Guild Bank Missing Items Update

I think they were not honest. Otherwise we would have gotten our items back.

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Nobody said that the items arenā€™t there, nobody said that the backup isnā€™t there. They only said that they have been packing up ā€œitems that weā€™re able to -identify as lost by this process-ā€. This could easily mean that they were simply not able to identify 99% of the other items which were also lost in the process.

Still not great, but given the amount of guilds, actions made to guild-banks, different time-lines, etc. I can somewhat understand that itā€™s not super easy to identify items which were lost due to this bug.

However, when entire tabs simply disappear, it would make sense that this could be noticed. Not sure why this isnā€™t the case.

And donā€™t forget that we deal with relayed information, probably passed through some PR-representative when being directed from the development department to these GMs. In other words; we know nothing.

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I havenā€™t had any items mailed back yet so itā€™s hard to judge the severity but others that have had items restored did not have many restored at all. I had 7 tabs nearly completely full. Will there be compensation for the other items that the effort wonā€™t be put into to restore? I appreciate the difficulties of a data migration gone horribly horribly wrong, but this is really bad.

Again I need to wait to see what the result will be for my own items, but if the result is what Iā€™ve seen a couple of others comment it being then the apology will really end up reading like the South Park ā€œweā€™re sorryā€ parody.

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This also reads to me as the typical scummy corporation move.

Release the news on Friday night, to see if you can ignore it by Monday or not.

And I still canā€™t believe they wouldnā€™t have back-ups thatā€™s just inconceivable (we seen rollbacks).
What is more likely to be true: it would be a laborious undertaking to restore our items properly. So the moneymen decided its not worth the time and effort.

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197 Rune Cloth, 12 DF Potions, 1 grey Mail boots item for mogging, a single healing potion for 2k lifeā€¦ and thatā€™s itā€¦ Well played Blizz. I run the oldest established alliance guild on our realm. Tabs full of proff Mats from the past 18 years played , rare recipes and TBC mog items missing, a whole tab of ā€˜hard to getā€™ vanity pets, a full tab of Island Expedition mog gear, a full tab of veteran potions , glyphs and herbs ā€¦ not to mention personal memorabilia from my 8th guild tab ā€¦

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Of course, no one mentioned that, and naturally, this is a message from a community representative who doesnā€™t know exactly what happened to cause the data loss. However, for someone with professional experience in setting up and administering very large database systems, it is possible to make technical assumptions or consider how one would have approached the situation.

I donā€™t know how much you know about organically grown IT systems and the difficulties that can arise with them.

I would take a backup of the database and compare the content from before the incident with the content after it. Then I would check if there are any entries showing how this content might have been altered by other processes, such as player interactions during that time period. Logs are essential, and they can be searched automatically.

Since I donā€™t know the technical details, I can only speculate. My long experience as a DB2 administrator has taught me that even in distributed systems, multiple iterations of backups were taken with every intervention and migration, and that we did extensive testing beforehand. An unexpected error can still occur, and considering the brief mentions and other comments made over time in relation to the game, itā€™s actually quite likely that something went wrong during testing or rollout. Iā€™ve experienced this with an ā€˜organicā€™ infrastructure at a very large customer (more than 150,000 employees, not their clients!), and we handled the IT very cautiously due to the fragile structure.

Of course, the effort and the number of backups involved were substantial, and in the long term, this became an issue for the customer. Thatā€™s why they eventually bit the bullet and had everything redone in parallel. It was a financial and personnel-intensive effort for that customer, which not everyone is willing or even able to undertake.

TL;DR The whole situation seems very chaotic, and itā€™s likely that no one knows what will happen when the databases are touched or something is changed, and what will break next. My experience with an organically grown structure has shown me that it increasingly produced unexpected results and that the SQL queries became so long that a person could no longer easily read them. We had to structure them carefully to even get an understanding of what was being written or queried in the database.

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No - because Guilds are not a part of Beta or PTR. It was inevitable that something like this would happen with essentially sub-standard test plans.

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So what youā€™re saying with your experience - is that they couldnā€™t simply take the database from the backups, mount it elsewhere, see whatā€™s in it, create an extract and replay that into a new sandbox database once they understood exactly where the error occurred to see what was left, and rinse and repeat until the correct resolution was achieved. And then replay that final 100% satisfactory iteration back into live.

Iā€™m by no means a database-export, but I am involved enough to know that a lot of this can, technically, be fixable/enhanced/ā€¦ but that itā€™s almost always about the priorities given to the problems from the management layers (Software Engineer with Cloud-infrastructure responsibilities).

They literally mention ā€œone of our maintenance processesā€, that feels more like a nightly cleanup/backup/ā€¦ process than a real test/migration-event. But nobody knows for real.

Feels more like a tool thatā€™s been forgotten in the migration/testing-process, being incompatible and corrupting everything. But eh, itā€™s all grasping straws and making assumptions.

Yes, there wonā€™t be a simple solution. But there is always a solution. However, I am sure it will be too costly in terms of manpower and other resources.

Oh, I missed the ā€œmaintenance processā€ post. Still: Why would anyone let lose a maintenance script within a grown IT structure w/o having a proper backup? This is getting more ā€œinterestingā€ by the hour.

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I got some wool cloth and green tea leaves in the mail. I guess blizzard thinks thats a fair compensation for the 9 tabs they emptied on my 2 guild banks.

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I can still see many logs what now is missing in the guild bank but no ingame mail from Blizzard. Looks more like its too expensive check each guild banks log for lost items compare to maybe some players quit about this issue.

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3 mails from Blizz, 2 grey items and 3 elemental motes. This is an insult. And the heads never took one minute of their time to even make an appology, that says something as well. If this would have happend in f.e. Final Fantasy, trust me the staff would work on that round the clock and you would have seen a huge compensation and appology. I love warcraft, always did but this is just a joke. And we dont even know if we can ever use the gb again, this may happen again.

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Some guilds you are saying, but based on the feedback in the US and EU forum, not a single guild has received all their items in mail.

That means,

all guilds are not receiving all their stuff and itĀ“s not just ā€œsomeā€ stuff, itĀ“s 90% or more of what was stored.

It is not your fault and we know that, but how is it possible that Blizzard as a company, the people you work for, is actually believing that this is a fair solution?

20 years of collecting stuff, is gone down the pipe and there is nothing coming from a billion dollar company, but some copper or or linen in a mail?

I am speechless!

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So, we had Guild Bank all tabs full of materials, pets and everykind other stuff and what i got in email as Guild Masterā€¦ is 522 Giant Dinosaur Bonesā€¦ are you joking? We lost around 4-5 million in gold, extra to that we where afraid until now use again Guild Bankā€¦ and still are.

I feel that big company like Blizzard dont care for their customers, we are little flyā€™s they can slap and continue to live

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Nothing was restored for my guild. Checked my mail, nothing.

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This legit deserves some sort of discount on game time or something for the rest of my accountā€™s existence. The amount of time I and my guild put into our materials and itemsā€¦this is crazy.

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This legit deserves some sort of discount on game time or something for the rest of my accountā€™s existence. The amount of time I and my guild put into our materials and itemsā€¦this is crazy. < would be fair to add gold to guild bank, as guild banks mostly not personal, giving GM a game time, would be unfairā€¦

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Well i ā€œstillā€ have nothing on the 6 out of 7 tabs back, has the devils luck it was the only personal guild bank affectedā€¦ but its has almost 2 full classic mats tabs and the 4 others from Outland mats, lich Cata and draenor expansions, all was organized, the sad thing is that almost everyting was farmend before a changed server with the previous GM a dwarve monk that the memories from a past person i changed for this Panda monkā€¦ but none the same all was gone in a blink, since then i just enter the game with the char to see the bank and at the beggining to send the ticket and later to send the bug reportā€¦

So now still in the waiting ā€œgameā€ā€¦ but my confidence in ā€œorganizingā€ the DF stuff in other GB char is zeroā€¦ And like many i hold off buying the D4 expansion until this problem has any resultsā€¦

For all that still are in the ā€œsame boatā€ lets see. Nad for the few blizz people that talk to us in the forum thanks for the little info.

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