First the question: I had 5 packhorses on my miner character full of ore down in Minoc mines. I told them to STAY and then recalled home to drop off some stuff and then recalled back to get them. Got back to the mine where I left them and they were gone and it says I have ZERO followers. I look all around and they are nowhere to be found. Anyone know whats up?

And the complaint: why the hell does it take so long to get a response from someone when you file a help request? I filed one about this issue almost 2 hours ago and I haven't moved from my initial spot in que (16). Is it too much to ask to have at least one person on staff to take care of requests? I can't sit here all night waiting for some help, I DO have to sleep/work.

my guess is someone killed them

I walked them into guard zone before leaving them (right at mines), and I was in trammel. I don't see how that could have happened. Plus I was only gone for about 10 seconds, so I would have been able to find the corpses there.

I had the same problem not long ago with a loaded beetle. I ran around and finally found it. When I said "all follow me" my follower count bumped back to 3... go figure!

The thing is, they might have ran wild, so anyone can kill them, guardzone or not. Or they started "following" you, heading in the approximative direction you recalled to.

I never had this problem before though.

About your complaint, I'm pretty sure you were number 6 in line It's a known "behavior". In fact, they have a queue prioritizing, all the "help I'm stuck" or other game stopping issues come before you. Being number 6 in the line means you are in the normal line, the non-prioritary
There was a post about it from the Dev Team.

I had my pet swampy do the same thing I logged out and when I logged back in he was missing go figure. I chucked it up to that he went wild not sure because he was bonded. I tried all the usual stuff like logging in and out also running around looking for it and looking in the stables you name it I did it, all but posted Lost Swampy signs in Brit lol. Never found that Swampy had to get a new one. Sorry that happened to you

If the horses went wild, there would have been backpacks of your ore where they were.

I had this happen, I logged out, logged back ina little while later and no horses. but the backpacks on the ground where evidence that they went wild and left. I later found them (After I bought more packies of course)

were they bonded or tame? (sorry if i overlooked that part of the scenerio)

I've had it happen on the Vesper server line. I crossed it and my beetle disappeared. I went to zero followers. Luckily this was back when we still had GM's. One showed up and found my Beetle in Vesper (how he got to town we do not know). We walked over to it and my follower count went back up.

It was a weird glitch with the server line "losing" my follower.

But in your case it seems that they should still have been around somewhere. They might have still been in the area like mine was.