anything back, we need to raise bug reports in-game?

I can’t remember whether I raised a bug report - I’m fairly sure at the start I raised a ticket (well … a couple … but as the first was replied to by a bot, that doesn’t count), but I’ve still have nothing back.

Have you had anything returned?

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Since the previous topic was closed, I’ll write here. My 2 guild banks were completely wiped. One is my personal one, the other is common for the main guild. And I still haven’t received a single letter with compensation.

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In the guild bank megathread, I wanted to post, for days, “they’ll close this thread before it gets more views than the years-old customer support thread’. That thread has 21.0k views. The megathread was closed at 21.0k views. :smiley:

So. Data loss, and the “It’s just pixels” replies etc.

It is frustrating if a game crashes when trying to get a new high score on Pacman or Spade Invaders. That is an example of data loss in a game. The game data stores your progress etc.

In an MMO, the data is at the very heart of the game. The data is stored on remote servers. Every aspect of the game is data. Your character’s name, attributes, progress, map exploration, etc. It is all just data. Data is just 1s and 0s. ‘It’s just pixels’ is inaccurate. It is all ‘just” data. The problem is that data security is the single most important thing in an MMO. If your data is secure, you can recover from anything that goes wrong.

To focus on guild banks. A maxed out guild bank has 8 tabs, each of which is 14 slots wide by 7 slots high. This means a maxed put guild bank has 8 x 14 x 7 = 784 slots.

WoW uses ‘unique item IDs’ for each item. ‘Maybe meat’ has a specific ID, as does ‘Basically beef’. Each leather type has an ID. Also, each equipment type has a unique ID (the ‘Smoldering Seedling’ raid drop trinket will have a unique item ID too. All grey drop items have a specific ID. Every specific item has a unique ID. This is how the game knows what each item is. This is also how the game can ‘store’ items into guild banks.

Wowhead currently lists 155,000 unique items.

If we use ‘4 bytes’ of data to store an item ID, that gives over 4 billion unique item IDs. For stackable items, ‘2 bytes’ of data would allow stack sizes of up to 65000.

Using 4+2 = 6 bytes of data can easily store a ‘stacked’ item in a guild bank slot. It would only take 4 bytes of data total (if we set a maximum stack size of 1000, and only allow 4 milliom unique items in the game, given only 155,000 items have been created so far).

Unbound gear needs 4 bytes of data. Pets (including level) could fit into 4 bytes. Bags could fit into 4 bytes (now that the ‘made by CharacterName tag is no longer a thing).

If we are generous, and allow 8 bytes of data to be used to represent anything that can go into a guild bank slot (actually just 4 bytes could work, even now, in TWW), we can say that:

784 slots x 8 bytes per slot = 6272 bytes. This is ‘6 kilobytes’ of data. This means that, for each guild, 6 kilobytes (6K) of data could store their entire set of guild bank tabs.

WoW has 7 million active players. If we assume 10 million active players, each with 10 personal guild banks, maxed out, it would take between 125-600 gigabytes of data for everyone in the entire game. Consumer hard drives are easily 2000 gigabytes these days.

When the fault started *** (they knew 48 hours after it started) *** they could have backed up that data onto a hard drive. Or, four 2000gig drives, costing less than 100$ each. One developer could have then spent a few days developing scripts to fix this. That is all that was needed.

It is scary because I am aware of

  • guild banks being wiped
  • personal banks being wiped
  • warband banks being wiped
  • characters being wiped due to disconnect when taking off ‘skyflying’ (not in Deleted Characters either)
  • reputation resets to zero
  • lifetime PVP honour resets to zero
  • trading post balance resets to zero (this often recovers, but sometimes doesn’t)
  • millions of gold being lost (and recovery refused) from
    • actual guild bank gold going missing from some of the wiped banks
    • gold going missing in mail
    • auction house items sold, but the in-game mail with gold never arrives
    • items vanishing from AH
  • and also ‘zeroing / vanishing’ of so much more, almost every data type, such as quest chains, map exploration, achievements, etc.

However, going back onto topic:

I do agree that the ongoing fault with the guild bank logs is a problem that needs to be addressed. How many friendships were broken early on with the guild bank wipes (because no logs would mean it would be easy to suspect other guild members of stealing stuff)

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I don’t know why people seem to misunderstand everything I say about this.
I didn’t say anything about getting things back. I mentioned writing a bug report as a means for Blizz to see how wide-spread this is and just how many people are affected. It’s not going to get your items back, but maybe to remind them that there are still a lot of people waiting for answers.
And, yes, I did get something back. 2 identical cosmetic drapes from DF.

Because, your the closest to a blizz representative that actually replies, and people are very offended and take everything a blue or green post says, to heart!

We are many frustrated angry people who lost out, and atm all blizzard is doing is sending AI generated replies and closing threads!

I guess so … but I don’t work for Blizzard and I’m just as frustrated as everyone else and hoping for a good outcome eventually.

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I misunderstood, because you said:

I read this as saying “if you make a bug report in-game, it gets investigated by the people who could return items - you made a bug report and you recommended everyone else do the same, including what/how much went missing”.

Personally, I’m not going to send any more bug reports on this. They’re obviously not going to do anything about it so it’s just spitting in the wind. It would be a waste of my time, and theirs.

They must, by now, be fully aware of how people feel about this - even those, like me, that didn’t lose a huge amount, are annoyed simply at the way it has been mishandled by Blizzard. But Blizzard have mishandled stuff in the past and, on the whole, the “ignore it and it will go away” tactic generally tends to work for them. Either people stop whinging about it en-masse and most go pack to paying for this poor CS with just a backwards whimper, or they stop playing … therefore no more whinging.

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There’s a good article here about it:

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My intepretation also - and as a result I made probably my third or fourth bug report on this, as well as the ticket where I asked the GMs to ensure my guild was listed on any summary they send back to Blizz. Let’s face it we all know they’re outsourced so Blizz will be getting communications/reporting from them about the satisfaction of the contract, and likely you’d expect the GM team to add some context around why tickets are being created, and possibly feeding back some useful information to Blizz.

If that isn’t happening then the contract/relationship is not fit for purpose and the GM team are over a barrel if Blizzard aren’t listening to them or letting them have any input. I don’t want to side with them, but it could be that they’re at the same end of a toxic Blizzard as we are.

Got to wonder if there are Service Level agreements in that GM ↔ Blizzard relationship, and who is failing who, other than the paying player/subscriber being failed by all.

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It’s obvious Blizzard is too greedy to invest time and money into this issue.
I think we should somehow try to involve Microsoft into the matter, maybe we can start claiming it’s a an Azure / Microsoft services issue. I’m sure Blizzard had or will have move over and start using MS services. We should just start a rumour that the data loss issue is because of Azure / MS server services, maybe this could get Microsoft involved.

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lol. Today these are the in-game “just a pixels”, but tomorrow it will be a list of purchased games in your account and “we are sorry, buy it again” response. I’m afraid to give any penny knowing that data is not safe anymore.

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I will say right away that I do not dispute this assumption. Moreover, I am almost certain that this is what will happen if the company’s current policy regarding the professionalism of its personnel maintains its vector.

I will only clarify that these are not “just pixels”. Many hours of time were spent collecting these pixels. Dozens of hours, hundreds of hours, and in some cases, thousands of hours of time. And even if we discard the philosophy about the invaluability of time, time in this game costs real subscription money. That is, behind these “just pixels” is not just time spent, but also money spent on buying this time.

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the “bright side” has darkened…

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Well that’s annoying. I raised this in Customer Support because it is a completely seperate issue … asking about the logs for the guild banks … and they’ve obviously not read it and just merged it here instead, and closed my post.

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Wow, how many of our guys have moved here! We are great. But we need local guys to visit the RU forums in the support section and write there. Our topic in Support has not been closed yet!

I’m very curious to see if IGN can get a statement out of Blizzard but they probably won’t, although I’m very happy that IGN broad it up to help spread awareness over this issue. This is far from over.

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I didn’t reply in the previous thread (that is now closed), but I’m getting impatient and just need to vent, I guess. I lost 7 full tabs worth of items. It held crafting materials, rare pieces of gear, rep items… just all kinds of things from basically every expansion. As someone who has a personal guild for myself and all my alts (and my brother, who comes back to the game extremely rarely these days), it has taken me a long time to gather all these things. I’ve been playing since BC, and I’m honestly very upset about this. I get that unforeseen things can happen, but I just hope that I’ll actually get some items back. So far the character that I have as GM hasn’t gotten anything in her mail, and it has me worried. Yeah, they’re “just items” but in that same vein you could say this is “just a game”. Many of us spend a lot of time in this game, and the items we gather have value to us. Sorry, I’m rambling at this point. This whole thing has just made me sad. I hope we get at least some items back.

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