An unforeseen exploit that allowed World of Warcraft players to gear up through rare mobs forces Blizzard to disable loot drops and reputation gain.
While some World of Warcraft glitches can be fun, they more often than not fall into the realm of exploits, and an unforeseen issue with Dragonflight‘s drop lockouts made Blizzard Entertainment disable all loot on rare mobs from the Dragon Isles. While hardly the first or the most prominent technical issue with Dragonflight‘s launch, Blizzard has doubled its effort in squashing out the bugs in time for the first Season of Dragonflight and the grand opening of its first raid.
Over the course of the expansion’s first few chaotic days, players have witnessed a World First Level 70 in less than three hours after Dragonflight‘s launch, and many have become enamored with Dragonriding across the Dragon Isles. However, the more mischievous among them discovered a very non-traditional way to gear up that Blizzard may not have intended. Given that rare drops scale with a player’s item level on the Dragon Isles, and given that the daily loot lockout wasn’t working, World of Warcraft players used the system to gear up well past Blizzard’s initial projections, decking out their characters in equipment around an item level of 410.
To combat the exploit, Blizzard Entertainment temporarily disabled loot drops from all rare mobs on the Dragon Isles, but ultimately elected not to roll back the loot that players earned through this broken system. The decision was controversial on the game’s official forums, with some players having zero sympathy for cheaters being allowed to walk free with their ill-gotten items, while others felt that the impact on the upcoming Dragonflight Season 1 would be minimal – and thus supported Blizzard’s mild, non-intrusive response.
After a few hours of tackling the problem, Blizzard announced that it would attempt to re-enable loot drops for Dragon Isles rare mobs, with the hopes that they would now be working as intended. Thankfully, the most recent info on the emerging situation seems to be positive, as rare mobs in World of Warcraft obey the daily loot lockout once more.
Though this means that players will now have to farm their loot the old-fashioned way, it does hearken back to an older era in World of Warcraft’s history when Mists of Pandaria‘s Timeless Isle truly represented that alternative option of gearing up through farming its rares in the outdoor zone. While Blizzard has attempted several iterations of the Timeless Isle system over the years, perhaps most infamously in Korthia, there is hope that Dragonflight will have more success establishing a similar catch-up mechanic in its future patches.
World of Warcraft: Dragonflight is available now on PC.
Source: World of Warcraft
