That is quite likely and part of the reason I'm not mad about that part. Valve does not support GE, can't blame them for this.I think that problem might be due to Proton GE, because I had the same thing happen.
That's a much weirder problem by many orders of magnitude; all chars are saved in the same .sl2 file, only ER can add or remove characters or perform any manipulation on the contents of the file. Perhaps file corruption + no checksum ??someone posted on reddit about it too
Ouch. That would drive me up the wallglad you had backups – i didnt
Thank you for mentioning that, I completely forgot about it.