World of Warcraft gave away big rewards due to bug

The first major update to World of Warcraft: The Battle for Azeroth had a bug that gave players rewards that they couldn’t just grab. The bug has now been fixed, but not all rewards have been revoked yet. The bug only played on the VS realms.

Redditor commandersteel mapped out exactly what the bug did. Players who performed high level activities on the previous expansion, Legion, accidentally got the rewards for similar activities from the last update when logging in. Depending on their activities in the last week of Legion, the rewards could go up to item level 400 gear. On August 13, Legion ended. That day, Battle for Azeroth came online.

The biggest source of this accidentally obtained loot was the weekly Mythic+ chest. You get this when you’ve played in a Mythic+ dungeon. Depending on the difficulty and your achievement, you’ll receive a chest each week that will give you a reward based on those factors. The new Mythic+ dungeons have been online since September 4. The rewards for that shouldn’t be available until a week later. The bug allowed Mythic+ dungeon players from the last week of Legion to get the chest earlier, without having played a new Mythic+ dungeon.

The World of Warcraft developers had found and fixed the bug on the morning of release. They are in the process of retrieving the rewards. It’s not clear whether it will be just the Mythic+ gear or also the player-vs-player rewards and the obtained Azerite, which is used for armor upgrades. PC Gamer tried to reach Blizzard for comment, but so far has not received a response. On the World of Warcraft subreddit and forums, players are asking for the servers to be rolled back, which will remove the rewards on a massive scale. The players fear that there will be an imbalance between guilds and players themselves. In addition, they believe that some players have been given an unfair advantage due to the bug.

Whether Blizzard and the developers think this is necessary or will do this is not yet known. The bug only occurred in the VS realms. Users playing through the European servers were not affected.

World of Warcraft: The Battle for Azeroth