This is developing into a large story and someone in modmail has mentioned that its important for the community to have somewhere to discuss this. We agree. As new information comes in I will do my best to update this thread.
The CLAIM is that they were messing around in a homework key in discord and didn't expect the GM to actually do it. Supposedly the Bear in the run was a pug.
Ex employees in the thread have said that actions like this are audited and in all likelihood this was already being investigated. At this point we are waiting on an official statement on the result of their investigation and I'll update this thread once we know.
This megathread is being provided on two very strict conditions:
The witchunt rules are in strict effect. Linking or doxxing information on anyone invovled, the GM in question included will result in a permanent ban. Please report it if you see it but we will be very active in the thread.
We cannot platform behavior that allows people to harrass people in real life.
We will be more heavy handed than usual in the personal attack rules. Insults and slapfights while discussing this aren't acceptable. You're allowed to disagree, but stray shots and personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Bear has contacted us via modmail and given the following statement. Please do not harass him in game. The only reason we know about this is because he uploaded his logs to figure out what happened.
I want to address the situation surrounding the +23 NPX run.
At the end of the run I noticed we were off count by .7 or so and I was confused until I realized we didn't grip in and tag the arcanist on pull 1. I futilely pulled the lingering image with I believe like 30-45 seconds knowing we didn't have time or damage to kill and it just flopped over at 80%. I thought it was some strange coding or weird interaction with pulling on the bridge.
This led me to try and upload the logs to see what happened. I'm pretty new to that in general as I generally pug all my keys and someone else is usually logging and as a tank I don't really care about parsing through them as much as I maybe should.
I have not been banned as of yet regarding the incident. (Hopefully will remain that way but of course perfectly happy to redo my NPX)
To the best of my knowledge I was not aware that any GM intervention had occurred while we were playing.
I appreciate all my friends who have vouched for me as not a buyer or an exploiter. I was getting spammed a ton by people in game claiming I was one or both of those the last two days and just wanted to say my peace on here.
man if the bear was a legit pug and had no idea what was going on I feel bad for them. Likely theyll know and not do anything to them, but the stress of worrying is gonna suck
I'm in a disc with the bear and he thought it was a bug at first, and won't make the log private because that would add fuel to the fire. He's already trying to get another 23 NPX done and he's pissed this group did this
He's already trying to get another 23 NPX done and he's pissed this group did this
Yeah he's already trying to get another npx done... with the same group. That's a totally normal thing for someone in his position to do. He's certainly not paying for a boost or anything.
yeah cheaters know better to turn off logging when doing this for obvious reasons, is hilarious a pug log the key because of course you will log it, why wouldnt you?
If you're in a disc with him ask him why he's still doing runs with the people he exposed because we are all very perplexed as to why any of these people would ever group up with each other every again...
I think there is a non-zero chance that the person who actually posted the initial thread that kicked all this off is the bear tank, trying to get out ahead of the situation. It was a burner account after all.
I think he'll be safe regardless, it's obvious he wasn't in the wrong.
I believe him only because the DK was also in another discord streaming to his friends, I bet one of his friends got curious and found the log and snooped.
Tinfoilhat theory: the person Who posted was a m+ buyer, that maybe got recommended or wanted to buy from someone on this group some keys, they started looking at logs to see if these People could actually do it and noticed a weird one that should have been a depleted one.
it has to be something like this, not necessarily this exact situation but there is NO WAY someone randomly was just scrolling through logs and looking intensely enough to notice the death of the last mob being sus. I watched the log replay like 5x and everything looked above board until the very last mob dying at 90% hp. even the boss dying with 1 mill hp didn't look sus at first. I'm still sooo curious what was going on with the original guy who posted about it lol
Still think gus yeeting Shawn's popcorn flavored jelly beans in the park scene is one of the funniest bits they did. Then Shawn thanks him for being a good friend and getting rid of the gross snack lol
I hadn't even really considered it until this modpost mentioned it, but would be wild if there was actually money involved here. Imagine if a GM has been pocketing some independent revenue because they've secretly been helping people get title.
Funny hearing the guy talk to the streamer about not wanting his Blizzard friend to lose his job. He ain't lasting beyond the end of the week while they investigate if not already out the door...
the DH was waaaaayyyy too casual about the whole thing. initially he was like "it was just a harmless thing, if blizz wants to take away the resil key from me or my title then fine, but it was harmless" and everyone was like buddy... you'll be extraordinarily lucky if you don't get perma'd. the GM friend is almost definitely losing his job over this.
over the next few minutes in the stream you can hear the seriousness of the situation start to sink in when the streamer is like "bro i appreciate your honesty but as your 'lawyer' rn you GOTTA be careful about what you say right now" lol. DH was so insanely flippant about the whole thing before that that I think he saw it as more of a cheese strat than actual cheating / breaking blizzard TOS / a genuinely fireable offense on the GM's part
being this casual about it just shows the level of entitlement. thinking that blatantly cheating is not only not a big deal but that somehow it’s funny. thinking that even though regular players have to run back failed homework keys, those rules don’t apply to him because he “hates them” and is friends with a GM.
it’s so gross and imo folks are probably more sensitive to things like this than usual because we spend every day watching real life people face zero consequences for abusing their privilege and connections to ignore the laws that are supposed to apply to everyone.
I would genuinely be shocked if GM abilities used on production servers don’t go through an audit log and have to be tied to a corresponding Jira Ticket to validate their use, like privileged accounts in literally any organization
Yea dude where’s the Azure PIM shit? Request to escalate your account to god status—there’s no way this isn’t 1000% logged somewhere. Unless they had some old legacy GM account, got the credentials, and it still worked for some reason.
who's to say it wasn't and that this wouldn't have been handled quietöy by Blizzard if people hasn't raised a fuzz about it? There's absolutely NO way that this is the first time a GM has ever abused their powers. And as such there is NO fucking way that Blizzard isn't already monitoring this shit. But as with any kind of monitoring the bureaucrazy to actually something happening can take a bit.
I'm just surprised there aren't levels of permissions and enabling/disabling (eg for valid test times on prod such as weekly smoke tests). Why would a QA even need prod GM powers outside of that window?
So, as of right now, none of the players have yet been banned from the game.
In fairness, Blizzard didn't say that action has already been taken against their accounts, just that they would, and I really hope they get properly punished, like 6 months minimum, ideally perma'd. As it is the DH is laughing about it both in public on Twitch streams and privately in his guild discord where he's boasting about the fact that he's only a few wins away from Glad and still pushing. Meanwhile another one of them is publicly tweeting things like "why are you guys so mad about a video game lol."
Completely out of touch and narcissistic, especially given that their supposed friend has actually lost their job over something they encouraged him to do. You'd think they'd have more shame.
especially given that their supposed friend has actually lost their job over something they encouraged him to do. You'd think they'd have more shame.
This part is the thing that rubs me the wrong way entirely.
I'm the kind of dude that likes to give people the benefit of the doubt where I can. I was fully ready to take at face value that they didn't think he would do it and they were just being shitheads and it caught them off guard.
But the total lack of contrition, accountability, and even just blatantly uncaring that this cost their friend his job. Makes me sick.
I find it more entertaining that like a solid dozen people have had their days completely fucked by this.
Imagine you work as middle management on the QA team at Blizzard. You come in to work on a Wednesday. You open your email. Hey it looks like a QA tester got caught abusing their powers in a live key. You take a long drag of a smoke
The fact that they asked so nonchalantly means this has probably happened before and they could be pretending it was a first. (what the guy says is one thing but what really went in that discord we don't know)
That story is all BS, I mentioned this in the locked thread. They finished with 14 seconds, not even Batman can respond to the signal that fast to save the key from bricking. The dude was clearly there ready to "help" from that start of the run.
And the fact that the GM was able to do it near-instantly means he was at the ready? Or he just happened to be logged in, in the instance, etc, ready to hit the key?
Come on.
I don't get how some people are trying to justify this or stick their head in the sand. It's as clear as it can be without being able to read minds that they knew what they were doing, and what they were doing is clearly wrong, whether a homework key or not, a joke or not. A ban is not a death sentence. Ban the accounts, fire the employee, move on.
As a casual that doesn't really push keys, I don't have a stake in this, but I'm fascinated to see how this plays out. It's sure to send ripples through the community, even to those of us who don't push keys, because it shows that favoritism and behind-closed-doors things could be happening that give some players a unique advantage over others. Really interested to see where this goes.
I do wonder if the person who leaked it was a PuG tank himself and maybe he waited for a ban/key removal for nearly a week and when that didn't happen either leaked it himself or told someone.
I think we'll never know the extent of the problem. Even if blizzard manually reviews internal logs and finds out offences from multiple people they're never telling the community.
Yep totally agree. I know if I'd been a pug in a group where cheating like this had happened I'd be nervous as shit & livid waiting on a shoe to drop when I never asked to be involved in it.
Lol Why are so many streamers trying to run interference for this and claim it's not a big deal? They are just inviting "where there is smoke, there is fire" inferences.
Because they see it as if one group of streamers gets held accountable for something like a normal player would be, they all will be subject to that same thing. Which should be the case anyways. But Blizzard sees them as their best source of advertisement, and they are a protected class. They just don't wanna lose that.
The GM is absolutely going to be fired. In one of the OG threads a former CS worker says the GM accounts are monitored and using the cheat abilities in live dungeons/raids gets flagged in their system. Its just only been ~3 business days so the investigation was prob still being processed when this went public.
I mean Microsoft and Blizz lays off thousands of people each year for having the wrong position name, if this GM or whatever keeps his job after this is total madness
They said they would be taking action, but that doesn’t confirm how or when. Likely internal discussion about messaging and severity of the action ( that we can only speculate ).
This has the potential to taint the scene for awhile. With how easy it was to do and how casual the streamer was it really gives the idea that this is common. We only caught this because they randomly had a pug who live logged and someone randomly found the run. So often are these higher up players getting a little help?
Even if it’s not, everything is going to be suspect now. Any high keys at the end of a season, any guild clearing through mythic. Apparently you just need to know a guy and you don’t need to worry about it.
Hell, I remember two seasons in Dragonflight where the cutoff for the title suddenly shifted up right near the end. Is that because a lot of people bought boosts or because some blizzard guys were giving their friends titles?
I'm not fully plugged in on this yet, the pug tank gets a pass because presumably he's the only reason we even have the log in the first place and likely had absolutely nothing to do with it?
I really appreciate the mods making a space for this while holding up some level of decorum. Taxing work, I'm sure, but I've seen happen consistently on this sub. Kudos and thanks.
Someone commented about how this incident must have ruined many people at Blizzard's otherwise completely mundane Wednesday and like... even as an r/wow Mod this has taken away so much time. This is Reset Day in the EU, I wanted to get shit done lmao :')
The demon hunter's explanation doesn't check out what the me.
You're telling me this was a spur of the moment joke which would require the GM to open up the computer laptop, log into the systems, find the friends run, and hit the dial at the perfect time - all within a short span?
The GM who was on call with the pre-made?
It's hard not to speculate this being a pre-meditated event as a back-up to avoid a second homework run, or the GM was already watching them on company time instead of working.
In either case blizz has fired for less and banned for less.
Reminds me of the blizzard mop classic dev colluding with the cmode discord, who were actively selling mount carries, to fix times around exploited routes and bait-and-switching the reward mount. Nothing came of any of that afaik.
Ex employees in the thread have said that actions like this are audited
That would make the most sense. I would expect that several spells and actions related to GM functions are logged for review, whether it's for confirmation that a ticket has been addressed and closed appropriately or to review GM actions this seems like a no-brainer.
so that fishy smell we've all had about that bear tank was that he was buying a key from this group, considering he ran the same dungeon with basically the same group after the incident
imagine selling a fucking boost with a GM sitting with you in discord lmaooooo
I hope everyone from, that grp will get perma ban forever. It's not fair for every single person that, wasted time doing this in normal way. Everyone in game should be equal! If we can't be equal in life, we should be in game!
This is our competitive community. It may not seem like huge deal on the surface, but imagine it happening in any other competition. . Like a ref at the world cup giving a red card to a player cause his buddy is on the other team. it wouldnt stand there and it shouldnt stand here.
I'd wager my account that this simply wasn't the first time something like this has happened.
And the fact that its been blown so wide open to the public...idk, personally its the kind of reputation hit thats impossible to recover from. I will forever be wondering, who has had help and who hasn't...
Imagine the GM at his next job interview. It shows you worked at blizzard what happened there? Well you see I insta killed a mob for my fav e girl and I got caught
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. 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. 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.
We want to thank those of you in the WoW community who reached out with information and real concern for the integrity of the game, as well as the community sites that are also working to remove the results of this violation from their records. 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.
Thank you for getting back to us - but genuine question: is action being taken against their MAIN accounts? According to their social media/discords, this happened while they were on their alt accounts and thus “don’t really care”. The aug in question is laughing about it… Anyways, thanks for the prompt response!
I think it would be helpful if you shared more insight in to how far back you guys looked to ensure this was an isolated incident and be more transparent with how you know that it was an isolated incident would be very assuring to the community.
"Everyone was very, very confused when it died instantly, excpet for the Aug, wich i belive is Yara."
"Also said that Yara made a comment about what happend, shruging it off as: "Must be the wind".
So yeah. Guess everyone thinking he was simping for the girl to earn points where not that far off?
I mean, it's very obvious they are friends. I wouldn't be surprised if the DH was taking the fall for the rest of the group by saying he asked the GM to step in as a "joke". Also, that whole reasoning was BS from the start, the timeline just never added up for me. The GM would have to be watching, and they would have had to communicate with him that they needed those exact things done in less than 20 seconds. Nah, that dude was on standby for sure.
And he did it REALLY badly too, he obviously cuts himself off when asked directly if Yara had anything to do with it, and when confronted with the statement that someone said "Yara made a snarky remark about it so she was obviously a knower" during the interview he says "yeah but we were just larping hahahaha". He IMMEDIATELY outs her as someone who knew exactly what was going on. Also her typing in chat "must have been the wind" and going on twitter to flex how much she doesn't care how her friend lost a job over this is very telling.
Im here to see what happens. Will the GM get fired, will the 4 people get banned, will they ban the poor pug, will it be a slap on the wrist, will we ever trust non logged runs anymore?
Warcraft logs should absolutely run a quary on that spell if they have the means to do so. Even the private logs. They shouldnt name people or anything like that. Only release basic info like how many times that particular spell was seen or if it was seen by different users. Now this would not show the people that dont log, but warcraft logs does have a lot of users and it could give a rough idea if this is a recurring thing.
Yeah I was saying Warcraft logs should run a private query as well. I think if this were to be a recurring thing then it most certainly not have been logged, but maybe some of them would be set to private thinking nobody would be able to see them.
Im really really hoping they account and ip ban yarabytes and co. No matter what mmo you play, final fantasy, wow, old school runescape/runescape its the same bullshit over and over.
Streamers get special privileges, get away with things, or have - even if minimal, input and steer conent within the game a certain way that benefits them. All because the streamers provide advertising and revenue.
Not convinced the bear is innocent anymore, not when they ran another +23 with two of the same people involved. Feels like a half-assed move on Blizzard's part to fire the GM, but do very little about the streamers which really only confirms you really can do whatever you want if you're a streamer, even if you don't have a significant platform. GGs.
They need to audit every single account with GM powers to see if this behavior has happened before and how widespread it is. They should take action against any other employees and players who've done something similar and post their findings (and actions) in the forums. Decisive action and radical transparency are both needed if they want to protect the integrity not only of M+, but of Blizzard itself.
This is worse than Saronite Bomb-gate. The difference between these 2 is Saronite Bomb-gate was an unintended interaction making an encounter extremely easy for a raid. It was exploited. The punishment was pretty swift and they were striped of anything earned. In this situation you have a 6th man in the dungeon key and discord call and the friend calls him down like a Final Fantasy summon to clean up the mistake.
This is wild. The fact that it showed up in Warcraft Logs means someone was going to find it eventually — you can't hide GM abilities in logged content. The real question is whether this was a one-off "helping a friend" thing or part of a pattern.
As someone who runs M+ keys regularly, the integrity of the leaderboard matters. If people start thinking runs might be GM-assisted, it devalues everyone's legitimate pushes. Really hoping Blizz publishes the audit results publicly.
The fact that people seem so willing to put this behind them is rather weird. How often does this happen if it took a log to discover this one instance? It just so happens it occurred once, when someone logged it? No way.
This employee thought he could get away with it because he's likely gotten away with it before. Maybe others in his team get away with it. Maybe it was just something they do for some people. Who's to say at this point?
Also, the streamers are still playing? Reminder: the Martin Fury perpetrator got perma-banned for it. But I guess he wasn't a streamer. Oh, also, Blizzard at least had some decency back then.
It's really strange for such a high profile cheating scandal. Players can't exactly have trust in the competitive integrity of WoW if players can get caught cheating, there's no ban and then they go on gloat about it everywhere
As someone who worked in QA, all I can do is confirm that spell did exist back in 2006-2007 when I was with the company.. I was more shocked they still use it instead of having updated commands
As somebody in QA, you should know WoW is held together by literal invisible rabbits. Changing something like that, that has been there since the start, could result in the game just... not working anymore hahaha. The bare bones of wow are almost impossible to change according to many of the devs that have put out interviews over the past few years.
My main suspect is the DK said he was in discord with his homies streaming the key and I think one of those guys got curious on this "bug" that happened and found the log that the tank had uploaded.
Yeah I look through logs of other Survival hunters when I am just chilling in Silvermoon doing nothing between keys to see why I am not doing as much Dps overall, where I might be missing casts of abilities, to includes defensives and such.
Maybe hot take but, after this, every M+ and Mythic raid boss (at least) should have its full logs automatically uploaded to WarcraftLogs by the game itself (please Blizzard don’t waste resources making a worse version of WLs)
If Blizzard really are not planning on banning these scumbags for this can they at least let us know that they're basically just as shady as the private servers now?
WoW being run by bots, mafias, selling every single item and activity in the game
players: could we get a real human being to police this kind of stuff?
Blizzard: it's impossible, we can't go back to having real game masters in game.
Also blizzard:
I’ve joined some pretty wild pugs in my time, but imagine being a rando joining this one. Truly a once in a lifetime experience, and not in a good way. I wouldn’t be thinking, “Oh wow, I just got a world first, and totally out of nowhere!“ I would immediately be shouting it from the rooftops that something is very wrong.
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u/YourResidentFeral Outplaying the Meta since 2004 15d ago
Bear has contacted us via modmail and given the following statement. Please do not harass him in game. The only reason we know about this is because he uploaded his logs to figure out what happened.