Blizzard has fired a World of Warcraft developer for using “development-only spells” in a live realm.
Discovered by a Reddit user who spotted a “Blizzard GM death touching mobs in M+23 for their favourite streamer”, fans uncovered a log record showing instakills and area death effects being used within the game.
Over the next few days, fans discovered the account in question, belonging to World of Warcraft Game Master Daijosai. As it turns out, this account belonged to a Blizzard employee who has now been cut from the MMO company.
In a forum post, World of Warcraft community manager Kaivax confirmed that the events were “the action of a single Blizzard employee, in violation with our Code of Conduct”. The community manager confirmed that “this employee is no longer with the company effective immediately”.
Kaivax noted that the employee was abusing the use of “development-only spells in a live realm” to help others cheese their way through activities. These spells are allowed in a live-realm for devs for testing and bug fixes, but are not to be used for other purposes.
“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,” the community manager said.
“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,” he continued. “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 also thanked fans for discovering the abuse in question as it helps to inform how the studio’s detection tools work. While fans flagged the issue prior to Blizzard, the community’s discoveries “helps confirm that our own tools are catching what they should”.
Of course, it’s usually cool whenever a developer comes in to help players in an online game. However, when they’re using dev-only tools to insta-kill mobs and create an unfair environment, that’s simply not on.
