Many guilds in World of Warcraft are furious – really furious. Because the ownership of 20 years of work is gone and won’t come back.
World of Warcraft is doing well. The War Within was well received by most players, the new features are in a solid position after a series of balance adjustments, and the “Race to World First” was exciting to watch. One might think that things are going well in Azeroth since the launch of the expansion. But one thing still disturbs thousands of players and hundreds of guilds:
Countless items owned by guilds have been deleted and there is no hope left that they will return.
What happened? Patch 11.0.2 was the “Pre-Patch” for The War Within. This already implemented major innovations in World of Warcraft, such as cross-realm guilds, revamped talent systems, and the war composition system. This should have been a reason to celebrate – but for many guilds it turned into an extremely distressing incident.
Because after the patch, many guilds discovered: Their guild bank was looted. Numerous items had disappeared. Sometimes only a few individual items were missing, sometimes the whole bank was empty. And this, despite the fact that the guild bank log did not indicate that anyone had stolen anything.
What did Blizzard say? After Blizzard remained silent on the matter for many weeks, the developers explained a few days ago that they had thoroughly investigated the problem. However, there is bad news. The items that were lost will largely remain missing. Only a fraction of the deleted items can be restored. Because the data loss is so massive that it is impossible for Blizzard to accurately reproduce what was lost and in what quantity.
Or to put it simply: The savings and items of the guilds cannot or can only be partially restored in most cases.
It’s not just about items, but about the community and bonds
What may seem a bit strange to outsiders is a real problem for long-standing players. In a game with a 20-year lifespan, many associate certain events with very special items. Additionally, guild banks have often been used as “extended private banks.” Such “bank guilds” often held all the possessions of an account – and now that is gone.
Particularly tragic are reports from players who used their guild bank to do good for others. One player reports in the WoW Subreddit about a good friend, a 72-year-old woman, who is very committed to the community. She had filled her guild bank with mounts and pets and regularly organized events for her guild with new players. There were these animals to win, to give newcomers a nice start in the game. The value of these pets ranges from 5,000 gold to 80,000 gold. A whole bank full of these lovely rewards – that is, 8 full bank slots – is gone.
But there are also reports that read almost cynically – otherwise such a loss is probably hard to bear. One player in the Subreddit shows the log of his guild bank, where you can see that he had put many pets into the guild bank, all of which were deleted.
Another reveals that he got back exactly one single item from twenty deleted stacks in the guild bank: a lonely piece of silk cloth (via reddit). That almost feels like an insult.
Still others report that even the restoration of some items cannot help them. Because the restored items are sent to the current guild leader. However, if that leader is inactive, then the items sit in their mailbox and simply disappear after a while, without the guild having access to them.
No matter how well The War Within is received and no matter where the expansion will rank in the “Ranking of the best add-ons” – this incident of the guild bank deletions will likely go down in video game history as one of the greatest low points in the history of in-game incidents in World of Warcraft.
Sure – the vast majority of guilds are not dependent on the items in the guild bank and will probably chalk the incident up as “annoying, but not a big deal.” But for many, these items meant more. In some cases, the legacy of 20 years.
After all, you can currently quickly refill something completely different in WoW: the great treasure vault.
