I'd imagine that's why those GM accounts are anonymous to normal accounts. But that doesn't help when the rest of the Dev team is more or less public and have public profiles on their normal accounts.
You know, if their accounts are of the normal kind, as in, they created them using the same "Join" link and "Create Character" that everyone else uses, they don't have any special powers on those accounts. They also don't have full admin privileges, so I've heard, meaning only Tom gets to directly alter the actual game, if it ever is necessary. Otherwise, at most their only advantage would be knowledge of the game code, for which they could potentially exploit, though I'm pretty sure they would be punished severely for any such attempts.
However, that might not really matter. Some normal player who is savvy and observant could potentially figure out quite a few exploits, and for those more immoral players, capitalize on them. But that's an entirely different discussion so my point for that is: Don't exploit those bugs, it's not cool.
Anyway, the point is, I am about 99.9% certain that dev team members don't get any special effects on their *normal* accounts, which would be exactly limited to the same stuff any other normal member is limited to. This would obviously also extend to their characters, as I am pretty sure none of us has ever seen a non-GM account with any characters as NPCs. Those are, to my knowledge, the only character types to have any code different from what is available to all human characters.
So the extent of the dev team's advantages only comes down to knowledge of mechanics, which if one thinks about it, doesn't actually make that much of a difference, even if those get exploited. Battles would still have enough randomness that even flawless initial setups can't account for final outcomes with 100% accuracy. Furthermore, politics has nothing to do with mechanics (except for the formalities of war and peace) and everything to do with your brain and words. Knowledge of the entirety of BM's code will not help one bit in achieving political dominance, which is one of the most, if not the most, important aspects to achieve success in BM.
