World of Warcraft

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World of Warcraft

Basic Information
Release Year	2004
Product Type	Video game
In Production	Yes
Official Website	https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com/

World of Warcraft (WoW) is a massively multiplayer online game maintained by Activision Blizzard. Despite the product's critical acclaim since the 2000s, the treatment of the product has had a historically negative trend, facing anti-consumer affairs at the request of its publisher.

Incidents

This is a list of all consumer protection incidents related to this product. Any incidents not mentioned here can be found in the World of Warcraft category.

Real ID (July 2010)

Real ID (July 2010): Real ID was a change introduced by Blizzard, where players would use their real first and last name when posting on WoW forums (instead of their preferred WoW character, as it was before). Initially announced as optional, it was quickly changed to obligatory, with Blizzard arguing it to be a vital step for reducing toxicity in gaming community. Community pushback was massive and united, with many citing privacy threats as the main concern. Blizzard initially tried to downplay the danger, even banning several people, but eventually buckled under the pressure. Then-CEO Mike Morhaime declared that, following user feedback, using Real ID to post on the forums would not be required.

Major data loss (August 2024)

When Patch 11.0.2 was released on 13 August 2024, a serious bug caused the contents of some guild bank(s) to go missing to varying degrees of severity (up to everything) regardless of player faction and world region. The only official acknowledgement of the problem at that time was a support article that was created four days later, on 17 August. Except for a Customer Support agent on the European forum, what followed was silence for over a month.

On 20 September 2024, Community Manager Linxy posted and pinned the following official statement in the General Discussion forum:

About a week after we launched patch 11.0.2 in August, we began receiving reports of an issue where some players were discovering items missing from their guild banks.

As we investigated over the next couple of days, we found the culprit—a technical update that was made to support cross-realm guilds. An unexpected bug caused one of our maintenance processes to make some items disappear. Many of these items were related to professions materials from prior expansions, but it was possible for players to lose other items from their guild banks as well.

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.

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.

We apologize for that and for the long wait here. We really appreciate your patience as we've worked through this difficult issue.

The company unlisted the support article the same day and has made no further comments in the matter since, save to answer a couple questions regarding if the guild banks were safe to be used and to confirm whom the recovered contents would be mailed to.

On 13 November 2024, the pinned thread was renamed to "Guild Bank Missing Items Bug – Aug/Sept 2024" and moved to the Bug Report forum. It was unpinned 26 February 2025, when Patch 11.1.0 had been released in both the NA and EU regions.

No form of compensation was given to those affected by the data loss. Additionally, an Australian player by the character name of Mordane on the server Dath'Remar shared the following update on 9 February 2025 in regards to their filed complaint with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission:

[...] "Blizzard Australia Pty Ltd has stated "The lost guild bank assets are digital items, and we do not consider those items to hold any monetary real-world value. As such, we would be unable to provide this customer with any refunds in relation to the data that was lost and the items that could not be restored to their account."

Based on the above response by Blizzard, we will be closing the Complaint." [...]