Sorry, but I have to point this out: You sincerely hope that someone loses their livelihood over a minor and non-game breaking inconvenience in a game?

I hope that someone faces sanctions for clear ineptitude. Pardon me for expecting some degree of competence in those who are the recipients of my hard earned cash.

Consequence isn't the same, a, and, b, we don't know that it has been the same problem or the same person. Or even one person for that matter. I'm all for their being serious discussion, and retraining, but out and out firing someone for something like this seems ridiculous.

There is no life outside wow. Wow is life.

I just want to say this, I really hope no one gets fired over this, just way out of proportion for me at least.

It's not even one person's fault. It's a group failure. The programmers, Quality Assurance and testers have to sign off that it worked for them.

The problem is something that wasn't on the checklist. They'll look again, narrow it down, and add it to the checklist for future testing.

As a game developer, normally I would be on the side of people saying wth, you want someone fired over this?

As a gamer who had it reset THREE FRAKING TIMES NOW, and having to spend to the tune of 6 THOUSAND GOLD EACH TIME. I am afraid I have to agree. WoW is a persistent world game. That implies a certain level of... PERSISTENCE. It's their JOB to create good code that supports the players time and effort. They have clearly failed in doing this. The first time, I forgive because code gets wonky. The second time was really a pain in the butt... but they insisted they had it fixed, so fine.

But this has now become gross incompetence. Every other achievement in the game doesn't have this problem. Meaning someone special cased some code without stopping to test it thoroughly. At the very least they should be stuck answering and fixing every single ticket that comes in about this and spend however long going back and awarding the achievement to every player that lost it.

If I am going to spend my time and money to do something in their game, they need to spend their time and money hiring people who can get the job done, test it, and make it work correctly.

@Ember

Actually, I want to say the elder achievement does reset each year and does not save its progress unless its completed.

I really hate when someone says they hope a person gets fired over x, y, and z. If it's clearly one person who continually can't do their job then yes. Fire away. More often than not though, it's an isolated incident for which you have no context and you want to dump a person on the street for it. It's ridiculously arrogant and presumptuous, and I lose a lot of respect for anyone who says that.

"Blizzard cut 600 positions in the company" Now you know why!

I've turned in all 9 every fair, in fact this fair, it cost me a total of about 2k, for ALL 9. with highest being treatise for 1k. (it's gone down a lot isnce they hotfixed the bug where it wasn't dropping hwere it should be). The raid and PVP ones are a joke to get yourself, that puts you at 4 at no cost (raid one drops in LFR now btw, although you can probably get one off AH for less then 1 gold now as a result of that change). the 5 dungeon ones have gone up a little. but if you were smart and stockpiled them the first month you're set for months/years to come. If not. then yuo can sitll get them fairly cheap, 100-500g in most cases. You also had an entire month to farm them, none of which are really that difficult to get anymore. treatise is only one that actually requires heroic, the rest just require mobs b green. i could get an egg for example just soloing a level 80-81 dungeon.

Should the bug be fixed? apslutely. Is it gamebreaking? Only if you're not willing to spend more then 5 min a month actually TRYING to complete the achievement instead of complaining blizz put as much effort into fixing it as you did in getting it.

And in all of this, only one guy is even remarking about the fact that someone had a job to do, and failed to do it, and believes there should be consequences. Firing? No, I don't think so. But something, yes. And something equal to the fact that the company has been shown to be incompetent in their software QA.

Simmer down, you. Listen for another few seconds. Is Blizzard incompetent? No, of course not, and the evidence supports that statement. But perception, particularly in the field of customer service, is *everything*. And whether you want to make this all a group endeavor or not, that group was made of individuals who each dropped the ball. The job didn't get done because at least one set of hands that should have been there to catch it, didn't. For a company that has lost 2 million subscribers in about 2 years, failures like this should be taken seriously, and that old "sorry about the inconvenience" starts to sound insincere -- which compounds the problem.

Bottom line: someone(s) at Blizzard should be getting "The Talking To"(tm), and if they're not, then Blizzard is demonstrating with their actions that continued erosion of their customers' regard isn't significant. *That* is a problem not just for Blizzard, but for their customers. That is, for *Us*.

@Bapo

I am not talking about half progress then it gets reset. Which is what the Elders do. I am talking about I got the achievement, for turning all 9 in. Then a month later, I suddenly DON'T HAVE THAT ACHIEVEMENT anymore.

Big difference.

@Ember: You spent 6k gold each time? I threw out 1k for the Treatise on Strategy just to get it done, but with all the others in the time since the last Faire I've had them drop, and most of them dropped multiple times. I'm still waiting on Ornate Weapon to drop this month to finish the achievement, but even if it doesn't, it's only about 500g on my server. Do you just not do anything that has a chance to drop that stuff?

Seriously though, this SHOULD be an embarrassment to Blizzard. They have a product that is used daily and updated regularly and incrementally. They added a feature to their product, with the understanding that the feature would work. It failed. They fixed it. It failed. They fixed it. It failed again. Oh, and each of these iterations, their customers lost data. Never mind that this is a game...it's a product that people pay real money to use, with the reasonable expectation that features will work, or when they break, they will be fixed and stay fixed.

I appreciate the "sincerely apologize" and "regrettably" and "unfortunately" in the statement. Even if it's lip service, Blizzard recognizes, apparently, that these failures are adversely affecting their customer base. I hope steps are being taken at Blizzard to improve their internal quality control.

@ some of the more 'Frothing at the mouth' rabid sort of manics above (ie emberdione for one)

READ THE DAMN POST
You complain about losing your achievement once you have bought all artifacts (which seems strange to me tbh - do a couple of things and the items seemed to drop like rain for me - so much so I have done all the artifacts on 3 toons and partially on another 2, although i DID by the weapon one for the massive cost of 400g a toon). But the post SPECIFICALLY STATES - and I quote "Completed achievements are unaffected."

So i will lose two part achivements - whoop de do, such a massive deal eh? /sarcasm off

As to calling for 'someone to be fired', this shows that you dont know how programming works, and is rather extreme for a small fault (and this is small - it only affects 3 achivements).

The individual lines of code have probably been tested perfectly well, but there is some secondary or tertiary interaction that causes the error.

It is not as simple as checking your bicyle tires for a leak by putting it underwater. Its more akin to searching a haystack, for a particular stand of hay.