Guild Wars 2

This thread is an effort to help players and developers understand the nature of this bug. Having all of one “category” of complaints merged into a single thread has so far been disruptive and resulted in frustration, mixed information, and confusion to both players and developers alike. Hopefully, this bug can be clearly analyzed, categorized, and fixed with the help of this thread. Until then, I’ll also post some tips that players can use to protect themselves from losing their items and gold.

General Information

Who does this bug apply to?

If you do any of the following, you could fall victim to this bug:

-Sell Items on the TP to Buy Orders (direct sell).
-Sell Items on the TP via Sell Orders.
-Buy Items on the TP via Sell Orders (direct buy).
-Cancel Buy Orders to retrieve funds.
-Purchase Gems with gold.

How much can be lost due to this bug? The gold loss is not immediate – it is delayed. There are numerous reports of a delayed spending mechanic that allows you to “spend” more gold than you own and “pay” it back as you gain gold from drops/vendoring. This means you could theoretically lose hundreds of gold, even if you’ve never had more than 5 gold.

A Detailed Explanation of the Bug

To put it simply, the Trading Post can, during a specific period of time, eat items and gold. When this happens, there is no clear indication it is happening (except in hindsight after significant analysis). In fact, all the nice UI messages that have been added to the Trading Post (“No more available at this price, please try again” etc.) merely serve to convince the user that nothing is out of the ordinary. This applies not only to trading items on the trading post but also to buying gems.

How Can I Protect Myself from this Bug? (message to Players)

1. If you get an error message of any kind on the Trading Post, just stop what you’re doing immediately. Wait a while before you try it again.

2. When cancelling unfulfilled Buy Orders, always cancel the lowest value one first and confirm that the gold shows up in your pickup box. If you cancel a Buy Order and the gold does not show up within a few minutes, just walk away until later.

Unfortunately these are not preventative except in that they limit the harm that you can experience from this bug. There is currently no way that I am aware of to test the working state of the TP. If you object to these measures being too “paranoid”, I empathize. But after experiencing this bug, I approach all of my transactions cautiously in order to limit the amount I would lose if this bug struck again.

If anyone else knows any tips to avoid loss or knows any indicators of the TGB, please post in this thread.

/edit – Mods seemed a little trigger-happy and removed any posts with ticket numbers in them. Unfortunately it seems like we won’t be able to keep a catalogue of ticket numbers here for the devs to examine, but hopefully the information about the mechanisms is enough.

Vawn, your issue seems a bit different than the rest of us. The TGB is not reproducible on command, it is a timing-dependent phenomenon that seems to happen near maintenance times.

I’m not downplaying your issue, though. Also, just to be sure, have you cleared out the items in your pickup box? There is an effect (not sure if it’s a bug) where if you have many items in your pickup box, any gold you get from sales is stuck in queue behind the items (it won’t show up until you’ve cleared out the queue of items).

If items in your pickup box are cleared out, then there is definitely something horribly wrong – an even worse bug than the TGB in many respects.

Additionally, thanks to everyone for adding your information here. If there’s any help to be had for this bug, it’s through giving clear information like has been so far.

I encountered this issue as well. It was very similar to Sarsen.7620’s issue. I attempted to purchased Gems with gold while the Trading Post was down on Sept. 19 and received a “Failure” message. The following day I logged on to see the Trading Post was back online and my 5 gold pieces where removed from my inventory with no Gems given. I have since stopped using the gem store at all since this and probably won’t use it again until I get some type of response to my support ticket.

BLTC Maintenance 26 SEP 8:00 AM – 8:30 AM PDT

Just a heads up to everyone to avoid market activity near maintenance times, lest this bug strike again. I am anticipating another wave of TGB complaints, unfortunately, but we’ll see what happens.

Problem:
Cancelled buy orders, recieved no gold. Sold 500 items, no gold return for any of them.

Ticket #
#120925-007031

Description
Sold about 500 rare weapons since last week, when the auction house suddenly stopped giving me any profits. Did not receive any profits for said 500 items. Canceled some buying bids on items to see whether the AH was broken. Did not receive any money upon testing.

Missing somewhere from 30-100 gold at the moment as I cannot say how much I’ve lost because I cancel and replace my buying bids and bid up to over 300 unique items every day. I had originally invested 135 gold into AH and am now missing a very large portion of it.

Currently have 600 items that are sitting in storage that cannot be sold as profits will be lost.

daphoenix:

Make sure you clear out your pickup tab of items. There is a hidden backlog of items and gold once the pickup box has a certain number of items in it.

The TGB is not a continously ongoing issue, it is a time-isolated occurrence that seems to pop up near maintenance times.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/9-19-TP-outage-and-how-it-has-affected-my-gameplay-today/page/3

“We’re aware of some of the recent issues with Trading Post purchases. This was caused by the sheer volume of activities with our system. We are taking steps to prevent that issue in the future but in the meantime we are actively looking into these unfulfilled purchases and will resolve them within a few days. But please note that we are unable to guarantee that your items will arrive, or that your gold will be refunded due to these issues, as the data may be lost. We’ll continue to investigate this for everyone affected and try to have an outcome as quickly as possible.

Regards,
GM Onyx
Guild Wars 2 Support Team"

(thanks, zaerk.2305)

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Gold-missing-from-Inventory-merged/page/6

“There were some cases where purchases were successfully made, but the delivery of the gems was delayed. This was due to stress on our system due to the volume of traffic. We are taking steps to prevent the issue in the future so you hopefully you won’t run into this again. In the meantime, we are actively looking into these hanging purchases and resolving them within a few days. It appears that this is taking a bit longer than we had originally thought, so your particular transaction may still be pending the refund. That said you should be receiving your gems or your gold refunded to you soon. If you have not received your gems back within 7 days, please let us know so that we may investigate your issue further.

Again we are very sorry that you encountered this issue at all, but I hope this message has helped. If you have any other questions or concerns please feel free to let us know about them as well. Thanks so much for your time and understanding while we work on resolving this issue for you.

Cheers!

Tina
Guild Wars Support Team"

(thanks, Juris Doctor.9842)

Looks like this is officially on the map and there may even be a chance to recover the gold/items.

Mfpanda:

I’m aware of the hidden backlog of items. I have about 400 items still in backlog and no place to put them as my storage is full / I was not able to list any items all week, nor buy bags as I had no money / way of buying b/c items bought go to the back of the log.

Still in risk of losing a ton of items after the game update though since it may affect my items stored on the auction house.

daphoenix.4283:

Mfpanda:

I’m aware of the hidden backlog of items. I have about 400 items still in backlog and no place to put them as my storage is full / I was not able to list any items all week, nor buy bags as I had no money / way of buying b/c items bought go to the back of the log.

Still in risk of losing a ton of items after the game update though since it may affect my items stored on the auction house.

Sorry if I wasn’t clear, but what I am saying is that gold itself is counted as an item when you’re talking about having a backlog. If you sell something, even direct to a buy order, and you have a backlog of items, the gold will NOT show up until you clear the backlog.

Try getting someone in the game to mail you some bags and use the Return To Sender trick to get an extra 50 item storage temporarily. I’m confident that if you clear the backlog of items, your gold will start showing up.

I don’t know if this is the same issue, but this issue has been happening since the launch of the game and it happens to me nearly every day.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Trading-Post-still-eats-money-and-items-when-buying-non-stacking-items/first#post262984

I’ve posted about this before, but I believe it requires its own thread at this point because there has yet to be any confirmation from ArenaNet on this. This issue has been in the Trading Post SINCE LAUNCH and I have potentially lost over 50 gold so far from this issue.

Yesterday as usual before I go to bed I put up a lot of sell listings for stuff I got that day and buy orders for things that look cheap to me.

“Rampager’s Banded Legs” looked like such a great deal to me I decided to put up a buy order for 5 of them.

Today I woke up and checked my buy orders, my order for the Banded Legs was reduced to 3 orders, so I happily assumed I would find 2 of them in my possession. Unfortunately when I went to pick up the items, I only saw one of them available, the other one just disappeared, and so did the money I invested in it.

This happened to several other items I ordered as well.

I am not 100% sure how to reproduce this bug but I do know

• it only happens with items that don’t stack and
• it only happens when putting up a buy order for multiples of that item.

I have been trying to avoid putting up orders for more than 1 of an item at a time, but it’s extremely tedious to put up orders of 1 item when I want multiples of something, and that doesn’t get me back the money that vanished either.

My Problem is from the Trading Post crashing, when it crashed I lost about 2g worth of items, including a level 39 rare Great Sword, not as bad as other players but still a loss on my part, I wish Anet would fix this problem for all of us I have loved the game thus far until this bug happened and I just keep getting the same response from Anet bout it

“Thanks a lot for bringing this to our attention. We really appreciate it. Next time that you’re in-game and you find a bug, you can do us a favor by submitting the bug report in-game. This will send detailed information about your character and your position directly to our Quality Assurance team.

To submit a bug report in game, simply bring up your “Game Menu” located in the upper left hand corner, and then choose the lifesaver icon for “Support.” From the “Support” menu, you can either click “Report a Bug” or just go directly the Ladybug Icon in the support menu to enter your submission.

Thank you again for taking the time to send this report manually."

I have submitted it several times in the bug report in game, and every time I get an email like this about my problem

I’ve had a similar problem to most of you.

On Wed the 19th I attempted to buy 1000 Gems, which at the time cost around 3 gold 60 silver. I got an error message that said the transaction failed and no gold was taken.

When I logged into the game the next day (Thursday 20th) The gold was missing from my character but no Gems had been given.

Unfortunatly, this is the reply I got from support, “The Guild Wars 2 Support Team is unable to restore missing characters, items, or gold. I understand this may be frustrating, but we simply do not have the capabilities to do this.”

There might be some hope for those of us who have lost gold and items. According to this http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/10uk5u/a_big_thank_you_to_anet_support_for_awarding_me/ support is now able to modify your character’s inventory – in this case they even spawned new items out of thin air.

MF Panda.5874:

There might be some hope for those of us who have lost gold and items. According to this http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/10uk5u/a_big_thank_you_to_anet_support_for_awarding_me/ support is now able to modify your character’s inventory – in these case they even spawned new items out of thin air.

Hmm, what about all the other people who have guiltlessly lost gems/ gold/ whatever due to bugs/ glitches/ whatever?

Isn’t their standard answer that they are not able to do anything?
How were they able to give him these tokens into his inventory?

Hmmm..

Looks to me like MF Panda said support is now able to modify inventory. Presumably that means they weren’t able to before, which is why that was their standard answer.

I’ve lost in-game currency to #1. Selling Items to Buy Orders three times now, that I know of, potentially more because I do not keep strict check on each transaction. I have had instances though, where I sold an item to a buy order and the money never showed and I took note of it, only later to NEVER have the money show up.

I’ve also lost money by purchasing multiples from sell orders but without an error message (usually with crafting supplies). I’ll enter, say “20” as the quantity I want to purchase, and click to buy them. The funds for all 20 will vanish from my inventory, and the pickup tab will only have ONE of the item I purchased. The remainder of the items never show.

I’ve literally paid 40c for a single butter this way. This has happened several times (I’d wager even as high as 1/4th the time I purchase multiple quantities even).

Have had it happen with: Butter; finished food items (paid for 20 cherry tarts, got 1, lost the cash for 20); half-finished crafting materials (buying 5 steel mace heads, etc); fine crafting mats (paid for 6 scales, got 1).

I thought at first it was a case where I tried to purchase 10 from someone who was selling 10, and someone had nabbed the other 9 first … but this has happened to me when buying 10 of something at a price where 1000+ are listed for sale.

Hippocampus.8470:

Looks to me like MF Panda said support is now able to modify inventory. Presumably that means they weren’t able to before, which is why that was their standard answer.

I am not really convinced: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/No-replacement-of-bugged-forge-items/first#post336578

Look there again.

That drives me crazy?

I am not sure whether one knows what another does…

And maybe they could do that (put in into inventory or mail it to the player), but they don’t want to do it?

It would be very helpful knowing what is going on.. ^^