Players report various loot box oddities in Overwatch

There’s nothing better than winning a game of Overwatch and seeing that you have a nice, fresh loot box to crack open. Unfortunately, some players are reporting various issues with loot boxes. One of these “bugs” is a legitimate error (although it’s not as bad as it seems, and it is currently being addressed by Blizzard), but the other seems to be a player perception error. Let’s take a closer look at both of these issues.

The first bug is an empty loot box bug, which is exactly what it says on the tin. You head to the loot box screen, pop open your hard earned gains, and receive... nothing. No shiny skins, no sprays, just four empty trays.

The good news is, you actually do receive loot, but you can’t see its rarity, its loot type, or who its for. It is simply added to your collection. Blizzard employee BillWarnecke explains the bug in a Reddit thread:

Hey there, we've been looking into this bug and we're sorry you hit it. As others noted you do get actual items, unfortunately they don't display so it's hard to know what you got.

The other reported bug is a little more controversial. Blizzard recently changed the loot box system to dramatically cut down on the number of duplicates you’ll get, replacing them with sweet, sweet credits instead. However, players are still complaining that they’re getting a suspicious number of duplicates. Drakuloth, a support agent, made a post on the forums explaining what’s up.

We still have no confirmed cases of situations where a duplicate was received and credits were not granted. Thus far, it's all been misremembering the details. Keep in mind that there are about 3000 unlockable items in the game right now. It's extremely hard (I would go so far as to say impossible for most of us) for our minds to keep track of that many things at once, especially when we consider that some items are only available for some characters, and some are available for all characters. Fortunately, we've got logs on our end that can confirm this.

Drakuloth went through some player complaints, explaining where the discrepancies between perception and Blizzard’s logs lie.

For now, opening loot boxes should be a relatively pain free experience. Should you find yourself cursed with an empty box, consider that you have likely been gifted with loot, and perhaps playing Overwatch in and of itself can be a kind of loot.