QOL update for Neverwinter caused recent loadout/trait issue. - Borticus

Bort responded to someone on Twitter asking about the cause of the issue

The root cause: A new QOL feature was added to loadouts on Neverwinter, which had unintentional side effects on STO.

It's pure coincidence that this released at the same time as the ESD revamp. That update also included a core code branch update, which included this NW code.

Source: Twitter

Edit: Borticus is in the comments of this post with additional details.

Hijacking top comment for further clarification... I didn't intend to paint a picture that this is by any means normal, or should be expected. We have processes in place that should catch this type of cross-project interaction, but those processes failed this time around. It happens, unfortunately, on a project as large and complex as these are. And when you factor in newer/junior employees still being trained, you only amplify the chance for errors like this one to slip through the cracks. But we're always learning, and trying to do better work.

If you haven't changed any of the equipment on your character, or actively modified your Loadouts, then old data should be automatically used once this code fix goes live, and your old character data from before this bug appeared should be intact. If you have already re-saved a new Loadout in the past few days, then your old data is gone. We don't have any capability of restoring it.

NW and STO still share what we refer to as a Core Branch. These games have retained this connection so that both can benefit from things like Infrastructure updates, performance enhancements, logging improvements, and much more. Champions detached from the Core Branch several years ago, so they no longer receive most Core updates. Though occasionally changes are manually brought to that game. It's sort of like when Epic Games rolls out new changes to Unreal Engine -- any game still connected to that core repository receives those changes, even though they may be vastly different games. Of course, this is normally why any LIVE games that use Unreal have locked in their Engine version at some point, and detached from Epic's code repository.

EDIT 2: Reminder, the associated fix for this bug is intended for Tuesday!

https://old.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/1i31fi3/a_fix_for_the_loadout_bug_is_coming/