In World of Warcraft, Blizzard employees are given the title of Game Master. Some have access to cheats they can use in the world, and can monitor servers, guilds, and more to make sure they're all playing fair and having a good time. Great power comes with great responsibility, as they say, and one Blizzard employee abused their power to help them advance through Mythic Plus runs.
Mythic Plus is an endgame feature in World of Warcraft, where you and four buds adventure through an increasingly difficult dungeon. As per a post by Blizzard's community manager Kaivax, it was discovered that an employee gave their group an unfair advantage by using a development-only spell which lets you instantly kill enemies in an area around you.
"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," reads the statement on the WoW forums.
Kaivax explained that a small number of developers can use dev-only tools on live servers to make urgent fixes to a game when needed. Every use of a developer-only tool is logged to ensure each use is warranted. In this case, it's clear the uses were not warranted, and the integrity of the game was breached.
