World of Warcraft's latest expansion, The War Within, has been out for over a month now, and things are going great. Critics and players are largely happy with all the new content additions, the new Delve feature appears to finally be appropriately balanced, and the Race to World First was a real fun nail-biter.
But there's been one major, glaring issue with The War Within simmering since a pre-launch patch that's frustrated hundreds of players, with seemingly no fix in sight: the disappearance of thousands of items from guild banks, seemingly never to be returned.
The Great Guild Bank Caper
Issues began on August 13 with Patch 11.0.2, which dropped a number of updates to the game ahead of the release of the latest expansion, The War Within. In the following days, players began flocking to the official community forums, Reddit, and other community spaces to report a strange and upsetting issue: tons of items seemed to be missing from their guild banks.
While initially some players suspected thieving guild members or some sort of visual bug, as more reports came in, the reality became increasingly clear. Without warning, hundreds of guilds had seen massive amounts of items sitting inside their banks wiped out by the 11.0.2 patch with seemingly no rhyme or reason. Not every guild was impacted, nor did every impacted guild lose every item, but many reported half, two-thirds, or even the entire contents of their banks vanishing. Individuals who used guild banks as personal storage reported losing the accumulated riches of several years playing WoW.
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For some guilds, the extent of the damage was difficult to track at all. According to player reports, the in-game "logs" of guild bank withdrawals and deposits did not reflect massive amounts of items being taken out, leaving those who were less active stewards of their guild banks struggling to remember what had even been in there in the first place.
Blizzard Responds
As reports flooded in over several weeks, players became increasingly frustrated by Blizzard's lack of public response to the issue. Informal player surveys found that it was impacting hundreds of players and guilds, with likely far more going unreported, so it seemed unusual for the developer to remain silent for so long on what seemed to be such a massive problem.
Finally, after over a month, Blizzard issued a response explaining what had occurred. Per Blizzard, "a technical update that was made to support cross-realm guilds" encountered an unexpected bug that "caused one of our maintenance processes to make some items disappear." Blizzard claims this mainly impacted items "related to professions materials from prior expansions" but acknowledged other items had disappeared as well.
The result will be an incomplete restoration for some guilds, and we do not have a way to restore the remaining missing items.
In response, Blizzard said that it had been "packing up the missing items that we’re able to identify as lost by this process, and we will soon mail those to the guild leader character for each affected guild." But there was a catch. "Due to how some of the data was lost, we’ve reached a point where the result will be an incomplete restoration for some guilds, and we do not have a way to restore the remaining missing items for them." The developer apologized for both the incomplete restoration and the long wait.
While on its face this seemed to be a positive resolution to a frustrating situation, relief quickly turned to anger as players realized exactly how "incomplete" the "incomplete restoration" would be.
Incomplete Restoration
In the weeks since, players have been sharing the results of the "incomplete restoration" of their guild banks, and it doesn't look good. Some guild leaders are showing off before and after screenshots of their banks, claiming to still be missing hundreds of items worth thousands of in-game gold. Some are reporting restorations that are insulting or even humorous, such as one person claiming they received a single piece of silk in the mail, or another who only got a bunch of Halloween-themed items back. Some are sharing stories of collections they spent years building being completely wiped out with nothing restored. One player claims their friend, a 72-year-old woman, lost an entire guild bank's worth of pets, toys, mounts, and other items she was giving out as gifts to new players. Others have noted that since Blizzard's item restoration is sending items to guild leaders via in-game mail, any guild whose leader is inactive won't receive any of its items back.
Still others are bringing up the fact that since the introduction of the WoW Token, in-game items essentially have an equivalent value in real-world money. "Would you accept your bank to "whoopsie" your savings account, replace it with a fraction of what it had, and have the end all be called an "incomplete restoration"?" they wrote.
There are some players who are coming to Blizzard's defense. Several commenters have pointed out the sheer scale of what went missing makes it very likely that Blizzard is telling the truth about its own ability to restore missing items, and there's really no good way to determine who is owed what even with data backups. But even players who acknowledge Blizzard's in an impossible spot are still frustrated by the loss of sometimes years' worth of progress, savings, and work, and concerned that further mass item deletions may happen in the future. It's an unfortunate black mark on what is otherwise a very well-received expansion, and an unfortunate weird side effect of the addition of a long-asked for feature (cross-realm guilds).
"It's heart crushing, and it's hard to play the game, even though this was stuff we could play without technically, it was about getting others what they need and would enjoy," said one player. "It took a lot of the enjoyment out of the expansion for leadership of my guild."
IGN reached out to Blizzard for further comment as to how this happened or if the company plans to take any further actions to restore lost items, but did not receive a reply in time for publication. We will update if and when we receive a response.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.