World of Warcraft dev under investigation for cheating in the game

A World of Warcraft player asked a friend who works at Blizzard to secretly kill a dungeon enemy for him, and the friend actually did it.

WoW’s Mythic+ dungeons are timed competitive challenges that get progressively harder, and clearing the highest levels earns bragging rights, rare rewards, and seasonal titles that fewer than one in a thousand players ever see.

So when a suspicious run surfaced where a group barely scraped through a top-tier dungeon with 14 seconds to spare, other players naturally started digging through the combat data, because that kind of miracle finish doesn’t just happen.

Blizzard investigating after developer-only kill ability spotted in competitive dungeon

Buried in the logs, players found an ability called ‘Area Death,’ a developer-only instakill that wiped out an enemy at nearly full health, and a second ability called ‘Death Touch’ also struck a boss toward the tail end of the fight.

Both were triggered by an account that didn’t belong to anyone in the group, which pointed toward a Blizzard employee intervening from behind the scenes.

Wowhead’s Peyton ‘Tettles’ Tettleton then cross-referenced the timestamps against third-party tracking sites and confirmed the run data matched a real completed dungeon, which all but ruled out a doctored log.

From there, players traced the mystery account to an X profile reportedly belonging to a quality analyst who had recently joined the Warcraft team, and the picture started to look a lot less like a bug and a lot more like a favor.

That suspicion was all but confirmed when one of the group’s members, a player known as Yiazor, appeared on YumyTV’s Twitch stream and offered a remarkably casual confession. He said the group realized they were short on the required enemy kill count after beating the final boss, so he turned to his Blizzard employee friend in voice chat: “I’m like, ‘bro, please, can you do me a solid.'”

He added that he “meant no harm” and that his friend “was just doing me a solid because I hate homework keys,” using the community term for tedious make-or-break runs.

Community Manager Randy ‘Kaivax’ Jordan responded on the official forums shortly after, stating that Blizzard was reviewing the situation and would “take action as appropriate,” while adding that the studio “won’t tolerate cheating.”

We have reached out to Blizzard to hear more about how they’re planning to handle this situation and we’ll keep you posted.

Blizzard has taken a hard line on competitive integrity in WoW before, including when it banned boosting organizations in a sweeping crackdown. And the studio has also moved quickly to enforce its rules whenever it sees its competitive landscape threatened, so a quiet resolution here seems unlikely.