You think this car crash looks bad? Wait until you see our update!

So if you’ve been enjoying Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit as much as I have, then you’ve probably also come to love (or loathe) Autolog, the social engine that allows you to troll all your friends by beating their fastest times and tell them so next time they log in.  So when a free patch to update Hot Pursuit arrived this morning promising new cars and an “upgraded experience”, I downloaded it gladly and unknowingly joined the ranks of Xbox 360 players to have their career progress wiped.

Download complete, I was treated to those insufferabledandy trailers for Shift 2 and Autolog (again), told thank you very much for playing the demo (again), and then went to check my Autolog Recommendations, only to find them completely empty.  When I logged into Career I found that my entire bounty and event progress had been erased, and I’d been demoted back to a Level 1 Cop and Racer.

I’m not alone either.  From the looks of things only Xbox users have been affected, but there are multiple accounts coming in online with the same results.  The official word from the Need For Speed Twitter account is that Xbox gamers should avoid downloading the update until Criterion can figure out just what is going on.  They don’t sound particularly optimistic about being able to recover gamers progress either, here’s what they had to say to me when I asked about the chances of recovery:

Depends on how much is saved to the servers. If it can’t be fixed, we’re thinking up ways to make it up to users that lost data.

-@NeedForSpeed

Maybe they’ll send me a poster or something, who knows.  Whatever the case, EA is asking any gamers encountering the same problems to leave their details on an official forum post so they can try and find the reasons behind the bug.

But the offical message is clear: If you’re playing Hot Pursuit on 360, do not download the 1.1 update until further notice.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I guess I’ve got some Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood to play online.