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Overwatch players are randomly receiving 11 free loot boxes due to a bug

Overwatch free loot boxes

Blizzard are accidentally gifting players all over the world 11 free Overwatch loot boxes – about $10 worth – due to a bug. Discovered in the last 24 hours by various players upon logging in, there are reports scattered all over Reddit and other community sites. It seems like what was supposed to be a specific-server-only apology for recent DDOS issues has gone worldwide.

Interested in the math behind Overwatch loot boxes? We’ve done it. All of it.

Checking’s a simple matter of logging in and having a look at your loot box menu. If there are 11 boxes there you don’t remember buying or earning, congratulations. Given the amount of community attention it has gotten in the past day, as well as being reported to various Blizzard customer service feeds, chances are it will have been found and fixed, so you’re probably out of luck if you didn’t receive it yet.

What was meant to happen was all players on the Taiwanese, Hong Kong and Macau server would receive the boxes as apology for some serious connection problems over the past few weeks. DDOS attacks have been rampant, and it’s been Blizzard policy since the early days of WoW to offer in-game recompense – here in microtransactions, back then in game-time – for service outages. You can see the explanation post (in Chinese) over on the official site.

English response has been less detailed. Late yesterday a few folks contacted the Blizzard customer service Twitter feed, who said their community team were taking a look at it and there would be an answer soon. That hasn’t popped up yet, but multiple folks have had confirmation from Blizz that opening the boxes isn’t going to get them banned or have their items taken away.

We had a check on a couple of accounts in the office and neither had the boxes, so we’re not sure what the trigger was – possibly completely random. Let us know if you got them and what was in them below.