Back when I first started in MMOs, rollbacks were a daily occurrence, quite literally. Not only was the server likely to crash at least once a day and wipe an hour or so of work, but MMO servers generally got daily reboots, meaning chaos reigned in the few minutes beforehand when folks knew their activities wouldn’t be saved post reboot.
Nowadays, it’s so rare that it often merits news articles and apologies, and it’s exceedingly rare in Guild Wars 2, which is one of the few MMORPGs that doesn’t go down for maintenance on the regular and indeed patches in updates on the fly, requiring only a relog by players. This is why reports on Reddit that Guild Wars 2 has suffered a rather major rollback are so alarming.
Across multiple threads on Reddit and the official forums, EU players are noting that they’d lost potentially several days (back to Saturday morning) of gameplay, questing, cash, and acquisitions following what appears to have been a server restart without a proper backup, specifically on EU servers. PvP records seem to have escaped the rollback, however. NA players don’t seem to be affected, but caution is probably advisable anyway, and EU players are in a holding pattern waiting to learn whether their progress will be restored or they’ll be compensated in some way.
ArenaNet hasn’t publicly commented on the rollback yet as I type this, but it’s inevitable, given the outpouring of anger on the forums. We’ll update as soon as it does. It has now, kinda; see below.
A reiteration of this message is now on Guild Wars 2’s official Twitter. Some more context for what’s going on:
So what we know about the #gw2 rollback:
– EU servers only
– Rolled back to Saturday morning (UTC)
– Affects character data: inventory, achievements, bank, wallet, gemstore etc
– Trading post hasn't been affected so there's a lot of item duplication going on right now— that_shaman (@that_shaman) May 11, 2020