They have back ups, but not from TWO YEARS ago. If you have ever asked Blizzard to restore something from years ago you would know this. Blizzard say if it’s more than a few months you won’t get it back. Which means the backups only go a few months back.
Stop hoping and realise they are gone and will not be coming back. Get on with either levelling a new character or play something else.
That’s completely irrelevant and you know it is. Having old backups for general characters and having backups for a character selling/cloning service are two completely things. There is zero reason why they would not have a backup of the characters from 2 years ago from the cloning service.
Storing such data would be insignificant, deleting such data when it has a monetary value would be incompetent. They lied about not having the Vanilla WoW code for the purpose of not encouraging people asking for Vanilla when they had no plans to do it, and they are lying about not having the clone backups.
No it isn’t different.
Except the fact they have stopped the service so no longer need the data.
In your opinion, you don’t know how much data a characters needs, neither do I but considering how much there is ingame it won’t be insignificant. Also don’t forget, the data would need to be on both Era realms and Wrath realms.
In your opinion, just accept it, start grieving and move on. Against the fact they have stated the data is gone forever, you just think they are lying, remember Occam’s razor? Which is more possible, the data is gone or there is a huge conspiracy that they are lying. Surely some disgruntled ex-employee would have said the data is there if it actually was.
An entire account wouldn’t likely be more than 1mb, for example certain pserver encrypted account backups (all data/chars) are about 600kbs. Based on those numbers, 10million accounts would just under 6 TB.
Even if it was significantly more than that, it’s an insignificant number.
“In your opinion” goes both ways. Also, a bit dramatic don’t you think? You seem to not really understand a lot about this, weird that you’d have such a confident and strong stance.
It would be more than that per character in my opinion, will you stop stating your opinion as fact?
I don’t think they could keep just one backup like that as in my opinion it’s a rolling automatic system that’s done every day, now that’s a lot of data.
I seem to understand far more than you and your denial.
Opinion based on what? An estimate based on nothing is what it looks like.
As I stated there is far more data per character than you see there being. All we see is what we do, there will be a lot of background stuff we don’t see that needs saving too.
Nope, I’m going to go with it being an insignificant number per account. Just like I’m going with them actually still having the backups, like they actually still had everything for Vanilla and other expansions backed up, in spite of them explicitly stating the opposite when it didn’t serve their business goals.
If the amount of space is not large then why would they keep data from two years ago? Remember it’s not the actual software it’s just long out of date data.
You can go with whatever you want but they have stated definitively the data is gone, you need to accept that and stop with the conspiracy theories.
Data’s gone doesnt mean they cant backtrack wotlk characters, just delete all post vanilla stuff and money, seems easy
I don’t really care for either side of the argument.
It’s not beyond the wit of man to give people their toons back.
It is, however, resources and time Blizzard rightly don’t need to waste to appease a few people.
Majority of people dont post on forums, I know at least 5 ppl who would pay to recover multiple toons but are too lazy to go on formus to ask blizzard for it
I know at least 5 ppl who would pay to recover multiple toons
That’s great, but obviously not business-worthy.
too lazy to go on formus to ask blizzard for it
If they’re too lazy to complain and too lazy to re-level, then that says it all really.
Good luck anyway. As I mentioned, I don’t care for either side of the argument.
But the cost would be very high for that. A lot more than they would recoup with sales of the service. Don’t forget it’s not just the cost of writing the code but the exhaustive testing they would need to do, costing far more than writing the code.
Sure it costs money but you are speculating, none of us knows how much money they can get on the long run with this solution
At the time ppl didnt clone because everyone was fed up of classic after playing non stop for months and months, especially most geared players. Also no one knew if era would regain in popularity
I personally thought cloning was blizzard masterplan to hook back players into era and I’m sure alot of people got this intuition and forgot about it, telling themselves “I’ll pay when I have a good reason to”
Now the good reason has arrived the service is allready gone
In the end it’s not so much the players who missed the train, blizzard missed the train on us
How exactly to calculate how much money is post vanilla?
Delete all the money, I ment
This exactly. i have 3 IRL friends waiting for this to pop up again. So we 4 people running 4 characters each (1 guy has 8 he wants to transfer actually), thats 20 characters waiting to get transfered and some $ to get into activisions pockets. It adds up among all the servers.
Id take a wild guess 8-10k people waiting to transfer a minimum of 2 characters each. 16-20k characters at a bare minimum.
They need to make an ingame suggestion. It won’t help as the service is gone forever but they at least have done something.
I thought I had copied both my 60s. Turns out I didnt, or did not forfill the cloning process. It was painful to log into classic era to see the chars gone 
So YES! Please bring back the cloning service. I will gladly pay the fee like a character transfer or similar to get them back.