http://forums.gearboxsoftware.com/showthread.php?t=150243

Even worse, the challenges that earn you those badass ranks are NOT reset, meaning they can no longer be completed with that character. Skin / head customization unlocks that are earned by beating a certain mission or challenge are also gone forever. The only way to earn rank / skins again is to start all over, and even that doesn't guarantee that you won't be hit with the problem again down the road.

No one currently knows what triggers the glitch either, so you might want to start making backups of your save files if you're on the PC or PS3. It sounds like 360 users are currently screwed, as the game saves are stored on your profile.

An official comment from Gearbox:

Thanks for all the reports and specific details, folks. Our engineers are looking into this, and the information you've provided has proven to be a great resource while we investigate. At the moment, it seems to be a fairly rare issue and we'll keep you updated on when we resolve it.

This is a real shame. Anyone here experience this yet?

All of those things aren't all that important in the long run. Still sucks to lose something that took a while to accomplish.

@TheDudeOfGaming: I dunno, with how much grinding it takes to unlock some of those heads (the boss drops, mostly), I could see someone being pretty freakin dispirited over having it all wiped for seemingly no reason. That you lose all your badass ranks and bonuses on top of that is just an extra kick in the chest.

Now I just gotta figure out how to back up a save on the PS3.

Plus the second and third playthoughs are supposed to be rock hard, especially once you hit the level cap of 50, and every enemy in the game is either your level or one or two levels higher. The game was balanced to account for badass rank, and not to have that extra help after the first playthough could make a tough situation even worse.

@SpaceInsomniac: There's a third playthrough? fml... Anyway, I only find a few skins/heads appealing but It would be a bitch to loose them. The badass ranks don't make a huge difference. I've got +7.2% health and shields and it accounts for like 2.5K each which I guess might help you survive a shot or two. The gun damage and critical hit damage on the other hand, those are the only worthy ones, but I've got a relic that increases my sniper damage by 20% and a class mod that increases critical hit damage and sniper damage by around 25% along with bonus skills that further increase critical damage.

So again, if you can't survive without the badass ranks, you wouldn't have survived anyway. It would still suck if it happened, but it wouldn't be that bad.

@TheDudeOfGaming said:

All of those things aren't all that important in the long run. Still sucks to lose something that took a while to accomplish.

I think they're all majorly important. You play this game for 50+ odd hours and heavily invest into your character. To have all that stuff gone with the snap of your fingers would be pretty discouraging.

@TheDudeOfGaming said:

@SpaceInsomniac: There's a third playthrough?

Sort of. Once you finish the second playthough, EVERYTHING in the game scales to 50 or above--even the first enemies in the first area of the game--and any side quests now feature level 50 or above enemies, and level 50 loot. Because of this, it's suggested that you don't accept any side quests in your second playthough that result in blue or above quest rewards, until you finish the second playthough. Here's a thread about it: http://forums.gearboxsoftware.com/showthread.php?t=154087

Sadly, I didn't even get to finish ONE playthough before I read about this glitch, which has kept me away from the game for the last couple of days. :(

@SpaceInsomniac said:

@TheDudeOfGaming said:

@SpaceInsomniac: There's a third playthrough?

Sort of. Once you finish the second playthough, EVERYTHING in the game scales to 50 or above--even the first enemies in the first area of the game--and any side quests now feature level 50 or above enemies, and level 50 loot. Because of this, it's suggested that you don't do any quests in your second playthough that result in blue or above quest rewards. Here's a thread about it: http://forums.gearboxsoftware.com/showthread.php?t=154087

Sadly, I didn't even get to finish ONE playthough before I read about this glitch, which has kept me away from the game for the last couple of days. :(

Yup, I'm deleting my character and starting over....And I'll hate myself as soon as I delete a character I've put in over 70 hours in. Where were you when I started my second playthrough?

Woah! No reason to do that. Keep your character, start ANOTHER character and do the second playthough perfectly the second time around. Hopefully you'd want to try playing as more than one of the four anyhow, right?

That way, you get to keep your first character, and you can trade loot to them using the second character. You'll keep all your badass ranks from both characters, AND you'll have your choice of who to use for the DLC.

Less than perfect quest rewards or not, there's pretty much NO reason to ever delete a character in Borderlands 2.

Duders...

You do know that if this glitch happens, you can just switch off your consoles and reload from last save ... right?

It's not a major issue if you're sensible

Knocking on wood as I type. Nothing like that happened to me yet.

@DefAde said:

Duders...

You do know that if this glitch happens, you can just switch off your consoles and reload from last save ... right?

It's not a major issue if you're sensible

That's what some people have said. Some others have tried doing that and said it didn't help, and nothing official has been said either way.

You also need to catch it right before you load, but before your game saves. And again, it might not even always work.

@SpaceInsomniac: Thanks for bringing this up dude...although it seems not much can be done. The other thing I learned from this thread was the thing about quests not resetting for 2.5...JUST AFTER I finished True Vault Hunter mode! Hah!

Anyway, I think the difficulty relating to this bug, at least for the 360, is that Borderlands 2 does save some data within gamer profiles - such as Golden Key use and other information - so reverting back to old saves may not even be a solution. I would flip out if I lost my Commando though...I think I have about 125 hours into him already just in the last two weeks ( I got the game about a week early).

This is really scary. Really scary, man.

So, from reading the thread, I've gathered that the Rank Reset comes from co-op on the same profile. I have a question regarding that. I want to play local co-op with my girlfriend, but this is freaking me the eff out. If I have my profile signed in to one controller, and my girlfriend signs in to her profile on the second controller, are my Badass Ranks safe? I'm on the PS3, and I haven't done co-op so far at all, so I haven't experienced this.

@The_Nubster said:

This is really scary. Really scary, man.

So, from reading the thread, I've gathered that the Rank Reset comes from co-op on the same profile. I have a question regarding that. I want to play local co-op with my girlfriend, but this is freaking me the eff out. If I have my profile signed in to one controller, and my girlfriend signs in to her profile on the second controller, are my Badass Ranks safe? I'm on the PS3, and I haven't done co-op so far at all, so I haven't experienced this.

It's not related to co-op on the same file. There are people saying that they've only played single player and still had their game glitch. That's the really awful thing about all of this so far. Nobody knows what causes it to happen, although there's a theory that it's caused by the game somehow improperly loading. Once a glitched load occurs, if you save your game then the glitch is permanent.

Because this could really be a problem with your game loading improperly, some people have suggested the following might work:

Load game, check badass rank, make sure it's not reset to 0, check skins, make sure that they're all there. If all is fine, play the game. When it's time to quit, select save and quit, but don't exit to the main menu (another thing theorized to be causing issues). Just turn your system off, or exit to the dashboard.

As I understand it, if you load the game and see your badass rank is reset to 0, immediately exit to the dashboard before you save what is currently an improperly loaded game. If you pass an auto save point, or if you select save and quit, at that point it's too late, and you're pretty much screwed. Just ask the NPC in this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAYX42saxkI&t=5m38s

Some people have said that their game glitched and they tried turning it off before saving, but it didn't help. It's hard to tell if that's true, though, or if they only tried resetting their system AFTER they had saved a glitched load.

@MB said:

I think the difficulty relating to this bug, at least for the 360, is that Borderlands 2 does save some data within gamer profiles - such as Golden Key use and other information - so reverting back to old saves may not even be a solution.

You are correct. If I was on the PS3 or PC, I'd just backup my saves every five to ten hours. But I'm on the 360, and I'm currently afraid to even play the game. :(

I've "only" put in about 50 hours, but I REALLY would not want to lose all of that BA rank progress.

@SpaceInsomniac: How do you save and quit, but not exit to the main menu? Doesn't it bring you straight back to the main menu when you save and quit?

@The_Nubster said:

@SpaceInsomniac: How do you save and quit, but not exit to the main menu? Doesn't it bring you straight back to the main menu when you save and quit?

You're right, I meant don't exit to title screen. Not even sure if that would help or hinder you, really. Everything is theory at this point, although some have reported that the second they saw their BA rank at zero, turning off before saving allowed them to avoid the glitch being saved to their profile.

If you're on 360, you can download Horizon on your PC and back-up your saves that way. It might be a violation of the TOU agreement though.

@SpaceInsomniac said:

@The_Nubster said:

@SpaceInsomniac: How do you save and quit, but not exit to the main menu? Doesn't it bring you straight back to the main menu when you save and quit?

You're right, I meant don't exit to title screen. Not even sure if that would help or hinder you, really. Everything is theory at this point, although some have reported that the second they saw their BA rank at zero, turning off before saving allowed them to avoid the glitch being saved to their profile.

Ugh, this really sucks. I don't even want to touch the game until a patch comes in. Reading through the entire thread isn't helping any, but I feel like I need to suck up every bit of info. Isn't so great that this Thanatos guy is being a total prick, too.

@SpaceInsomniac: Your save games are in C:\Users\[user game]\Documents\My Games\Borderlands 2\WillowGame\SaveData on the pc. If you wanted to put this in your thread.

Having the worst time trying to find Jinkens. Any advice? 

@The_Laughing_Man said:

Having the worst time trying to find Jinkens. Any advice?

Maybe try posting in a relevant thread?

Seriously, though, just go to google and search there. I'm guessing that some Borderlands 2 wiki page has everything you'd want to know.

@The_Laughing_Man said:

Having the worst time trying to find Jinkens. Any advice?

Maybe try posting in a relevant thread?

Seriously, though, just go to google and search there. I'm guessing that some Borderlands 2 wiki page has everything you'd want to know.

Didn't really mean that as an attack, and you didn't really explain the situation so anyone reading would have known you thought your quest might be glitched, which of course would be somewhat relevant to this thread.

Anyhow, I think you have to find him 3 times. If the game thinks you found him, you probably did find him. I've only found him once so far in the Wildlife Exploitation Preserve,

On another note, someone found a way to replicate the glitch on the PS3: http://forums.gearboxsoftware.com/showpost.php?p=2838605&postcount=633

Hopefully that means we might be one step closer to finding the cause, and gearbox--if they hadn't figured out how to cause the glitch on their own just yet--might be another step closer to releasing a patch.

Sadly I got hit with the glitch after playing w/ the mechromancer. 11k badass rank down the drain X_X

Man, this stuff is still happening? I think I might have read something about the Nechromancer class and/or the accompanying patch also bringing bugs into the game or something like that. I think I may just wait out on this one until it's fixed.

Well I think I might stay away from Borderlands 2 for a while. Was looking forward to jumping back in after i had S-ranked RE6.

I got hit by the glitch. Lost heads, skins, premier club access, badass rank, and golden keys. Basically, everything that is shared from one character to another. Hell, even my Claptrap stash was deleted.

The skins and heads I don't care about, but I really want my badass rank and my damned keys back. I was saving those.

I haven't had my badass rank reset but there have been a few times where my skills will all be gone and I have to put points into everything again.

14K Badass rank. Gone today when I loaded up. :/

saw that there was a title update today. anyone know what it was for? My removed badass levels et al weren't restored, but have that fixed the problem causing it?

@Rhinox: No, sadly neither a BA rank glitch fix or a character erase glitch fix was a part of the most recent patch. Here are the patch notes:

Update Fixed player first-person arms appearing too far up or down the screen when in horizontal/vertical split mode.

Fixed players losing ammo when reloading a savegame with max ammo and a stockpile relic equipped.

Fixed the vendor UI sometimes showing a count of 1 less item in the player's backpack than is actually there.

Fixed fast travel stations from downloadable content sometimes disappearing when loading a saved game.

Fixed players getting stuck in a white box when two people try to travel at once and one is in a vehicle.

Allowed players to trade with each other when at maximum backpack capacity if they're trading the same number of items with each other.

Fixed clients sometimes losing access to fast travel stations unlocked during co-op progression.

Fixed the favorite/trash icons on inventory items sometimes disappearing when scrolling the inventory list.

Added safeguards against the game getting stuck on a 'Saving...' prompt when a client with a splitscreen player saves and quits the game under specific rare circumstances.

Fixed the "has abandoned your struggle!" message sometimes appearing with no player name.

Fixed mini-map fog-of-war sometimes not uncovering correctly when first loading a saved game as a client. Fixed co-op players sometimes spawning at different places after a level transition.

Fixed an error that could sometimes occur when trying to join a game where the host had recently returned from a downloadable content area.

Fixed an error where clients would sometimes see certain weapons firing in incorrect directions.

Fixed a blocker in the "Do No Harm" mission and repaired users already affected by the bug.

Fixed an issue with savegames sometimes causing the game to stutter / freeze and repaired saves already affected by the bug.

Made the user's inventory not jump to the top of the list when using a customization item.

Fixed a bug with shields that reduce the player's maximum health not displaying the amount of health reduced on the item card.

Fixed a bug where some challenges would sometimes re-complete levels 1 through 5 over and over again, granting the user additional ranks and tokens.

Enemies affected by a Siren's Thoughtlock ability may now be damaged by other players.

Fixed an issue where players could sometimes lose their third and fourth weapon slots. Characters who have already lost these slots will be repaired the next time they are loaded.

Fixed an issue where players were sometimes unable to pick items up after another player had bulk-picked-up a nearby item.

Fixed an issue where players could occasionally be unable to connect to one another if one of them had recently been in DLC that the other doesn't have.