WoW Midnight: Season 1 top Mythic+ rewards go out after review

Blizzard has handed out the rewards for the best Mythic+ players of Midnight Season 1. Mythic+ is the timed dungeon mode, and a player's results in it add up to a rating. Players who ended the season with a rating in the top 1% of their region get the Umbral Champion: Midnight Season 1 achievement and the Umbral Ashes mount; those in the top 0.1% also get the Umbral Hero title. On 15 September Blizzard said the rewards would go out during that week's maintenance in each region, and posted the final ratings needed for them.

For Europe, the final figures are a rating of 3981 for the top 1% and 4204 for the top 0.1%. In North America they are 3935 and 4185. Both European figures are lower than the ones in a post Blizzard marked as its final update on 12 August, which put the top 1% at 4008 and the top 0.1% at 4236: 27 and 32 points higher. Blizzard's September posts do not explain the difference.

Season 1 ended with the maintenance in the week of 12 August, so the rewards came about 5 weeks later. Blizzard's support page says rewards like mounts and titles are only given after a final review and security checks. In an interview published on 31 August, game director Ion Hazzikostas said the team was doing a thorough check of the Season 1 top 1% for players who had paid for carries, where stronger players take a paying player through high-level dungeons, and that Blizzard would soon share more about how it approached the review and its final results. Blizzard's posts of 15 and 21 September do not describe how the review was done.

Some players on EU servers say they finished above 3981 but got neither the achievement nor the mount; some of them say they never paid for a carry. On 21 September a Blizzard representative replied in the EU forums that the developers had checked these reports and so far found no bug, which means those players were either not eligible, below the cutoff or disqualified. Blizzard says some players may have been disqualified in a manual review that happens at the end of every season and removes players found to have broken the code of conduct. It will not tell players why they were disqualified, so as not to help them avoid detection in future. Other players in the thread say they found signs of paid carries in the groups of some of those complaining; Blizzard has not commented on any single case.

Blizzard says a bug gave some characters the achievement without the mount, and mailed others the mount without the achievement; on 15 September a Blizzard community manager said the bug should have been fixed. For characters that have the achievement but no mount, Blizzard's support page says to enter Silvermoon City, leave the city area and come back in; sometimes the game has to be closed completely, and the bags must not be full. Players who believe they qualified and got nothing are asked to send a bug report in game, which gets no personal reply. The rules will change later: from Season 3, which starts shortly after Eclipse, Midnight's final major content update, there will be a new reward for the top 5%, and the top 1% and top 5% will be ranked against players of the same specialisation rather than all Mythic+ players.