A World of Warcraft game master has been fired from Blizzard Entertainment after the community caught them using "development-only spells" to help their friends breeze through a dungeon and instantly wipe two bosses. Essentially, they were caught helping some mates cheat.
The cheating scandal first came to light earlier this week when a couple of Reddit users shared evidence that a game master had used insta-kill abilities usually reserved for Blizzard employees to demolish at least two bosses. A player from the group all but spelled out the situation in a stream with Yumytv, too: "I go to my GM friend and I'm like bro please can you do me a solid? This thing has 20 million [health] bro, can you please just one-shot it?"
Things sort of escalated from there, with the community wondering how commonplace incidents like this were. "Now you know it exists, therefore the pandora's box is wide open," one Redditor writes. "Which make you question a lot of stuff." Were secret GMs all around, helping their pals achieve titles and record runs?
As PC Gamer reports, Blizzard has now investigated the incident, fired the employee responsible, and assured folks that GMs aren't regularly manipulating games in secret.
"As we mentioned, 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," community manager Randy 'Kaivax' Jordan writes in a recent forum post. "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," Kaivax explains. "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."
The community manager than thanks everyone who brought the information to light, alongside community-led sites. "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."
