Please support Game Informer. Print magazine subscriptions are less than $2 per issue

X
report

[Update] Xbox One Division Agents Aren't Lost Forever, Says Ubisoft

by Mike Futter on Apr 13, 2016 at 06:47 AM

Update: There's some good news (and maybe some bad news) for Xbox One players affected by vanishing characters following the April 12 patch. On the bright side, those characters will be restored. However, any progress you made after the patch went live at 12 a.m. Pacific / 3 a.m. Eastern on April 12 will be wiped.

Ubisoft says it will be restoring the characters that were corrupted during the server maintenance. Here's the full statement:

Some of you reported that their characters went missing after Update 1.1. Our team has identified and fixed the source of this issue to ensure that your characters could be correctly restored.

The issue was caused by a malfunctioning server that couldn’t synchronize character data correctly and corrupted them instead. The game client was unable to read this corrupted data, and simply assumed that the character didn’t exist. Once this has been identified, we were able to restore the server to its normal functions, thus ensuring that the issue will no longer occur for other players.

For those who experienced the issue: your character is not gone. We are currently working on a fix that should make it available shortly. Implementing this fix will require a server downtime, and we will let you know when we are ready to perform it.

Please note however that in order to make your character available, we will need to restore the latest uncorrupted save of your entire account, which happened during the server maintenance of April 12. In other words, your character will be back just as you left it on April 12 at 9am CEST | 3am EDT | 12am PDT. You will lose any progress made on this character or any other one from the same account between April 12 and the next maintenance. This only applies to players who have been affected by the missing character issue.

We apologize for the inconvenience and want to thank you for your understanding and your help in identifying this issue.

If you haven't encountered the error, you're safe. If you did, sit tight. A fix should be coming soon that will restore your missing character.

Original Story (April 13, 2016 @ 8:13 a.m. Central):

Yesterday’s big patch for Ubisoft’s The Division is reportedly having a significant problem on Xbox One. Players on the game’s official forums and The Division subreddit are reporting the disappearance of characters.

Ubisoft’s Massive studio, which lead development has gathered a number of reports and is investigating. We’ve asked for a more in-depth statement from the publisher and will update once we hear back.

The subreddit in particular has reports from dozens of players on Xbox One that have suffered from the problem. While not confirmed (again, we’re waiting on Ubisoft for details), a number of players report experiencing character disappearance following a “delta” or “mike” error in-game.

If you happen to be playing The Division on Xbox One, you might want to hold off for now. It’s possible that the characters can be recovered, but we won’t know until Ubisoft figures out the problem and issues a statement.

[Source: The Division Forums, Reddit]

 

Our Take
Patches can introduce some strange problems, but this one is either a major nuisance or a catastrophe. How it plays out depends on whether Ubisoft is able to recover characters that have pulled a vanishing act.