Blizzard has fired an employee for using developer-only tools to help World of Warcraft players cheat their way to a victory.
The incident was first reported on the World of Warcraft Reddit page, where user Acrobatic_Pianist688 said they were looking at logs for the game’s Mythic Plus runs and found something odd.
Mythic Plus is an endgame feature in World of Warcraft where players can take on 5-player dungeons with an endlessly scaling difficulty.
According to the Reddit user, the log for a certain level 23 Mythic Plus run showed that despite the group being behind and seemingly unlikely to win, they “pulled it out of nowhere” and succeeded.
Upon further investigation, the log – which records every move used in a run and its effect – showed that a sixth user called Daijosai had used a move called ‘Area Death (TEST)’, the description of which is “kills all enemies in a 30-yard radius, cheater”.
It appeared that Daijosai was a Game Master – a Blizzard employee who can oversee games and take action if players have issues such as retrieving bugged items, teleporting stuck players and dealing with cheaters.
In this case, however, it seemed that the employee was the one doing the cheating, by using an instakill move only available to developers to help the group win their run.
“Against company policy”
In a statement on the official Blizzard forums, the World of Warcraft forum confirmed that the incident took place, and that the employee had been let go as a result.
“We internally monitored and confirmed a recent incident in which a World of Warcraft group gained an unfair advantage by abuse of access to development-only spells on a live realm,” the statement read. “Our tools confirmed what was also surfaced in community discussions, and we have investigated the incident carefully.
“We can confirm that this was the action of a single Blizzard employee, in violation of our Code of Conduct. This employee is no longer with the company effective immediately. We are also taking action against the player accounts that were complicit in this violation.
“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. 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.
“We want to thank those of you in the WoW community who reached out with information and real concern for the integrity of the game, as well as the community sites that are also working to remove the results of this violation from their records.
“When your findings line up with ours, it helps confirm that our own tools are catching what they should, and we’re grateful for the way we work alongside you all to protect the game and each other.”
