A strange and frightening glitch is occurring on the Khadgar server of "World of Warcraft" where characters are dropping in level from level 120, the level cap when "Cataclysm" was released in 2010, to around level 85. Some people have found cloned characters wearing the armor and weapons they wore in that era, while others have logged in to find that their characters have completely disappeared. Fortunately, Blizzard is investigating the cause and has already confirmed that no characters have been permanently deleted.

Reports of these problems started coming out late yesterday on the WoW forums and subreddits. In a video posted today, YouTuber MadSeasonShow said that nearly all of his 12 characters have been changed or are missing.MadSeasonShow explains that he now has a level 81 Death Knight character is named "Bagina," which is just an older version of the level 110 Death Knight "BadSeason" that he renamed a few years ago. Warlock, who was deleted around the same time, is back on the account as if nothing happened.

MadSeasonShow also states that many of his characters are in different places than where he left them, some belonging to chat channels created by players he once belonged to during the Cataclysm era.

Blizzard has not confirmed exactly what went wrong, but has acknowledged the issue on the forums and said it is being investigated; a Blizzard customer support representative said, "Since the original high-level characters do not appear to have disappeared, our team is working on the cause of the problem, future prevention, and how to restore access to high-level characters."

What seems likely, however, is that a very old backup of character data has somehow been merged with the current version. As many players have pointed out, Khadgar is currently in the process of merging with another server to bolster its player population, which may explain this screw-up.

So if you are playing on Khadgar and your character disappears or suddenly looks 10 years younger, don't panic. Nevertheless, hopefully it will be fixed soon and players will be able to immerse themselves in the game again; on the WoW subreddit, a player said that his guild is close to being the first to beat the latest raid in Khadgar on the highest difficulty, but his main tank character is missing He says he has to postpone future attempts because of the unknown. That must be frustrating.