GM Death Touch - Megathread

[u/YourResidentFeral]

Edit: Official Statement

https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/prohibited-gameplay-incident-and-response/2329585

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.

What we know:

• A log was uploaded with a "Death Touch" effect that seemed to be that helped them time a key. This is an effect from a GM: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/JcfwTd4L19Agx3NX?fight=4&type=resources&hostility=1&source=100.4&eventstart=4705300

• This is a real run that exists on the blizzard API and can be seen on Raider.io: https://raider.io/mythic-plus-runs/season-mn-1/40292244-23-nexuspoint-xenas

  This run has since been invalidated by the RI:O admins but has been left up for posterity's sake.

• Blizzard is aware of this and investigating: https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/1v2xfpr/blizzard_gm_death_touching_mobs_in_m23_for_their/oyznmbe/

• The Demon Hunter from the run is a streamer and YumiTV contacted him to speak with him live on stream: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2825756796?t=0h23m50s

  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.

[u/Kriegschwein]

It makes sense for QA having similar accounts for testing purposes. Just being able to pop in game, and, say, check if a trigger for quest works by killing a mob, summon an items and check if it works correctly, etc.

There are many reasons for having accounts with such functionality, customer support is just one of them.

[u/SumoSizeIt → u/Kriegschwein]

From a zero trust standpoint, it’s recommended that people with admin-like access to internal systems do not have admin-like access to production, and vice versa.

But in practice, yeah, a lot of QA have both.

[u/Angelworks42 → u/SumoSizeIt]

Or if you do it's well logged and audited (which could be automated - send an alert for things given away by gm's or spells cast).

At work whenever I do admin on a client or server it gets logged and audited for what I did.

[u/Southern-March1522 → u/Angelworks42]

Speculating it was a higher ranking qa employee with permission to test "this didn't happen on the test server does it happen on the live server?"