Dust Incident Explained, What Happened, Will You Get Refunds For Missing Dust, Will Crafted Cards Get Taken Back And More!

The last couple of days have been a mess – between all the BG card reveals, leaked builds, and people getting Dust out of nowhere and then getting it taken back… it’s safe to say that a lot of you might not fully understand what’s going on and be confused. Why did you get Dust in the first place, or maybe why you DIDN’T get it, why it was then taken away? Let me try to explain it all and tell you what you can expect to happen. However, keep in mind that the situation is still being played out, so we don’t fully know how it will end and new developments might pop out at any time.

It all started a few weeks back – some players got extra copies of uncraftable cards such as Lokholar the Ice Lord or Golden versions of faction leaders (Drek'Thar, Vanndar Stormpike). I’m not sure if it was through packs or other rewards, but the point is that they should have never got them in the first place – those were all given out for free either through the rewards track or the Honor event. So the goal of this entire debacle was to remove those extra cards and give refunds for them and them only.

However, something went horribly wrong and Dust was sent to more people than it should have and in much higher amounts. What was meant to be a pretty small refund for most turned into a huge mess. For example, some players who were supposed to gain just a few hundreds of Dust gained thousands. Of course, I can’t check the validity of all the stories myself, but I’ve heard about people getting as much as ~15k Dust out of nowhere. The official message went out on Twitter (I also posted it here) saying that it was a mistake, but let’s be honest –  most of the casual players wouldn’t even see it. The message said that they sent out too much Dust by mistake and aren’t sure what they might do with it yet – leave it or take it away, also saying that people MIGHT go into negative Dust if they spend it.

Despite the message, naturally, many players who gained tons of Dust immediately spent it on cards. But then Blizzard has made a decision to remove all the extra Dust people got by mistake. And here’s where the situation gets more “interesting”. I’m not sure if it’s a problem with technology or maybe an actual decision, but no players went into negative Dust amounts. So, for example, if someone was at 0 Dust, got 8k Dust they weren’t supposed to and already spent it on crafting cards, they went down to 0 again even though they got a bunch of cards for free. The official message is that no cards that were already crafted will get taken back. On the one hand, it would suck taking cards back from players, but on the other hand, it punishes those who wanted to be “fair” and didn’t craft anything after reading the first message that people got too much Dust by mistake. Others thought that there was no point in doing that since it will just take them into negative numbers, but it didn’t happen, no one landed below 0. It means that if they started crafting instead of waiting, they would end up with a lot of free cards, so they feel cheated.

The entire situation happened only on the Americas server. If you’re playing on any other server, then you for sure didn’t get any “bugged” Dust and nothing was taken away from you. So what about the other servers? The current goal is to fix the problem with whatever scripts they’re using and run it on those servers too, but this time only taking away extra copies of uncraftable cards and refunding Dust for them, without any mess around it. We don’t know when will that happen, it might be this week, or maybe next if they will run into some more troubles.

According to the official source, no one lost more Dust than they gained. Of course, again, this is not something I can confirm myself. I’ve seen a lot of players reporting that e.g. they had 4k Dust before the whole accident, got 8k extra, didn’t craft anything, and then landed below the initial 4k. But apparently, they checked the logs for players who reported it and it simply wasn’t true. Here, I’m not siding with anyone, because I just can’t know that without any proof. I know that memory can be tricky and people generally don’t write down how much Dust they currently have to double-check the numbers, others might have forgotten that they have indeed crafted something, and there might also be people trying to simply lie to gain something out of it. Or maybe they are correct and devs did take away more Dust than they should. I hope that this part will be explained quickly, because if someone really ended up with less Dust in the end despite not crafting anything, that’s NOT a situation that should have happened.

Now, the important question is – what’s next? Here’s the part we don’t really know, there’s no official message yet. The current stance is that the extra Dust was taken away from people, but if you managed to craft a lot of cards with it, then you will get away with it. Then the – now fixed – refunds for uncraftable cards will be rolled out on the other servers. However, players are clearly not happy with how the whole situation went down and I expect that Blizzard MIGHT reconsider their stance.

The problem is that, at this point, they don’t really have a great option. If they give people the Dust they got by mistake back, that still wouldn’t be fair, because players got wildly varying amounts of “incorrect” Dust. Some got only a few thousand while others got let’s say ten thousand. Giving them back those wrong numbers still wouldn’t be fair – because why should someone only get 4k Dust for free while other person got 10k randomly? And what about players from EU and Asia-Pacific? They didn’t get anything, should they also get all that free Dust? In the end, for it to be really “fair”, they would need to give all the players on all the servers like 10k+ Dust for free. In theory, they could also take away the cards crafted with that Dust – but the problem is that they already said they won’t do it, so it would also look horrible. Or they can just leave it as it is and wait for the further community reaction. So far, nothing about it has been positive and I don’t think they can afford to just ignore the problem.

You might be asking why they wouldn’t just let people have all that free Dust. And that’s a good question, with a very simple answer – money. It wasn’t a few hundreds of Dust here and there, if they wanted to be “fair” and give the extra Dust to everyone, we’re talking about millions of players getting tons of Dust out of nowhere. Given that many of those players would normally have to buy a lot of packs to get that much Dust, we can only imagine how much money it would cost Blizzard to do it. We’re talking about millions, maybe tens of millions of dollars that they would otherwise get in pack sales. On the other hand, taking it away after it was clearly their mistake damages their PR.

I’ll be very clear about it – I’m not trying to take a stance in this post, I’m just trying to objectively explain what went on and the point of view of all the sides. I wrote this post, because the situation is not as simple as it might seem. We still don’t know how it will all end, but I’ll definitely keep you updated.

Update #1:

Community manager has issued another official message, but they just apologized and doubled up on their previous one, didn’t really say anything new. Apparently the refund was meant to only apply to a very small number of players and most of them weren’t supposed to get anything at all. They said again that they looked into people’s account and haven’t seen any player who ended up with less Dust than they started with – assuming they didn’t spend any of the extra Dust they got by mistake.

The script has been fixed and it will now be rolled on other regions too, but most of the players won’t see any effect, because – again – the issue applied only to a small percent of players in the first place.

Here’s a full message:

The heal-up correction has been completed in the Americas region. That correction included running a script that subtracted the same amount of Dust that was previously added to each account, and also added back in the cards that were previously mistakenly deleted. Then, the refunds were processed as initially intended. The refunds only properly apply to a very small number of players, so the end result is that most players ended up with 0 extra Dust. We’ve seen your concerns, and we’ll continue to investigate your reports, but we’ve looked into it extensively and have not seen any player end up with less Dust than they started with (except for any Dust they spent in between the two adjustments).

The original refund script has been fixed, and is now being rolled out in each of the other regions. Because it was adjusted, most players won’t see any affects from it.

We apologize for the inconvenience and confusion this has caused.

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