TheMrHuggles: While i've not seen or heard of this
specific there is a long standing, known, glitch from the rift that is extremely similar where the server malfunctions (no warning message) and someone elses pawn is replaced by a copy of your own (sometimes with basic starter weapons, starter skills, no skills, etc.). I don't know what happens when you rent these copy pawns, but it is known that none of the copy changes seen on the renter side are actually applied to the owner's pawn and will be removed if you exit and enter the rift again. Chances are your glitch is related (or the same) and has been seen as far back as the 2012 console edition. If you exited and re-entered the area where you saw your pawn (causing the
Accessing Server message to appear on screen) your pawn copy would be gone and you might even have the chance of seeing the
true pawn it was copied over (although you wouldn't know it).
Thanks for the info. I'm not sure if it's the same/ related bug as it didn't happen in the rift but it does sound similar enough. I rebooted the game when it happened and the duplicate had vanished.
One thing to add for anyone keeping track, just before this happened I had gone to offline-mode to fight the offline Ur-Dragon and had just switched back to online. I'm wondering if this had something to do with the glitch.