A quashed World of Warcraft bug was deleting players' entire quest logs

A nasty World of Warcraft bug has caused all in-progress quests in a player's quest log to be automatically abandoned. First brought to light in the World of Warcraft forums about four hours ago, Blizzard has already confirmed they've addressed the root cause of the issue.

"Logged on this character a few minutes ago and noticed in my inventory that my raid mission quests were showing they could be accepted," said the first commenter in the WoW forums. "Checked my log, it's completely empty, which included a ton of stuff partially complete. I accepted one of the quests to see if it was just a display error, it is unfortunately not."

Since then a torrent of users have reported the same issue, which is apparently triggered while travelling from one zone to another. Blizzard has since issued the following bugfix note:

"We recently experienced an issue where upon changing zones some folks would lose all non-account wide quests. The root cause of this issue has been resolved, so quests should no longer be abandoned upon zoning.

"If you lost a quest you'll be able to re-acquire it by visiting the original NPC you got it from. The majority of those quests should appear on your map. If you had a collection quest that had items not marked as "Quest", your progress should update as soon as you pick the quest back up."

While players can now log in safely, it's possible that progress has been lost for those who happened to log in while the bug was still present. Over on the World of Warcraft subreddit, some players are reporting losing progress on quests that would take days of playing to redo. Writing in the forum, Support Forum Agent Vrakthris told user Kamarel that it might not be possible to re-secure any in-progress missions that were in the log at the time.

"I don't know if that is possible, Kamarel, but that is certainly part of the discussion about this situation. For the most part you should be able to just pick the abandoned quests back up, but for those who had partially or fully completed the quest, there may not be a way to verify that progress to restore it."

This bug couldn't come at a worse time for World of Warcraft. Its 8.0 patch released last month restructured the math behind combat but ended up breaking it so severely that Blizzard had to apologize and issue a band-aid fix while it investigated the deeper cause. And yesterday a new cutscene revealed a plot twist (or lack thereof) that has the entire community fuming for a variety of reasons. The backlash has gotten so severe that even specific Blizzard developers, like writer Christie Golden, have had to "step back" from Twitter due to harassment.

We've reached out to Blizzard for comment on whether any lost progress can be restored.

Shaun Prescott is the Australian editor of PC Gamer. With over ten years experience covering the games industry, his work has appeared on GamesRadar+, TechRadar, The Guardian, PLAY Magazine, the Sydney Morning Herald, and more. Specific interests include indie games, obscure Metroidvanias, speedrunning, experimental games and FPSs. He thinks Lulu by Metallica and Lou Reed is an all-time classic that will receive its due critical reappraisal one day.