10/🧵 … a *full* personal bank wipe (for guild master character) as a bonus.

If they merged databases without fully understanding the code, causing these various losses, then they sabotaged the game’s future for short-term profits.

The bug report forums are increasingly full of data losses 😶

9/🧵 … and the end result could be ‘32-bit UUIDs, but bits 31 and 30 are
used as flag bits in some random 17 year old code’ etc.

Anyway, something like this would explain the weird way Blizzard have handled this whole issue. It isn’t just
guild banks (I got a 100%
6-tab wipe, *and* a full …🧵

8/🧵 - … if so, it could explain stuff like the guild bank pet cages, achievements, rep, map exloration, honor, etc.

I mention signed int overflow (somewhere in 20 year old code), but they must use ‘flag bits’ a lot throughout the code and database… 🧵

7/🧵 - this would be one way an accidental loss could be followed by deliberate lack of restoration and information suppression (and not
impact any big guilds or streamers).

I wonder whether merging all servers into one is responsible for a lot of the weird data losses throughout the game? …🧵

6/🧵 … would require deleting some more data at the next scheduled downtime (the wipes worsened after the downtime). They could then manually restore streamers and big guilds (of course they have backups). They would need to suppress everyone else, exactly like they have done … 🧵

5/🧵 … if this happened, they would be faced with two options;

1. Rollback. Announce warbands will be delayer. This would need a lot of work, as they had a lot of new code / UI etc. Early access payments lost, new expansion delayed.

2. Sweep under carpet. This option would require …🧵

4/🧵 … and it is almost certain the devs they fired had special knowledge of how the databases were designed.

With hypothetical 32-bit UUIDs, they could have calculated that 2.2 billion UUIDs were needed, they ran the scripts, and lost the .2 billion UUIDs due to signed integer overflow …🧵

3/🧵 … run into a problem with running out of item UIDs? 7x14x7 slots in a guild bank : would overflow 32 bits unsigned at 6 million accounts (each with one guild bank).

Prior to warbands, some server mergers had occurred. But nothing on this scale.

They fired most?all devs in recent years …🧵

2/🧵 … database to ‘talk’ to eachother, without item loss or duplication (especially as the databases would run on multiple threads/machines for performance reasons);

WoW was launched when Pentium 4 was good. That was a 32-bit CPU, as was Intel Core ‘1’. Core 2 was 64-bit!

Did they run into …🧵

The whole guild bank incident is bizarre. Why no restorations?. I have a theory, and wonder what you think;

- The data loss happened when, essentially, merging many (all) server-data into one mega-server, for warbands.

- They must use some form of UUID to allow the different parts the …

1/🧵

There is! Will attach a screenshot that may be helpful / I just updated the app to see if it is upgraded yet - nope. Will look at web based access tomorrow!

We live in interesting times 😬