Division bug has not wiped characters, Ubisoft says

Breathe a sigh of relief – gamers who feared they may have lost their characters in The Division have been told their data is safe.

Following the release of the game’s 1.1 patch this week some players were aghast to discover that their characters had vanished. However, the cause has been identified and players have been told that they should expect their characters to become available shortly.

Our team has identified and fixed the source of this issue to ensure that your characters could be correctly restored,” Ubisoft said. 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.”

There is a slight catch, however.

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 12th,” the company added. In other words, your character will be back just as you left it on April 12th. You will lose any progress made on this character or any other one from the same account between April 12 and the next maintenance.

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