No Toons after patch

So I haven't logged in and played since Sunday and I patched up my game this morning when I left for work, came home and logged in and I now have no characters at all.  I did put in a support ticket but I have no idea at this point whether the account was hacked or whether this was a random patching incident.  My account password was still the same unlike the one time I managed to have a different game's account hacked so I'm a little miffed.  I don't have any vet toons but omg the thought of having to start all over makes me angry.  

I run all the appropriate antivirus/antimalware stuff that has pretty much kept my computer protected for several years (been quite a while since I've been hacked if that was what happened.)  I do run the Minion to update my addons but after being hacked in WoW through the Curse client I never run that when I run the game blah blah.  

I don't know if anyone has had a similar experience or if it was "just me" but I'm pretty bummed right now since tonight was like Friday for me and now I don't really want to start over at the moment :(

Same happened to me after the patch.  All my characters are gone.

Oh hey my characters are all back!

Actually they were never missing.

After the patch, the launcher was logging into the PTS by default, even though it was not displayed on my lanucher

Interesting way to discover that I have a PTS account now, too.  Never had one of those before.

You know funny thing, I looked and made sure I had PTS off, but apparently you are correct, it still autologged me into PTS.  THANK YOU for making my night :)

LOL, yes, I enabled PTS in options on one hopeless beta weekend way back when thinking it was accessible; it wasn't :P

Since then i've regretted it as the launcher always defaults to PTS even though it's not enabled any more in options.

the recent PTS release is making this a problem for everyone it seems....GOOO ZOS! :)

 yes since the patch it has been switching to pts on start up and  tries to download pts instead of normal server  i have to to catch it and switch lol 

I've been trying to download the PTS for 12 hours, and I'm only at 68%..... guess I'll have access someday.

I tried to get rid of the PTS client (I already had it from earlier) because the launcher kept preferring it and auto-starting to patch. Seems like there's a glitch with the settings "auto update" and "show PTS in the Launcher" because no matter how many times I turned them off, they turned back on when I next started the launcher. I don't have the  time or the available bandwidth to play on the PTS right now.

I uninstalled the PTS client (using the supplied uninstall function), and the entire launcher vanished. The live client was still present in .exe form, but a live client without a launcher can't be patched. I searched the forums and it seems to be a known issue. The only way to retrieve the launcher was by downloading the entire live client again. So in attempting to save bandwidth, I managed to incur another 25+ GB download. Doh. xD