Blizzard Is Reviewing WoW Midnight’s Top 1% Mythic+ Rankings for Paid Carries

Blizzard is reviewing World of Warcraft’s Midnight Season 1 Mythic+ top 1% rankings for players who paid for carries, game director Ion Hazzikostas says. The season ended August 11, but the associated rewards, including the title and red-and-black bird mount, have not been handed out yet.

“The team is doing a thorough scrub of this for Season 1 and will share more with the community soon about how we approached that review, as well as the final results,” Hazzikostas said.

The controversy comes from how the new Mythic+ reward tier works. Unlike PvP’s current high-end rewards, which use fixed rating requirements, Midnight’s first season used a flat percentage cutoff. That means every boosted player who made it into the top 1% potentially pushed out someone else near the line.

Players had already been complaining about the end-of-season race, especially as the cutoff kept rising. One Reddit poster said they briefly hit the 1% mark before falling out minutes later, while also pointing to paid “note” keys and boosted runs in group finder. The addition of resilient keystones, which stop dropping in level once a player has completed that difficulty across all dungeons, also appears to have made repeated push attempts and sales easier.

Blizzard has recently taken action in a similar space, removing Mythic raid mounts from accounts it determined had obtained them through paid runs, particularly real-money transactions. Gold-only carries through specific guilds or individuals have historically been treated differently, though enforcement can get messy when sellers mix gold sales, real-money sales, or boosting communities.

Hazzikostas and associate game director Paul Kubit said the top 1% Mythic+ rewards are still popular and will continue. Blizzard is also looking at specialization-specific cutoffs in the future, though not for Season 2, which has already started. The details are still undecided, including whether that system would still use a top 1% structure.

The current system has also renewed debate around class balance at the highest level. Raider.io data cited in the source shows a heavy lean toward a small group of meta specs in keys above level 20, the range tied to the top 1% chase. Blizzard says it does not want players at that level to feel forced into a specific spec, but for now, the high-end Mythic+ ladder is still narrowing around a familiar meta.