A cheating scandal has erupted in the World of Warcraft community after a Blizzard developer was caught using special game master (GM) abilities to kill two bosses for some friends. The GM seemingly didn't realize that one of the players was recording combat logs of the whole thing.

Late on Tuesday, Reddit user Acrobatic_Pianist688 posted evidence of the GM's meddling on the WoW subreddit. Their post links to a combat log that shows a non-player ability called "Area Death (TEST)" being used to instantly kill a boss with nearly 90% of its health left. Not long after, a commenter on the thread found the GM using a separate insta-kill ability on a boss earlier in the run, too.

Surprisingly, one of the players from the accused group went onto a Twitch stream to talk about what happened. When streamer Yumytv asked them to explain, they said they were just short of finishing the Mythic+ dungeon in time to get a seasonal title when they called for help from their GM friend: "I go to my GM friend and I'm like bro please can you do me a solid? This thing has 20 million [health] bro, can you please just one-shot it?"

The player went on to say that they don't care if Blizzard disqualifies the Mythic+ run and revokes their title because they believe "it was harmless."

"I didn't expect him to do it," they said. "In hindsight, he shouldn't have done it. He was just doing me a solid."

World of Warcraft community manager Randy "Kaivax" Jordan acknowledged the situation in the original Reddit thread, saying Blizzard is looking into it. "Thank you to those who flagged this," he wrote. "We are reviewing and will take action as appropriate."

The dungeon run has been disqualified on Mythic+ dungeon ranking site Raider.io, but can still be viewed for posterity.

Part of the reason the player thought it wasn't a big deal is that it's a relatively low-level Mythic+ run, which they referred to as a "homework key". They seemingly thought it would go unnoticed, but didn't account for the fact that many Mythic+ players regularly record runs to compare them online.

Many WoW players are skeptical that the full story has been told. The WoW GM had to have been spectating the run using special tools to be able to kill the boss on command. WoW GMs aren't supposed to watch runs casually; it's normally reserved for PTR raid testing and world first races, where Blizzard developers can fix bugs directly to keep things moving.

I've asked Blizzard if it's made any progress on its investigation and will update this post if it responds.