The fraud in World of Warcraft was said to be an isolated incident. The result: A Blizzard employee immediately lost their job.
The integrity of competitive gameplay in World of Warcraft is at risk. A Blizzard employee helped players cheat their way to a high dungeon rating. Now there have been consequences; the individual has been fired. But Blizzard clarifies: This is an isolated incident, it does not happen more often.
Why shouldn’t this happen more often? Blizzard explains that some employees have always had the ability to influence the live game environment. This is necessary to develop hotfixes or to test things. These employees also have access to “internal spells,” such as the kill spell used here. However, the use of these spells never goes unnoticed by Blizzard, because:
Every use of these internal spells and commands on the live realms is logged and shared with our security team to ensure that any occasional use was justified. Due to this process we have for the use of these tools, we are convinced that this involves a single individual.
Blizzard employee is immediately fired, loses their job
What were the consequences for the employee? For the Blizzard employee involved in the fraud, the consequences were severe. A termination was apparently issued immediately. Blizzard states in the US forum of the game regarding this:
Our tools have confirmed what we have already seen in community discussions, and we have investigated the incident thoroughly. We can confirm that this was the act of a single Blizzard employee who violated our guidelines. This employee is no longer part of the company effective immediately.
This is likely to be remembered as one of the most unnecessary ways to lose a job. What do you think about this punishment? Too harsh? Or justified?
What happens to the players? Blizzard has also imposed sanctions on the players who were “partially guilty.” This likely includes everyone except the tank – who joined the group as a “random” and was even responsible for exposing the whole thing by uploading the information to Warcraftlogs. It was only there that the use of the GM spell and the cheating could be identified accurately.
However, it is questionable whether this is enough to ensure the integrity of the PvE content of World of Warcraft again. Blizzard insists that this is an isolated case, but within the community, there is a desire for all dungeon runs to be logged in a visible way so that every run can be reviewed as soon as there are doubts.
Unfortunately, this marks the second major failure for Blizzard in World of Warcraft this week: There was also a massive leak regarding the end of Midnight.
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