World of Warcraft is still going strong 20 years after its initial release, with the game still getting DLC. Its latest content update, The War Within, has been well received, with players enjoying the story and new features. However, this DLC also brought along with it a major bug that has led to in-game items to go missing from guild banks, many of which seem to be gone for good.
In a post on the WoW forum, a community manager says that the company “found the culprit—a technical update that was made to support cross-realm guilds.” This update contained a “bug [that] caused one of our maintenance processes to make some items disappear.” Unfortunately, due to the nature of how this data was lost, guilds will not have many items restored.
The silver lining to this issue is that not every item was wiped out. The community manager noted that “for the last few weeks, we’ve 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.”
The WoW community has been less than pleased with the situation, not just with the loss of items but that it took so long to get communication about this issue. With one user saying that “As someone else above me pointed out, it was a long time without communication here. I know I would be frustrated if I was one of the users who lost valuable items here and didn’t hear about it for a month.”
It’s a shame that this problem is marring what should otherwise have been a good time for players. Hopefully Blizzard can find a way to make it up to those who were hardest hit by this bug.