The World of Warcraft plague
I think it’s fair to say that World of Warcraft can easily claim to be the MMORPG that brought the genre to the masses. I’m not going to go into the whys and wherefores of it now but WoW enjoy the position of being the global number one MMORPG in terms of sheer numbers of players, last estimated to be around 10 million subscribers. And yes, I’m one of them.But other than pulling a South Park special, WoW’s only real claim to fame for the purpose of this article is that it laid the foundations for pretty much all other MMORPGs to come. The interface, the selective PvP, duelling, raids… WoW has it all. Oh, and the instanced dungeons. Ah yes, the instanced dungeons… and it’s one particular instance area that helps Wow into our RPG half of fame because it spread a wave of death across the game world that was so virulent and lethal that even Ebola and Hanta were looking a bit apologetic and asking if it wasn’t perhaps going a bit too far…
The problem all started when Blizzard introduced a new instance for high-level players. Titled Zul'Gurub, the boss was a particularly nasty piece of work named Hakkar the Soulflayer who had a debuff attack which would cause damage over a fixed period of time. In this case, the Corrupted Blood debuff was designed to be cast on high level players who would have around 3000 to 5000 hit points, meaning the players would have time to heal themselves. But a nasty twist with Corrupted Blood was that the targeted, infected player could spread the debuff to any nearby players as well. Not really a problem when anyone in the instance would be high level and therefore able to deal with the debuff and the damage it caused.
But what Blizzard didn’t count on was Corrupted Blood ‘escaping’ from the Zul'Gurub instance which it managed to do through a player’s pet. If a player was hit by Corrupted Blood, the chances were that their pet would catch it too and some players, not having the resources to save their pet, dismissed them. But the pet remained infected with Corrupted Blood as the debuff and the timer for it were effectively paused once the pet was dismissed. Summoning the pet outside of the instance set Corrupted Blood going again, infecting the pet’s owner and also anyone else they came near… So you can imagine how catastrophic the effects were in an area populated by lower level players and NPCs. Check out the video above to see the plague in action. In less than a week, entire cities were uninhabitable with thousands of players dead and most major cities being avoided by those still alive. The problem was further compounded by infected high level players be able to keep themselves alive long enough to spread the plague to outlying regions. Blizzard stepped in to try and sort the problem, even imposing a quarantine on some areas but eventually it was fixed by changing how Hakkar’s attack worked.
Fortunately, dying from a debuff doesn’t carry penalties, so it was more of an inconvenience than anything else. One good thing to come from the WoW plague was that many experts in real-life biological plagues and epidemics are now looking at the WoW outbreak as a model for how a virus might spread in real life.