Many guild banks in World of Warcraft were suddenly empty and items were missing. Now Blizzard has spoken out – and the news is not good.
In World of Warcraft, almost everything revolves around items in one way or another. You need them as equipment, as material for complicated crafting professions, or as buff food. If items are lost due to an error, it can be bitter and ruin many hours of gameplay. This is exactly the fate that befell many guilds at the launch of The War Within expansion.
Now Blizzard is coming with a clear message: some of the items are gone. And they are not coming back.
What happened to the guilds? When the era of The War Within was ushered in with the pre-patch 11.0, there were a lot of new features. One of them was the introduction of guilds that function across server boundaries. But as soon as the feature was activated, some guilds noticed that something was missing from the guild bank.
At first, many people thought that a guild member had made off with the loot, but it quickly became clear that this was a bug and the items had simply disappeared.
What does Blizzard say now? Blizzard has remained silent about the problem for quite a long time and has analyzed how this error could have occurred. Now the developers have reported on the official WoW forum and have a rather sobering message:
An unexpected bug caused one of our maintenance processes to cause a few items to disappear. Many of these items were related to professions from previous expansions, but it was also possible for players to lose other items from their guild bank.
Over the last few weeks, we have been collecting the items that were lost and identified and will soon be sending them to the guild leaders of the affected guilds.
Because of how some of this data was lost, we have now reached a point where the result will only be a partial recovery for some guilds and we have no means of recovering the lost items for them.
We apologize for the inconvenience and the long wait. We appreciate your patience while we work through this issue.
What does this mean? Quite soberly: Not all items are saved. Some end up in data nirvana forever and recovery is impossible. Since Blizzard has made this very clear here, it is not worth opening more tickets and bothering game masters. It is apparently no longer possible to determine which items have been lost.
The underlying problem has now been resolved, which means you can use your guild bank again without any worries.
This is certainly bitter for some guilds, but it is probably worth waiting to see which items reach the guild leaders over the next few days. Perhaps there will be more than feared. And when in doubt, you can always look on the bright side of the situation: There is now more space in the guild bank for all the new materials from The War Within – because making gold with them has never been so easy.