Ubisoft Massive reports that the studio has fixed the bug that was deleting agents, though restoring the lost characters will require downtime for the servers.

Many players hoping to jump into the brand new incursion added by yesterday's big April update for The Division were left scratching their heads as the game failed to find their characters. As it turns out, The Division's latest update brought a pretty awful bug with it, resulting in several players randomly getting their agents deleted with no warning.

Obviously, this bug set off the panic alarm at Ubisoft Massive, and the studio began to frantically seek out the bug. Thankfully, the studio has now confirmed that the error has been completely fixed, and players who had the misfortune of having their agents deleted can rest easy knowing that their high-level agents will soon be restored.

As it turns out, the issue was caused by a malfunctioning server that wasn't synchronizing character data correctly after the update. When the corrupted data from the server reached client consoles, the game was unable to read the data, and tossed it out the metaphorical window. This meant that, although the player's saved character technically existed on the server side of things, the game assumed nothing was there due to an error in reading that data.

In order to actually restore the agent data, Ubisoft Massive needs to take the servers down again. Currently, the studio hasn't set a time for this maintenance, but we'll keep you posted when that time is made official. The last backup Ubisoft had of the uncorrupted agent data was saved on April 12th before the big update, which means affected players will lose any progress they made on this character prior to logging out on that day, or with any other characters in their account. It's important to note that this loss of progress is only for those affected by the bug – everyone else who has been playing the latest incursion won't lose the progress they have made.

Despite being released barely over a month ago, this isn't the first major issue that has prevented players from accessing The Division with their chosen agent. A previous game-breaking bug prevented users from logging into the game due to an inventory-based glitch, and it took Ubisoft Massive two weeks to get to the bottom of things and apply a fix. We have to imagine any gamer who was afflicted by the first bug only to encounter this one a week later may not be too happy with these kinds of errors in a Triple A title.

Hopefully, the majority of these hiccups have now been patched out (Ubisoft fixed 10,000 bugs for the beta alone, and a daily missions issue was just fixed yesterday), so one can hope the streets of Manhattan will remain open for business in the foreseeable future.

Were you affected by the latest bug in The Division, Ranters?

Source: Ubisoft