Wiped archeology history

[Blitzy]

On 6th Nov 2014 Blizzard wiped archeology history for a number of players, primarily in EU, but also US. There are some blue posts in the EU thread http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/12618122585. Two months later the problem is not fixed and it looks like Blizzard is just waiting for it to go away.

I was surprised to discover this problem myself only when I started to do Draenor archeology. Even though I read mmo champion (and other wow news sites) daily this problem was never mentioned before. I consider progression data extremely sensitive in any RPG game, so I'm not going to let his go away so easily for Blizzard.

First let's see how many chars were affected, please fill in this google form with your affected character http://goo.gl/forms/v7ZDDtSzp8.

Once we have a list of a significant number of affected characters let's convince any/all major wow news sites to cover the story.

[GKLeatherCraft]

Geez man, IT's obviously a significant issue, at least give them some time before jumping on a silly bandwagon claiming they are trying to ignore it, they will be working on it, but constantly posting in threads to assure people like you, isn't working on it, Not only is it only a couple of months past, they also have had the expac release to contend with, Stop thinking everything can be solved instantly, that's not how life is, sorry.

[Blitzy]

Nice sarcasm, Gobra.

[GKLeatherCraft]

Nice sarcasm, Gobra.

I'm sorry the truth burns so much you have to call is sarcasm, Sucks to be "there" :P

[Blitzy]

Well if your comment was not meant as sarcasm then you don't know much of computer science AND you haven't done much archeology in WoW.

Firstly, the longer this is delayed the more likely it is that any log files and backups are going to be deleted by the automated systems. Usually backups are kept for a period of time depending on the importance of the data. So you might have backups of the last days for the less important data and backups of the last months or years for the more important data.

Secondly, writing the code to merge any wiped data from a backup database into the live database is not that difficult or time consuming. The fact that they didn't do this actually makes me believe that they do not have backups of the character archeology history or the bug that wiped the data was so severe that it wiped any backup data as well. And if this is the case, I damn them for not coming forward with it and, instead, sending customer support to say nice words without communicating any real information.

Thirdly, if you look at the game issues they worked on for the last 2 months you will see a lot of minor things that they spent time fixing, while being unable to fix this data loss. Maybe you don't realize it, but loosing data and being unable to recover it from backups or other means is a MAJOR issue. Imagine that you login tomorrow and you'll find some of your characters gone because they had a bug that wiped character data before "it was fixed within just a few hours" (quoting blue post from the archeology incident).

Forth, let me tell you that doing archeology to complete all the achievements and dream to get the Tol'vir rare mount takes hundreds and thousands of hours. It's a lot of time put into a character's progress to accept it's lost.

[GKLeatherCraft]

Well first off, they keep full records of characters for a very long time indeed, years, so that's not the issue here, I think it's more likely to be an error where something else is disrupting it, and causing it not to show up, Some things seem simple, but actually are not, so let's not pretend we know all about Blizz's systems and the way they work, You maybe know more than myself, but I doub't you have insight into how theirs works.

Other minor bug fixes are just that, easier, smaller things, that likely affect a greater amount of people, I don't believe they will be ignoring this issue, or hoping that it goes away and people forget, I apologise if you felt I jumped on your back about it before, It just irks me when people say they believe Blizz are just hiding it etc etc when that's not what they do, they will be working on it, they just don't give updates about every problem.

[Delaios]

Was 1 pristine away from the MoP title when I heard about the bug, luckily I wasn't affected by it. If I had been affected by it I wouldn't have started over and would have been pretty pissed about it. Spent hours upon hours of flying around Pandaria to even get that far.

[makazeu]

On China servers, a number of players also found their archeology records reset and complained on the official forum.
And this issue hit 2 characters of mine, which are only characters with full-skilled archeology. I had unlocked 29 rare artifacts before all archeology record was wiped.
Chinese GM confirmed that it had been bugged out and a few days later they said that the bug had been fixed but the lost data could not be recovered.
I've tweeted to the devs for many times but no one responded.

Since there's no option of CN realm on that Google form page, I have to post it here.

[Blitzy]

And guess what? The fix they promised was not applied with patch 6.1. It seems to have been just a delay tactic.

Hi everyone. We’ve just received an update from our development team informing us that this fix may not be applied to all affected players immediately after the launch of 6.1.

Anyone actually got the archeology progress back? Because I sure didn't.

[Deleted]

For five months they promised us a fix with 6.1 they knew about this problem before WoD even launched, and now they're telling us that it will be fixed on a rolling case by case point for those few not corrected with the patch.

Nobody has been corrected, and this significant problem with one of their cataclysm flagship selling points has destroyed it for those of us who use it as a time-filler.

On the Blizz forums they've said nothing in the official bugs lists and seem to be trying to minimize knowledge of it's existence. (Sweep it under the carpet)

They are basically lying, but nobody wants to stand up and accuse them of this.

[Deleted]

Was 1 pristine away from the MoP title when I heard about the bug, luckily I wasn't affected by it. If I had been affected by it I wouldn't have started over and would have been pretty pissed about it. Spent hours upon hours of flying around Pandaria to even get that far.

I was 3 off when my archeology tab was reset. I found this out the hard way when I went to do some more Panda archeology and got a pristine that I was sure I already had... And what do you know, right clicked: "You have already completed this quest."
I was furious, almost 4 months later I barely touch archeology, because I'm waiting for a fix. I don't want any progress I made since the "reset" to be lost if a solution has been applied.

[jaolin]

Didn't get any progress back :/

[Soulstorm]

Opened ticket 6 days ago got the reply to check this link:

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/to...85?page=30#591

followed immediately by the clearly bothered response:
"anything else I can do for you"?

Yes, give me back my fucking progress.

[Deleted]

I haven't gotten my progress back either, and that makes me a sad panda

[Anxty]

I honestly believe Blizz put this on the pack burner and will either hotfix it in another month or so or tell you in 6.2 it will be fixed. Sucks to the people it happened to.

[Jester Joe]

Does it wipe it strictly by if you check up the achievements there's no progress, or does it also clear the Arch solved tab? Just to make sure, I know my solved tab was still full of everything.

[Deleted]

It was both progress and arch solved tab that got wiped

[Deleted]

6.1 live, didnt get it back now either... Guess they are using their devs to make some new toys or a shop mount...

Must be most useless patch ever, doesnt fix any problems, all it does is correct some things that should have been in the game since 6.0.

[Deleted]

Does it wipe it strictly by if you check up the achievements there's no progress, or does it also clear the Arch solved tab? Just to make sure, I know my solved tab was still full of everything.

Achievement progress stays the same, it's the archeology tab that is somehow corrupted. This means that if you completed all tol'vir rares, except scepter for mount, you can potentially proc all those rares again before proccing a scepter.
This also means you can proc pristine artifacts in Pandaria that you already completed..