It took a long time and a lot of work to squash the pesky Outriders bug that was wiping players' inventory, but a patch deployed last week appears to be doing its job. Publisher Square Enix announced today that the update "deployed successfully and continues to prevent further complete inventory wipes."

Additionally, the good news for many players is that returned equipment will be in better condition than when it was lost.

"Items that are granted will have the same combination of attributes, but with a god roll value. This means that these items are at least the same, if not higher quality than the originally lost items," explains Square Enix." Items will be granted at the highest level a character can equip, taking into account world tier and challenge tier."

As part of this process, the developers divided Outriders players into three groups: unplayable characters with invalid inventory, playable characters with valid inventory who lost items, and players who lost nothing .

Interestingly, it is impossible to "definitively distinguish" the second and third groups, and thus the restoration process differs from that of the first group.

Group 1:

Group 2:

Group 3:

"We wanted to give you an exact date today, but we need more time to make sure the process is running exactly as intended. Square Enix stated, "When executing an operation of this magnitude on our database, we want to ensure that there are no instances where the recovery would have an ongoing significant negative impact on individual players or the population as a whole. That said, we are working on an "ASAP" schedule and fully understand how disappointing it is that items have not yet returned today.

We are also making progress on the "Community Appreciation Package" announced earlier this month, with the Stadia patch expected to be available next week (but not for cross-play).