As we mentioned, we internally monitored and confirmed a recent incident in which a World of Warcraft group gained an unfair advantage by abuse of access to development-only spells on a live realm. Our tools confirmed what was also surfaced in community discussions, and we have investigated the incident carefully. We can confirm that this was the action of a single Blizzard employee, in violation of our Code of Conduct. This employee is no longer with the company effective immediately. We are also taking action against the player accounts that were complicit in this violation.
It has always been the case that a small number of Blizzard employees can use developer tools and spells on live servers: this lets us test and make urgent fixes to the live game when they’re needed. Every use of these internal spells and commands on live realms is logged and shared with our Platform Security team to help ensure that the occasional use of this access is warranted. The use of development tools for anything other than development work is against company policy. It’s because of the process we have in place around use of these tools that we’re confident this incident was isolated to one individual.
We want to thank those of you in the WoW community who reached out with information and real concern for the integrity of the game, as well as the community sites that are also working to remove the results of this violation from their records. When your findings line up with ours, it helps confirm that our own tools are catching what they should, and we’re grateful for the way we work alongside you all to protect the game and each other.
The World of Warcraft Development Team