Blizzard squashes major World of Warcraft XP exploit less than an hour before the MMO's Midnight early access begins, sending power levelers back to the drawing board

World of Warcraft: Midnight early access has begun, and everybody's working their way to level 90. Ahead of the release, a major exploit seemed poised to absolutely break the leveling race, but Blizzard quietly announced it had been fixed less than an hour before launch. The studio is also making some notable changes for the first month of Midnight as a result of the exploit.

In the pre-release version of Midnight, players discovered that Endeavors – a new system tied to player housing – could be used to get obscene amounts of XP all at once. You could use this system to scale a low-level zone, rely on an unscaled player to kill mobs for you, and reap massive XP rewards. Some estimates suggest it would've been possible to level from 80 to the new cap of 90 in under 60 minutes.

Community manager Randy "Kaivax" Jordan confirmed that "Endeavor XP is temporarily disabled in Midnight Early Access" in a post to the Blizzard forums less than an hour before launch. "Furthermore, scaling for the older zones when doing Endeavor activities is disabled for the entire first month, and will return with the Endeavor that begins in early April."

Concerns about the exploit had lingered for some time before Blizzard finally addressed them, and the timing of the announcement so close to Midnight's launch has certainly annoyed some fans. Now we face the question of how rewarding Endeavors will feel with their XP payouts restricted, and what the balance will look like when those rewards return. Just another day in balancing an MMO for wildly different audiences that want wildly different things, I guess.

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