Girlfriends game crashed while I was playing on her world, all items in my inventory

Edit: After playing more, we realized that my stepson's items are all missing as well. He was completely decked out with diamond tools, weapons, and armor, and had 20 XP. All missing. Even worse, the entire world is full of chunk errors causing holes straight down to the void every couple hundred blocks. Whatever happened has completely destroyed our world. I convinced my girlfriend to start playing this game less that a week ago and this is her first experience. 

My complaint is NOT about the crash. I had to try to make that clear on my last bug report when I was given the same generic comment about crashes being logged automatically. Again, I'm not reporting a crash! I'm reporting a bug that completely corrupted my world and deleted a major portion of our work, that coincided with the crash. 

I'm not expecting anyone to fix this or give me some detailed response outlining the exact problem. But when players run into game breaking issues, as I have several times now, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect something more than a generic line about crashes being logged. Even a one sentence indication of what might have caused it, or pointing me to other reports of this with more info (I couldn't find any here) would be appreciated and avoid this entire exercise/forum seeming pointless. I'm sorry, but if that is the only response given if anyone even mentions a crash, regardless of the relevance, then there seems to be no point in having this open to the public. 

As I said in my last report, I understand that you guys are under a heavy load right now with the betas going on, but if you can't respond to reports like this, then perhaps you should close it to the public until you have the resources to do so. Brushing off the community's outreach can only damage your relationships with the public. This is supposed to be a way for us to communicate and make this game better. These irrelevant and/or uninformative copy/paste responses aren't helping anyone achieve that goal. 

The commenter above is an ordinary user, not Mojira staff. You should ignore anything he says. Staff will always have a colored background behind their name, as I do on this comment.

I'm sorry that we don't always give you as much attention as you'd like, but you need to know that the bug tracker is not staffed by Mojang employees and, though it's an official Mojang site, is not intended to be a customer relations site. Its purpose is to accept bug reports, not to help players resolve them. We are staffed by a handful of volunteers from the community who organize and complete the reports before forwarding them to the developers. After that we're out of the loop until they put a fix on the change log. Most of the time we have no idea what causes a problem, although for certain problems we will experiment with them a bit to try to get more information for the developers. In that case we'll add our findings in a comment. But in general, comments on this site are meant for providing information to the developers, not for dialoguing. (There are other sites that fill that function.)

We get hundreds of reports per week, and there aren't enough of us to write an individual response to each one, so we have to rely on tools that provide boilerplate text. Inevitably, that text has to be somewhat generic and uninformative. I'm sorry, but that's the best we can do unless you ask a specific question, in which case most of us while try to answer or point you to someone who can. If you'd like insight or discussion with other players about what causes a bug or crash, one place to do that would be the Minecraft Discord.

While you're reporting a loss of your inventory and not a crash, the crash is nevertheless the cause of your problem. When a crash happens, it's very common that nothing done in the current session is saved. That's a good thing, because the game only crashes when it can no longer be certain of the integrity of its data. If it saved the data, it might cause an even bigger problem, whereas if it reverts to the previous save there's a good chance (though not a guarantee) that the world can be rescued.

The developers will analyze the crash report to figure out what failed and how, and fix the game if they can. Further crashes (on new worlds) shouldn't be expected, but if you want to protect yourself against them anyway, consider making it a practice to export your world in between sessions, especially after a significant amount of work is done to it. Then, if a crash happens you're guaranteed to have a copy that should be error-free.

Thank you for the thoughtful and informative response. That is more than I would have expected. I understand that this forum isn't for diagnosing problems or dialogue, and that you have a lot of incoming reports to deal with. I wasn't aware that this forum was staffed by volunteers or how many people you have doing this, so that's helpful to know.

From looking at many other bug reports, I've noticed a general format of responses to them, which many times include the reports being marked as invalid due to what often times boils down to a formatting issue on behalf of the reporter (for example, mentioning two separate issues). But this always seems to come with some explanation of why it was marked invalid. Other times, I've seen responses giving information about what is causing the issue, or links to other bug reports that have been resolved or are still open. Seeing that gave me certain expectations of how this process works. My last bug report was marked as invalid with no explanation, although it was a very serious issue that has been reported many times over a span of several years. The only comment on that report was the same copy/paste comment about crash reports being logged automatically. Then seeing the same thing happen again here gives the appearance that these reports are just being skimmed over, tagged with an automated response, and not actually looked into. 

I don't expect thorough attention, preferential treatment, detailed responses about the nature of the issue, or anything of the like. As I said, I'm aware that you all have a lot to deal with and difficulty in doing so with any vigor. I suppose I was just expecting some sort of indication that this information was being put to use (or possibly some information that could be useful), because that is ultimately my goal here. Before making my last report, I looked into it and saw dozens of similar issues spanning years, but with no verified resolution, although most of the reports had useful and informative responses. And with this current issue, I saw nothing similar, so I figured it was worthwhile to report it. Especially with the game breaking nature of it. It just didn't seem to be acknowledged at all, which I suppose is the issue I took with the response. Whatever the issue is, it seems pretty bizarre and important to report. Same with the last bug I reported. I've ran into several bugs that are minor, but I don't bother reporting them because many people already have and I see no need to. I only feel the need to report when something goes severely wrong. I understand giving a boilerplate response to these dime-a-dozen bugs that get reported a dozen times a day, but I guess I expect that these very strange and very destructive bugs warrant a bit more attention. 

As for the issue itself, the game didn't recover to a previous session, which is why I thought it important to report. All of the building progress I made was still intact, but our inventories and XP (beside the hosts) were wiped clean and the entire world was riddled with missing chunks. Our closest village was also reset to a new world state, even though it had been altered by us almost a week, and a dozen sessions, prior to the crash. Obviously this is frustrating. Especially when it happens while I'm trying to convince someone how great this game is and to play it with me. Having your world and progress get completely and irreparably destroyed seems like something that shouldn't happen and should be taken very seriously. Especially when similar things have happened more than once. It just doesn't seem right for a game of this stature.

We have been making backups several times a session since this issue causing us to revert back to a very early save (it's happened more since my report), but it seems like a workaround that we shouldn't be forced to rely on. I know this isn't your problem, and I know nothing about the architecture of this game, but it seems a bit absurd that a game of this stature doesn't have some sort of active redundant backup system
in place. 

I've committed to Bedrock. I love the idea. I think it has serious potential to dethrone Java. I want to give it a real chance. I've bought a copy for each family member so we can enjoy it together. I love the game. I love the community. I want to be one of the people who held on through all of its notorious bugs to see it through to the end. But it's hard when issues like this crop up so often that completely ruin my experience. I don't want to abandon it and concede to Java because of these issues. So I hope things like this can be resolved and I want to contribute to that. 

Anyway, thank you so much for your thoughtful and informative response. I'll take this information into account in the future and temper my expectations. I hope to stick with you for the long haul! And thank you all for contributing to this process. I know from experience that it's a lot of time to invest in something just because you love it, and not for a paycheck. And I'm sorry you have to deal with upset players like me so often. We mean well. We just get a bit upset with these issues. 

Now, it's time to prepare for The Nether update! Took two days off work for this, and I'm very excited to spend that time on this game with my family. Here's to hoping it goes without any serious issues!

Thanks again!

I'll give a couple of responses to specific things you've mentioned, but please remember that this is not what we intend comments to be used for. Instead, we invite you to discuss bug reports with us in the Mojira Discord (sorry, I don't have the link at hand). There, you can converse with Mojira staff about anything bug tracker related. You can also tell us when you think we've handled something incorrectly, and ask us to reconsider.

The requirement of one bug per report isn't a trivial matter of formatting, it's because a report only has one field each to record several kinds of information we track, including things like confirmation status, resolution, and date resolved, which are normally different for every bug. Also, people whose reports just list a bunch of bugs never provide any useful context to help us reproduce them, and usually don't respond to our requests for info, so reports like that just waste our time and theirs.

In both this report and your earlier one, you have been trying to report your loss of inventory and XP as a bug, to which we have replied that crash reports are sent directly to the developers. You have been trying to clarify that you weren't reporting the crash, but a severe bug that has been reported numerous times before, usually in connection with similar crashes and the same explanation from us. Do I understand what you're getting at now? I think I do, so let me answer in more depth.

First, a crash is something the game does only as a last resort, in response to a problem it has no way to recover from. In many cases, some of the world data may have been corrupted (overwritten with meaningless data). Starting a crash is like bailing out of an airplane that's out of control. The game is going to have to abruptly stop running, but first it produces a crash report which it sends to the developers. The crash report is like the black boxes on the airplane. It contains all the data the program is able to capture, whether it's corrupt or not, and information about what the game was doing at the time. The hope is that this will be enough to help the developers find the root cause, but sometimes it isn't. (A problem that's serious enough to make the program crash is often not detected until major world corruption has occurred.) After the crash report has been sent, the program terminates execution.

Next, you start the program and reload the world, hoping to continue from close to where you were when it crashed. Instead, you find out your inventory is empty, you have no XP, and a bunch of other data is missing (for example, your respawn point and ender chest contents). The reason for this is that as it's loading a world, the game checks the validity of its data. If it finds corrupted data, it has no choice but to discard it. And it turns out that one of the most frequently corrupted pieces of data is your player token, which is a number that represents you and distinguishes you from other players. Most of the data the game knows about you is accessed by looking up your player token, so if your player token gets corrupted, all that data about you is effectively gone forever.

Since it can't match your player token to a past player of the game, the game creates a new token for you and a new player character in the game. Of course, this means you're starting over, with no inventory, armor, or XP, no respawn point, etc. It's not that your inventory was taken away from you, it's that you're not the same player you used to be, because your token is now different. It's unfortunate, but this is the best the game can do to give you a way back into the world. You can't really continue developing it, but it might be helpful to let you take screenshots which you can use later to rebuild a new copy of the world by hand, or to bring a backup copy up to date.

Ok, so after a crash, a lot of people wind up with a brand new character because of world corruption. They all see the same problem the same way, so that's what they report. But the reality is that this is a secondary problem, a consequence of the original bug that caused the world data corruption. We know why this consequential bug happens, and it's not really a bug at all, just the game trying to minimize the damage that was caused earlier by the original bug. So yes, losing your inventory and XP is a serious problem, but the ultimate cause was that original bug that caused the crash, and that can be a different bug for each person whose player token gets destroyed.

Since we know how that occurs, and it's not even a real bug, we don't have a use for reports about the inventory and XP. What we need is those crash reports that contain whatever there is to know about how the program got into this state from which a crash was the only option. And those crash reports are sent automatically. That's what our message is meant to be telling you.

Thank you, Auldrick! Your comment was incredibly thoughtful and insightful, and I genuinely appreciate you taking the time to respond in that way. Again, I had no expectations of receiving such thorough responses. And I understand that this website isn't meant for dialog, which gives me even more appreciation for your comment. 

I completely understand the report formatting issue. I have no contention with that. My only point was that my last report was marked as invalid with no explanation. To me, that seemed like a cop-out reminiscent of the many poor community/customer relations incidents I've witnessed before. I'm not saying it was that, things are a bit more clear now. But it came off as if any excuse to ignore it was being used, as I thought my mention of the previous missing shulker box was potentially useful and not a reason to dismiss my report outright. I tried to be thorough in explaining what happened and I thought I only included relevant information. For whatever reason, it was simply marked as invalid and I wasn't informed why.

Whatever the Shulker Box issue is, it seems to be a long running one. Seeing that this was the case, and that it had been responded to for years with what seems to be inconclusive results, I thought it warranted a bit more attention (as other reports had). Especially with the bizarre nature of the random Ender Chests being present in several End Cities after the crash. Doesn't seem on the surface to correspond to the player token issue you mentioned, as everything else was intact, but I have no idea. The 1.16 update changelog seems to include a related fix about missing/invisible Shulker Box's though. Shulker Box's seem to be notoriously buggy on Bedrock, and I'm sure you know I'm not the only player who's dealt with this. It's a game breaking issue too. 

As for this current issue, I fully understand what you mean about it being a symptom and not the problem itself. It would probably be helpful to add that to your boilerplate responses though if this is such a commonly reported issue. The other response honestly just comes off as entirely dismissive and unhelpful. I understand that's not your teams intention, but it does come off that way. If the response would have been "Issues like yours are typically not bugs themselves, but symptoms of less obvious background bugs that require us to look at crash logs to gain information about. Thankfully, crash logs are automatically sent to the development team and are looked into by them." etc, I would have understood and left it at that. But getting the same response on two entirely unrelated issues came off as if you hired someone and told them to just copy/paste the same response on anything that mentioned a crash. 

As I said before (and maybe I'm completely unaware of why this is impossible), I don't understand why a game of this magnitude doesn't have some sort of active redundant backup system in place. I think it's a bit crazy to have to back up my world every few hours out of fear of losing everything. Most games keep a cycle of save states they can revert to if one becomes corrupted. I know the data size is an issue with phones, but I don't see why it isn't at least an option. But that's not a discussion for here.

I'll join the Discord you mentioned and try to take part in the community there. Seems like something I'd enjoy. 

Finally, I'm sorry if I've come off as rude or hostile. I mean no offense to your team and I do appreciate what you do. I just got rubbed the wrong way, I suppose. I thank you for your excellent responses here!  I'll leave this conversation with a new understanding of how to approach these issues, even if I might not be perfectly satisfied with the results. The effort your team made to respond to me, a random player who's ticked, speaks volumes about your commitment and passion. And I appreciate it greatly. 

Thank you!

You have not struck me as rude or hostile, so don't worry about that.

The Mojira Discord is for communicating with us (the Mojira helpers and moderators) about problems with or questions about the bug reports themselves. It's not so much a community as it is a more interactive way to talk to us than the comments. If you're looking more for community involvement, I would suggest joining the Minecraft Discord instead of or in addition to the Mojira Discord. Some of the community members there have a lot of in-depth knowledge of the game, including things like how to accomplish specific goals within the world and how to set up your devices for playing across a network. The community can help you decide whether something you're seeing in the game is normal or a bug, and if it's normal they can tell you how to take advantage of it in your gameplay. I think you'd enjoy the insights you can gain from them.