Yesterday’s patch caused a soulbinding glitch that took the servers offline and damaged character records in the game’s database, necessitating significant downtime yesterday and a rollback to yesterday morning, meaning if you played after the patch rolled in, you lost over two hours of playtime.
Late last night, ArenaNet’s Mike O’Brien clarified just how players will be affected:
“If you purchased the game on an existing account, we’ll restore your purchase. If you purchased the game on a newly created account, you’ll need to recreate your account. We’ll contact you so we can restore your purchase after you have recreated your account.
“If you purchased gems, we’ll restore the gems. If you purchased an item using gems, that purchase will be rolled back, and you’ll have your gems back. You can purchase again. If you purchased a sale item that’s no longer on sale, you can purchase again, then contact customer support for a refund of the difference between the current price and the sale price.
“All in-game transactions are being rolled back, including transactions through the currency exchange, trading post, guild bank, and in-game mail. The trading post will come back online after the rest of the game does, and with buy and sell offers back where they were prior to this morning’s release.
“Character progress made during the affected time period is being rolled back. If you had an extreme situation, for example you got a precursor from the mystic forge and then had that rolled back, contact our customer support team and we’ll try to help you.”
Players on Reddit continue to report problems this morning. (I personally bought and spent gems this morning with no problems, however, so your mileage may vary.) ArenaNet has tweeted that it’s working on a few outstanding issues:
We are aware of some lingering crashes after yesterday's fix. The team is working on a fix, apologies for the inconvenience ^DO
— Guild Wars 2 (@GuildWars2) August 24, 2016
We are also aware of the network error with code 1083, apologies for that ^DO
— Guild Wars 2 (@GuildWars2) August 24, 2016
We don’t yet know whether or with what players will be compensated for the downtime, but if you’re a day-one player, you’re getting birthday presents today, and everyone [with an old account, anyway] is getting anniversary gifts, which should go a long way toward making you feel the love for GW2. I opened mine when I tested this morning, and I’m hugely impressed at how great this year’s gifts are compared to past years’:
Click to reveal spoilers about the birthday gifts!