Blizzard employee cheats to help players during Mythic+ dungeon, rocking high-end dungeon run community

As we approach the end of Midnight season 1, while many of us are biding our time waiting for new raids and dungeons, a small group of people are working harder than ever — the folks who run absurdly high Mythic+ keys. There’s recognition in the offing for those who can be in the top 0.1% of scores, something that a lot of players enjoy chasing. However, with only a few weeks until the end of ths season, an unexpected scandal arose that caused a number of people to question the fairness of the whole thing, because it appeared that a group (that just happened to contain a pair of World of Warcraft streamers) that was up against the timer in a +23 Nexus-Point Xenas run had some unfair assistance in order to time their run… assistance that seemingly could only have come from inside Blizzard itself.

The tell-tale log

The firestorm of this event was set off by a Reddit post with the eye-catching title “Blizzard GM death touching mobs in M+23 for their favorite streamer.” Now, right away, there was a lot of suspicion around this post because it read a lot like a hit piece — the account is basically a fresh Reddit account, they just happened to be browsing logs while at work and happened to find one with a GM-only spell in it, and so on. There was also the possibility of uploading a maliciously-edited log, or a mistaken in Warcraft Logs’ parsing code, or other more innocent options. Still, it looked like the following had happened: a log was uploaded of a +23 Nexus-Point Xenas run, and towards the end of the run, two strange things happened.

First, when the final boss, Lothraxion, was at low health, he was instantly killed by an ability called “Death Touch” (not to be confused with Touch of Death) cast by someone named Daijosai — who was, notably, not one of the five people running the dungeon. Secondly, after that, they headed back into the dungeon, realizing they were short on percentage to finish the key. With mere seconds to spare, a leftover Lingering Image was also killed by Daijosai, this time using an ability called Area Death (TEST). Fun fact: this is the exact same spell that was on the GM-only Martin Fury shirt that a player accidentally got their hands on back in Ulduar after an item restoration gone awry.

The evidence seemed incontrovertible that someone had been using GM-only spells to kill mobs in the dungeon, but the evidence didn’t point right away to a Blizzard employee. After all, just as recently as the Liberation of Undermine raid, a group calling themselves “RAoV Quality Assurance” gained access to GM-only spells and used them to exploit their way to a world-first Gallywix kill. This could be something as simple as cheating players, although the idea of getting a sixth person into the dungeon to use the spells to begin with certainly proved a tricky point.

Luckily, we didn’t have to speculate for long: one of the streamers essentially confessed to what happened on someone else’s stream.

“Can you do us a solid?”

Content creator Yumytv got an interview with one of the streamers in the group not long after the event to ask them what had happened. The streamer’s story essentially confirmed the Reddit post correct: four of the group members (essentially everyone but the tank who uploaded the log) were in a voice chat with a Blizzard employee, and when they realized they were going to miss timing the key, one of them jokingly asked the Blizzard employee to “do them a solid” and insta-kill the last mob in the dungeon so that they could make count and beat the timer — and the employee did.

This apparent confession sent shockwaves through the community. How could anyone trust that any of the high-level keys being run in World of Warcraft were legitimate at this point? The sentiment online was that if it weren’t for the tank live-logging their dungeon run, this would potentially have gone completely undetected, as no one would have ever seen the evidence of GM-only spells being used. At this point, some internet detectives even seemingly tracked down the employee in question, whose X account went from open to locked to deleted in the space of about half an hour. Clearly, nothing was going to calm the crowd other than Blizzard stepping it — and they did, with Kaivax posting that they take cheating accusations very seriously and were investigating the matter.

The aftermath: some bans and a firing

WoW players didn’t have to wait long. Two days later, Kaivax posted a followup under the subject “Prohibited Gameplay Incident and Response.”

Obviously Blizzard does not speak about punishments handed out to individual accounts, but streamers do: a post on X from jdotb confirmed that one of the players complicit in this scandal has received a month-long ban from World of Warcraft. A month might not seem long for an instance like this, but it’s worth noting that that gives other people time to pass them in score and potentially bypass them for any end-of-season titles they had been hoping to earn.

Personally speaking, I also think Kaivax made the right move here in being more open than usual about Blizzard’s internal processes and how they help monitor this situation — especially to ensure that it hasn’t been happening all along. A cheating scandal like this involving someone inside Blizzard could have easily ruined any trust the Mythic+ community has in Blizzard itself and soured player-developer relations pretty badly; a sign of faith that the system is working like it should — and that this kind of cheating isn’t commonplace — goes a long way towards restoring integrity that could have been damaged by this incident.