For the old timers, reverts were common in the early days. So common that people that got killed would hope for a server revert. Yeah, I totally understand how frustrating it can be when you lose hours of play/training and most importantly, loot!
In situations like these, unfortunately, a full shard revert is the best resolution.
Note that they would never revert for cases where someone has been hacked and lost stuff. Not even 20k USD/GBP worht of rares (see hemisphere's thread), they only revert when there is a server-side issue. So there's no comparing to the GM's policy to replace lost items.
Also, while they definitely can restore on individual basis (think of how block holing works), this is avoided for data consistency reasons.
If the system is to continuing working properly, you want to bring the entire system back to a specific point in time.
Restoring only parts of a system would lead to immediate issues where some items are duped and others are lost. The duplicates (from dupes) and orphaned records (from items that are lost, but the server has no record of it being deleted) would leave inconsistencies and errors that in the long term might propagate and do more damage down the road.
And by then, a full revert would be inevitable, but this time because they tried to avoid doing it for a week, the revert would undo a entire week of play.
of their lost items demanding they be replaced & replaced NOW.
