Update 1.1 for "Tom Clancy's The Division" went live recently and was supposed to put in the first free content, "Incursion," plus new gears, new assignments, and the new loot trading. It did that successfully. However, there was an extra baggage: players' characters went missing after the said update.
Game servers for "The Division" went offline for a few hours last April 12 for maintenance and for update 1.1, which pushed roughly 4.9GB of data to players on different platforms. When players started to get back online, they were surprised that they could not find their characters anymore. Reports started to come in and there were a lot of affected players.
According to reports, players were able to notice it upon logging in after the update, while others were still able to play but failed to see their characters after attempting to play again, VG247 reported.
Ubisoft, the game developer and publisher, received multiple complaints about the missing characters issue via the company's support Twitter account. "The Division's" Twitter account acknowledged the problem.
The company's reply reads: "Please note that the missing character issue will require further investigation and will not be resolved with the upcoming hotfix."
Meanwhile, their Reddit account, which has accumulated close to a thousand comments since the issue started, stated, "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."
It added, "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."
Once things are sorted out, Ubisoft will then restore the accounts that were backed up before the server maintenance on April 12.
Express added that majority of the affected accounts come from the Xbox One platform. There are fewer affected players on the PlayStation 4 and Windows PC.
"Tom Clancy's The Division" was released last March 8.
