Blizzard has fired the World of Warcraft game master who used internal game master abilities to instantly kill two bosses for a group of friends. The studio says it will also take action against the player accounts that took part.
The incident surfaced earlier in the week when a Reddit user posted combat logs from a Mythic+ dungeon showing a boss at close to full health dying instantly to a game master ability. Another Reddit user then found evidence that the same thing had happened to an earlier boss in the same run. One of the players present later admitted on a Twitch stream to asking a game master friend to kill a boss rather than repeat the dungeon.
Blizzard says the case was isolated
Community manager Randy "Kaivax" Jordan addressed the incident in a forum post, and pushed back on community speculation that game master friends might have been quietly assisting other Mythic+ groups.
We can confirm that this was the action of a single Blizzard employee, in violation of our Code of Conduct.
Jordan said a small number of Blizzard employees have always been able to use developer tools and spells on live servers so the team can test and make urgent fixes to the live game. Every use of those internal spells and commands on live realms is logged and shared with Blizzard's Platform Security team, and using development tools for anything other than development work is against company policy. Blizzard says that logging process is why it is confident the incident was limited to one individual.
Game masters are rarely visible in World of Warcraft today. Most customer service issues are handled through Blizzard's website rather than in game, and the situations that call for a game master to be on hand are narrow, such as players testing raid encounters on the public test realm or competing in world first raid races. That rarity was part of why the story drew attention, with some players surprised that in-game game masters still existed.
The dungeon itself was not a notable one, and the group was completing it for a title. The record of the run has since been disqualified by ranking site Raider.io.
Join the conversation — sign in to comment.
Sign in