Blizzard has fired a senior QA developer after an investigation turned up that the developer had helped a group of players cheat in a World of Warcraft dungeon.
The studio published a statement last night saying that it had monitored and confirmed a situation we reported on earlier, in which a five-person team was able to complete a Mythic dungeon within a time limit thanks to a developer using an insta-kill spell that players do not have access to. “We can confirm that this was the action of a single Blizzard employee, in violation of our Code of Conduct,” the statement reads. “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.”
Blizzard goes on to say that “every use” of internal spells like the one used in this situation is logged and shared with the game’s Platform Security team. Such spells are sometimes used legitimately by developers to test and make “urgent fixes to the live game when they’re needed.” However, Blizzard’s company policy prohibits them from being used for anything other than development work.
On social media, player response has been positive in response to Blizzard’s swift and open handling of the incident. Some players are speaking up on the side of the druid tank in the raid, who was the one who published the combat logs that led to this incident being discovered in the first place. Players in the group have mentioned that the druid was a random person who joined for the Mythic key, and was not aware of the GM’s presence or interference. It is unclear who all in the group had action taken against them, or what sort of action was taken at all.
However, other players are expressing concern about Blizzard’s use of the language “action of a single employee” and the statement that the incident “was isolated to one individual.” Some are taking this as a potential indicator that while only one person was guilty of this, they may have used the tools illicitly multiple times to benefit groups on multiple occasions. No proof of this has been put forward and, even if this did occur, it seems Blizzard likely took action to reverse any remaining impacts. But it does raise a question of how often such a thing has occurred without anyone noticing, given that this only surfaced because the druid tank published the combat logs in the first place. As pleasantly transparent as Blizzard has been about this whole ordeal, we will likely never know if other illicit actions were ever noticed.
