The roll-back will affect level progression, ladder rankings and changes in card collection.
Blizzard China and their partners NetEase have found themselves in a rather big conundrum. On Saturday, January 14, 15:20 CST, a massive power failure hit the Hearthstone data servers. Three days later, on Tuesday, January 17, all servers were taken down for maintenance. After 40 hours of down time, on Wednesday, 18:00 CST the company issued a statement, saying all game data will be rolled back four days to the point right before the incident.
This has not sat well with the Hearthstone community. Even before the roll-back was confirmed causing the massive roar of today, the scarce communication coming from NetEase and Blizzard regarding the issue has come under criticism, having taken more than a day for a company representative to publically address the server down-time, even though local community sites are said to have been positive reporting the issue.
The server roll-back is said to affect hero level progression, changes in collection manager and ladder rankings. Packs purchased with real money will be refunded, but the cards opened during this period will be lost.
The official statement (posted below, with translation courtesy of Reddit user Czhihong) mentions that compensation will be provided, with details on how and when exactly to be provided after the smooth running of the servers is ensured again.
First, please accept our sincerest apologies, and thank you all, truly, for your patience during the maintenance period.
On Saturday afternoon (14 January 15:20 CST), our Hearthstone database encountered an issue due to a power failure, which resulted in damage to the data.
Engineers from both NetEase and Blizzard attended to the issue immediately after the incident, attempting to restart the servers and restore the data. Unfortunately, due to technical issues with the back-up as well, they were not successful.
We fully understand your frustrations during any and all downtimes, and we exhausted all options in the first two days, but progress and results were poor with every option. In the meantime, the game environment had turned extremely unstable, and the maintenance period had already exceeded 24 hours.
After an extensive discussion of all available options, Blizzard and NetEase came to a collaborative decision to roll back game data to just before the point of the incident (14 January 15:20, 2017).
To clarify, we hope you understand that performing a roll-back is the absolute last resort, and we are deeply apologetic and regretful that we had to make this decision.
Performing a roll-back means that all Hero level progression, changes in collection and ladder rankings are lost, and could not be tracked. One of our biggest priorities has always been the gameplay experience, and we're acutely aware of the time and effort you've dedicated to the game. Due to this unusual incident, some of you are facing a lengthier climb up the ladder, others will be forced to re-enter the arena.
Once again, we sincerely and unreservedly apologize for all the frustrations, inconveniences and losses that we have caused. Both Blizzard and NetEase will be dedicating all our attention and resources to this incident. We will announce compensation details after we are sure that the servers are running smoothly again.
Finally, we are fully aware that allowing this to happen was completely unacceptable. We will be reflecting on this, learning from this experience - including upgrading surveillance, better hardware protection - and do our utmost to ensure that similar incidents will not happen again. Thank you all for your understanding and support.
-Blizzard Entertainment & NetEase”
