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.