I watched it and the first thing that popped into my head was "I guess Blizzard still has some real people as GMs". Kind of sad, I know, but given how Microsoft is pushing all of their employees to adopt AI in everything*, it's pretty much expected that Blizzard would cut costs by eliminating personnel in "customer facing" roles such as GMs in favor of bots. So to discover that an actual GM did what they did...
Wow. Just... wow.
Okay, I should back up and provide a short summary:
In Retail WoW there was a Mythic+ dungeon run that included a WoW streamer and a pug tank. During the run the group wasn't doing so well, so the GM "assisted" the group by insta-killing mobs. They got caught and the GM was fired and the players involved were banned. What made this even a bit juicier than your average MMO-related drama is that the GM was friends with some of the group participants and the GM was also interfering in the run to impress the WoW streamer.**
Here's the Reddit thread that kicked this off for reference.
The group would have likely not been found out by a Redditor if it weren't that the pug tank had logged the Mythic+ run and therefore it showed up in Warcraftlogs. I'm not sure how they thought they were going to get away with it, since the info is in the logs and there's always someone obsessive enough in the WoW community to go digging for group content data and discovering the pretty obvious outliers in the data pool. And I'm willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that since Blizzard crunches data all the freaking time, those outliers would have showed up in their own internal data.
I guess there's also the aspect of this being a Mythic+ dungeon run, which gets into the competitive/hardcore nature of WoW, that has people so up in arms about it. This was a Mythic+ 23 run, which according to Ye Olde Internet is a very high end run, so the specter of cheating on a run such as that is like direct interference from FIFA in the recently concluded World Cup.
The one thing that I hope that comes out of this little brouhaha is that Blizzard doesn't to all-in and simply replace any remaining GMs with bots, which would make an already poor situation (where GMs need to be out to enforce the rules) worse.
*And the subsequent decline in quality across all of their products, including gaming. I fully expected that there's a direct connection between the increase in usage of Copilot and other AI tools with the decline in QA testing in Retail WoW, let alone Windows 11.
**OF COURSE the streamer just has to be a girl. Why can't these GMs try to impress male streamers to eliminate the obvious sexism-loaded commentary?
A Blizzard Community Manager stated that Blizzard logs every time a developer command is used on Live (https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/prohibited-gameplay-incident-and-response/2329585). The logs go to the Platform Security team for review. Which makes sense because if someone outside Blizzard figured out how to use developer commands they would want to know and stop that ASAP.
ReplyDeleteI suspect everything a GM does in-game gets logged to make sure things like this get caught and stopped. It is just the community caught this and brought it up before Blizzard saw it. To Blizzard's credit they reacted before this could be a PR disaster.
From my understanding your summary contains a couple of errors:
ReplyDelete- The cheater was a QA guy, not a GM. So no, sadly not evidence that human GMs still exist.
- The streamer who asked for help was in fact a guy. It was just sexist rumours immediately assuming that only widdle girls would ask for help like that I guess. A female streamer was present in the run, but she was just one of the other people present.