Many guild banks in World of Warcraft were suddenly empty and items are missing. Now Blizzard speaks up – and the news is not good.
In World of Warcraft, almost everything revolves around items in one way or another. They are needed as equipment, as materials for complicated crafting professions, or as buff food. Losing items due to a bug can be bitter and ruin many hours of gameplay. This fate befell many guilds at the launch of the expansion The War Within.
Now Blizzard comes with a clear message: Some of the items are gone. And they will not come back.
What happened to the guilds? When the pre-patch 11.0 heralded the era of The War Within, there were a lot of new features. One of them was the introduction of guilds that operate across server boundaries. But as soon as the feature was activated, some guilds noticed: Somehow, something is missing from the guild bank.
At first, many thought that a guild member had run away with the loot, but it quickly turned out: This is a bug; the items have simply disappeared.
What does Blizzard say now? Blizzard remained silent on the issue for quite some time and analyzed how this error could occur. Now the developers have responded in the official WoW forum with a rather sobering message:
An unexpected bug caused one of our maintenance processes to make some items disappear. Many of these items were related to professions from older expansions, but it was also possible that players lost other items from their guild banks.
In the past few weeks, we have compiled the items that were lost and we could identify, and we will soon send them to the guild leaders of the affected guilds.
Due to the way some of this data was lost, we have now reached a point where the result will only be an incomplete restoration for some guilds and we have no means to restore the lost items for them.
We apologize for the incident and the long wait time. We appreciate your patience as we worked through this issue.
What does this mean? Plainly: Not all items will be rescued. Some will end up forever in data nirvana, and restoration is out of the question. Since Blizzard has made this quite clear, it is also pointless to open additional tickets or disturb Game Masters about it. It is apparently no longer traceable which items have been lost.
The underlying problem has since been fixed. This means you can use your guild bank again without fear.
For some guilds, this is certainly bitter, but one should probably wait to see which items will arrive with the guild leaders in the coming days. Perhaps there is more there than feared. And in case of doubt, one can always see the best in the situation: Now there is more space in the guild bank for all the new materials from The War Within – because making gold has never been easier.
