Restoration of Deleted Characters

[basedchad.3194]

Hi all, I submitted a ticket to have my characters restored a long with my account. They were able to cancel my account deletion but I received this for the character restoration:

"Thank you for contacting the Guild Wars 2 Support Team.The tool that we use to restore deleted characters to an account is currently down. Unfortunately, we do not know when a fix will be implemented but it is being looked into.Please feel free to touch base with us at a later time and we can attempt a restoration then.We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. If there is anything else we can assist with, please let us know."

Anyone else had the same or not had the same result recently? Decided to post this here so we can keep a track on it

Thanks everyone and have a great day! :)

[Mistwalker.4952]

Yup, I'm on the same boat sadly and the GM whom answered my ticket told me I'd have to open a new one in the future to check again, but there's no PSA nor any other way besides keep opening new tickets to know if the tool has been fixed or not, no ETA either (which is understandable).

[Linken.6345]

update your tickets and ask them to post a message about when its fixed on the news and announcement forums to save both you and them time with tickets.

[Maglus.2751]

similar here...

"We were unsuccessful in restoring the character back to the account. We are currently experiencing an issue with our character restoration tool. Please contact us at a later date to attempt to restore the character again."

so tool is either down, or having issues... or they just playing ping-pong game to respond quickly and close the case instead of do actual job... or maybe they doesn't want to bother before anniversary... doesn't seems too professional ;(

[Seera.5916]

@"Maglus.2751" said:similar here...

"We were unsuccessful in restoring the character back to the account. We are currently experiencing an issue with our character restoration tool. Please contact us at a later date to attempt to restore the character again."

so tool is either down, or having issues... or they just playing ping-pong game to respond quickly and close the case instead of do actual job... or maybe they doesn't want to bother before anniversary... doesn't seems too professional ;(

How is it unprofessional for a tool to be having issues? Sometimes issues aren't quick to fix. At least they now have a tool for it, even if it is currently broken. They used to not be able to restore characters at all.

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

I'm a game developer who has also worked in IT, so I can tell you what's likely happening.

Your characters are on physical media backups, which are made on a regular basis in MMOs especially to keep the database safe from corruption in many possible failure events (power outage, storms, and yes, even server room fires).

To restore your characters they'd need physical access to the datacenter which is currently on lockdown due to COVID-19. The data sets are too massive to just keep backup copies on hand accessible over the Internet from their homes. For an MMO the size of GW2 we're talking likely hundreds of gigabytes of data per backup, and this isn't an emergency issue like a server crash that needs a rollback.

Its the same reason they can't do voice acting, no one's allowed to go into the office, studio or datacenter right now beyond a few key personal for maintenance purposes only. And its likely going to be that way for a while still.

I presume the "fix" is modifying their tools to work better remotely, which were designed to work in-house only. This likely means adding secure, remote interfaces and keeping extra data sets online instead of just being archived offline like usual.

[Dondarrion.2748]

It's even a great service they've got tools to actually restore/cancel pending account deletions and/or character deletions.

Other than doing the same as e.g. BDO and impose a deletion timer when you delete a character, I don't know how many "prompts" you can get before at some point you must take responsibility for going through with a deletion.

I've deleted characters in the past, but only after carefully considering what I'm getting rid of and being convinced it was something I wanted to do.

Was there a need to delete your characters AND account to begin with?