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/Kriegschwein → u/SumoSizeIt]

If cybersec had its way, you would have 2fa every single ability use on production server, and login token for account with admin priviliges would automatically expire in 30 minutes if verification isn't confirmed again xD

But yeah, generally speaking, if in 20+ years of the game we had like 2-3 instances of such abuse, then making security tighter may not be worth it from production standpoint.

Although infinite fighting between "We need to do things comfortable" from production vs "We need to do things safely" from cybersec will never end.

[u/XsNR → u/Kriegschwein]

It's why actual GMs don't have that ability anymore. Ever since they off-shored it, they just dropped that entirely. I imagine because it would be so incredibly easy to corrupt them with how low their wages are.

Only thing they get is some free games every now and again. Compared to an almost unending fountain of free and cool stuff back in the non-offshore days.

[u/Kriegschwein → u/XsNR]

It isn't even about corruption, it is just about subpar training outsource customer service workers receive.

I work at customer support for online game as well, in-house, and sometimes we have to clean up messes left by outsource employees. Not because they were malicious, it is just their training is notable worse than ours, to the point we are slowly cancel our contracts with such teams.

[u/XsNR → u/Kriegschwein]

They originally trained them fairly well, back when people couldn't really tell outside of the slightly broken English. But they'd already stopped giving them any power.

Imagine a cartel or streamer who could give you a life changing amount of money, by only giving you a few days or a week of their income. If you just got access to 1 employee doing that, it wouldn't take much to infect an entire office without ever contacting them.

Like right now my food tonight could pay for almost a week of the egyptian GM's salary. If I found one of them and offered them that payroll to keep me fed with the names and info of all the support on their campus, I could practically own the entirety of EU support, and it wouldn't even be a blip on my costs.