A Blizzard employee who used developer tools to allegedly help a group of friends complete a challenging Mythic+ dungeon in World of Warcraft is no longer with the company, Blizzard has confirmed.
Earlier this week, a thread on Reddit called attention to a suspicious Mythic+ 23 dungeon run. A simple look at the key in question on Warcraftlogs, a site players use to track dungeon and raid performance, showed the dungeon shouldn’t have been completed in time, as after the final boss the group still needed to kill more enemies from earlier in the dungeon.
However, by some miracle, the key was cleared in its final moments with a spell titled “Area Death (TEST)” that instantly killed all the remaining enemies.
As you can probably assume, that’s not a spell players have access to. It immediately became clear that if the log was legitimate and not edited in any way, a Blizzard employee, possibly a gamemaster (or GM for short), helped this particular Mythic+ dungeon group. Since high-level Mythic+ is competitive, with special titles, rewards, and bragging rights reserved for the highest-rated players, a major cheating scandal like this was rightfully cause for concern among the WoW community.
Word quickly spread about the incident, and it wasn’t long before a streamer by the name Yumytv aired an interview in which they reportedly talked to one member of the nefarious dungeon group in question. One of the group members claimed they called upon a GM friend who they were in voice chat with as an act of desperation upon realizing they weren’t going to clear the key in time.
“I go to my GM friend and say ‘can you do me a solid bro, can you please just one shot?” he said.
They continued by stating they “meant no harm” from it and if Blizzard wanted to revoke anything earned from the key, they were completely fine with it.
“I didn’t expect him to do it,” he said of their Blizzard employee friend. “In hindsight, he shouldn’t have done it. He was just doing me a solid.”
Blizzard, however, did find harm in it. After stating earlier in the week it was investigating the incident, it has now announced the Blizzard employee in question is no longer with the company and that it is taking action against the players involved as well.
“It has always been the case that a small number of Blizzard employees can use developer tools and spells on live servers: This lets us test and make urgent fixes to the live game when they’re needed,” Blizzard stated in a forum post. “Every use of these internal spells and commands on live realms is logged and shared with our Platform Security team to help ensure that the occasional use of this access is warranted. The use of development tools for anything other than development work is against company policy. It’s because of the process we have in place around use of these tools that we’re confident this incident was isolated to one individual.”
Blizzard went on to thank the WoW community for their concern and response when it came to ensuring WoW’s competitive integrity.
“We’re grateful for the way we work alongside you all to protect the game and each other,” Blizzard said.