Although Anthem is supposed to receive a fairly substantial title update later today, it appears that developer BioWare secretly buffed loot drop rates ahead of time. On the Anthem forums and subreddit players are noting a severe increase in the number of Masterwork gear that is dropping, similar to how loot dropped around the time the game launched.

While Anthem’s update is supposed to eliminate uncommon and common items from the loot pool for level 30 players, the patch notes did not mention anything about a loot drop rate increase. For a while now BioWare has acknowledged that players feel certain activities and difficulty levels aren’t rewarding, but it hasn’t extended beyond that. Perhaps this is BioWare’s way of acknowledging that players were right but not putting any fanfare behind it.

The other possibility is that this change was not intended, as it also appears to be causing problems for players. According to reports online and this writer’s personal experience, there are now instances of loot disappearing or not being rewarding for completing missions. Usually what happens is the game skips the loot screen where the game shows all of the loot a player accumulated during that expedition, which means no masterwork or legendary items decrypt.

Some players have said that loading into an expedition and quitting it will eventually deliver the missing loot but not everyone has been so lucky. Tonight, I completed several Legendary Contracts and some gave the guaranteed Masterwork component and some did not, and there was no way to reclaim that missing item. However, in an instance where Masterworks were lost from Freeplay, I did reclaim them by quitting out of a new expedition.

Since it’s still the middle of the night local time for BioWare, we aren’t likely to get an answer about the missing loot and whether drop rates were buffed in Anthem. Either way, something feels different for players, both in terms of good and bad changes. But it only seems appropriate that, just like BioWare secretly nerfed loot drops, the dev team buff them secretly too.

Anthem is available now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.