‘The Division’ Lost Characters Will Be Recovered

The Division 1.1 update came with a few bugs that were fixed with a hot fix patch released on Tuesday night. Some players also reported the loss of their characters due to an error in the game. Ubisoft announced on Wednesday that they have found the cause and a solution to the issue, plus a remedy for any affected PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC players.

“The issue was caused by a malfunctioning server that couldn’t synchronize character data correctly and corrupted them instead,” Ubisoft Community Manager Yannick Banchereau wrote in The Division forums. “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.”

The lost character issue primarily affected Xbox One players when they experienced a “Delta” or “Mike” error while playing or logging out of The Division. Ubisoft then reached out to players in the Reddit community to provide their usernames and platform to help with the investigation. Now the investigation is complete, and the good news is the characters have not been lost permanently.

“We are currently working on a fix that should make it available shortly,” Banchereau added. “Implementing this fix will require a server downtime, and we will let you know when we are ready to perform it.”

There is an unfortunate side effect, however. Any progress made on the character from the time The Division 1.1 update was delivered to the time the character went missing will be lost. Additionally, this won’t affect just the character that disappeared, but all characters under a player’s account.

“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,” Banchereau explained.

This isn’t the only issue still lingering with The Division. The game began experiencing issues with the Daily Hard and Challenge missions not showing up late last week. Ubisoft thought they had fixed it with the release of the 1.1 update, but it cropped up again today.

“We are aware of the missing Daily Challenge mode. While we won’t be able to fix it today, we can confirm that it will be back tomorrow,” the official Twitter account revealed early this morning.

It’s unfortunate, as The Division has largely been stable since an initial hiccup at launch. Creating a massive (no pun intended) persistent online shooter does present developers with a new set of challenges, though, as Bungie and Destiny have already documented.

The hot fix patch released to The Division on Tuesday evening focused on issues with the new “Falcon Lost” Incursion boss encounter, plus the amount of loot received from named enemies in Challenge mode. Banchereau shared the following patch notes prior to the patch being released last night.

• Named enemies in Challenge mode will now only guarantee one High-End item like all the other named enemies
• Incursion: Falcon Lost
  • The APC will no longer take damage from players’ weapons
  • The APC’s Mortar weapon will now fire correctly
• Several fixes to improve server stability

There is no ETA yet on the next hot fix patch to resolve the issue with missing characters.

[Image via Ubisoft]