Blizzard accidentally released some World of Warcraft gear way too early

World of Warcraft’s new Mythic+ dungeons are finally here, but some players are getting high-powered gear from them way too early.

The Mythic+ system was a new feature during WoW’s last expansion, Legion, and it encouraged players to try to complete the game’s dungeons as fast as they possibly could. The faster they completed one dungeon, the harder the next dungeon would be and the better the rewards. At the end of each week, players would receive an extra high-level item for the hardest dungeon they managed to complete.

In Battle for Azeroth, this entire system returns, but the rewards for completing difficult Mythic+ dungeons weren’t supposed to be available until next week — the first week after the Mythic+ dungeons were released.

Instead, Blizzard accidentally opened the chests a little early, allowing players to get high-level items from Battle for Azeroth as a reward for the dungeons they did in the last week of Legion. This resulted in players getting gear that was well above the game’s current item level cap of 355. In fact, some players have gotten items as high as 385, making them significantly more powerful than their less lucky peers.

While this may not sound like a huge deal, it presents a number of problems for the portion of the World of Warcraft community that takes competition very seriously. Some players were arbitrarily rewarded for something no one could have known about.

If everyone had been told that there would be some extra gear as a reward for the end of Legion, then it would have been alright, because everyone would have an equal chance to get it. What’s worse is that the rewards themselves are random. So, not only do some players have an upper hand thanks to Blizzard’s mistake, but even among the crowd that received items, some are going to be much stronger than others — because getting a weapon above the item level cap would be much better than getting say, some shoes that were high level.

This error has the chance to affect all kinds of things in-game, including who can do the hardest Mythic+ dungeons, who finishes the raid first, or even which guild manages to clear the Mythic raid first next week — a highly competitive race that some guilds spend months preparing for. Because of the possible far-reaching effects of this, it’s likely that Blizzard will rollback characters and take these items away, but so far, nothing has been done.

Polygon has reached out to Blizzard for comment and will update this post with its response.

UPDATE: Blizzard has addressed the situation via a tweet that confirms that all items gained through these accidental Mythic+ chests are being deleted.