The short summary is that no new items were restored, and she provided commentary on the comments from her first video.
That Blizzard hasn't provided any communication on this issue isn't surprising to me, because a huge monolithic corporation --Bobby Kotick's version or Satya Nadella's-- has other things to worry about if the contract doesn't call for their explicit attention. Put another way, the people who lost items are too small in stature for Micro-Blizz to care*, and it also wouldn't shock me if Blizz never bothered with a proper restoration because that cost money (in terms of people and space).
The longer this has gone on, the more it seems to me that changes under the hood that led to the deletion of massive amounts of items from some guild banks was actually a data wipe; items that were no longer in the game or may have had some potential data corruption from years of activity were simply removed, and that was that. I've seen "database cleanups" that have had this sort of effect before, particularly on unstable databases. At those times, you have to do a manual dump of the database contents and potentially clean up the database by hand. It is by far a miserable task, but cleaning up a database like this is something that ought to be done. It will take a ton of time, but there also needs to be a full amount of transparency involved with the customers (us).
I'd actually respect Blizzard a lot more if they were up front about what they were doing instead of this whole "too bad, so sad" non-response after items were removed. If the answer to "fixing" the data meant removing all the items from a guild bank into a temporary guild bank and then putting items back into a rebuilt guild bank to fix any potential corruption, that should have been done.
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Oh, and once again, a Season of Discovery rollout affected Classic Era. As of a week ago, all of our bars were reset, so you have to go back into every toon on settings and re-enable your action bars.
One of my WoW friends was in Blackwing Lair on Thursday night, and the drakes in there were massively bugged. They hadn't wiped to them in ages, and yet they kept wiping due to wonky drake behavior. I didn't get any real details other than "this crap sucks!", but let's say she's not a fan of SoD impacting Era's raids.
And some pull down menus, like that found on your toon to reset a dungeon, have that table's font and font size absolutely huge compared to the rest of the UI. Given that Blizz has implemented "some changes" into Era in the past few months, I'm not confident that this will ever get resolved.
*If you think that if you were a larger customer you'd get better customer service, well... Let's just say that some Fortune 500 companies are beginning to discover that Azure Cloud and AWS don't really give a crap about any special services for them, unlike when they might have gotten that extra service in the past from outsourcing firms that had their own datacenters.
EtA: I meant to write action bars. Corrected.
I suspect it is an issue of data corruption. The dragon scales Kurn mentions are still obtainable from Chromaggus (I just skinned him to check), plus all the ones mentioned are still in my little personal guild bank. Absolutely infuriating, but likely due to some sort of heisenbug. Though the programmer in me wonders why they can't load up a copy of the pre-launch guildbank databases and run a comparison against the new version. I mean, I do hope that they had those backups before running a conversion...
ReplyDeleteOh, thanks for the notice about the action bars. I logged into my Classic Era characters and reenabled all of them. I don't play them that often, but it is good to have them ready to go without potentially seeing unexplained behavior. That SoD affects the other versions of Classic Era isn't surprising since Blizzard seems to be pushing a unified client for things as much as possible. Sensible for a development perspective, but annoying from a player view when you get these bugs.
The lack of any communication out of Blizzard makes me think that they decided it cost too much in terms of manpower to go and fix the problem. I can actually hear the finance person pointing out that "A lot of these people will come and go anyway, so why bother going the extra effort when they're so fickle?"
DeleteI've seen this "meh" response from Microsoft in my own line of work; Apple notwithstanding, they know their operating system is by far the default for servers in a corporate environment, no matter if they're physical or virtual machines on even AWS. After all, what are you going to do, go to IBM for Red Hat? (And yes, that IBM now owns Red Hat --and has directly influenced their pricing structure-- galls me to no end.)
I understand where Blizzard is coming from as far as wanting a unified client, but they're doing such a piss-poor job of implementation that they're likely to push much of the Era crowd back to private servers. These people play Era for a reason, and typically they're happy if Blizzard pays them little attention. In this respect, Blizzard is like the Eye of Sauron: if Blizz pays attention to you, they're liable to make "changes". The problem is that every change Blizzard makes in SoD or Retail seems to break Era to an extent. Since the Era crowd only plays for a subscription and doesn't buy anything from the cash shops, Blizzard has no vested interest in fixing what they broke while rolling out stuff in other areas. Again, finance people ruling the roost.
How do you get Blizzard to be more responsive to customers? That's a question I can't answer, because all options from a corporate perspective don't seem like they'll really be an improvement. Wishing that Blizz went independent from Microsoft (or in earlier times, Bobby Kotick) means that they'll be more inclined to try to sell you stuff out of the cash shop (and other assorted microtransactions) to keep their profits up. Staging a strike doesn't mean much to Blizz since the cash shop insulates them from customer whims; one player who buys only two mounts from the cash shop per month covers the monthly cost of both myself and two of my friends from Era. And that's not counting any faction/race/whatever changes that Blizz has you pay for, when the "cost" associated with such a thing is an automated script that requires no human intervention. If people stopped buying items from the cash shop that might work, but let's be honest here: the people who buy vanity items from the cash shop aren't the people who are upset with Blizzard; if anything, they're a bit closer to the people who putz around with NFTs and cryptocurrency.
"if anything, they're a bit closer to the people who putz around with NFTs and cryptocurrency"
ReplyDeleteI think that's unlikely. I think cash shop customers in video games are more likely to be the least technologically-aware of all players. It's a shop. They go shopping in it using the same credit card they use out of game. It's about as simple as it can be. NFTs and crypto are orders of magnitude more complex to access and pretty much unknown to most of the people on the planet, except possibly as scare stories about as close to anyone's personal experience as the Earth being hit by an asteroid.
I used to think it was too complex to access until I encountered my first Cryptocurrency ATM at a gas station outside of Chicago. Between that and a certain popular presidential candidate peddling NFTs for sale to his fans, I think that the cash shop has a LOT more overlap with the target audience for NFTs and crypto than I would have ever considered in the past: not the people who think it's the next big thing, but people who think "it's just like buying something from Amazon".
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