World of Warcraft – Corrupted Blood Plague

Back in 2005 (1 year after launch), Blizzard introduced Zul’Gurub. A new level 60 raid that was nothing like what was already in the game. For you that remember it, it was one of the unique raids until later on when it was modified into an 85 dungeon. The end boss of Zul’Gurub was Hakkar the Soulflayer, during the encounter with Hakkar, he would cast the Corrupted Blood debuff that dealt significant damage to whoever had it and was very contagious.

Classes with pets or minions were to blame for this outbreak as they learnt that once their companion had the debuff, they could be dismissed and brought out later with the debuff still attached and thus, the start of the epidemic.
Although no one truly knows what major city it was started in, one can only presume that it was either Orgrimmar (Horde capital) as most screenshots are of Orgrimmar but other cities such as Stormwind City or Ironforge could have been affected. These cities were quickly evacuated after a few hundred or thousand players’ bodies were covering the floor of each city. To lower levels relaxing in this cities, it was disastrous and would kill them almost instantly.

After a while, scientists and epidemic physicians became intrigued with what was going on in this environment and started to study what people would do if a real plague was to overtake the real world. They mostly studied the behaviour of players and what people are likely to do if something like this ever happened.
There was 3 types of players during this time, the first type was the one that made an effort to help. Trying the game mechanics to help heal and dispel the debuffs from players and trying to make a change to the plague that had taken over almost every major player encountering zone.
The second type of player was the ones that quit society essentially, they kept shy from any player afraid that they would contract the debuff and spread it further into the world.
The third type was the players that just quit, many players couldn’t bear dying every time they logged in or every time they need to sell some items in a big or small town.

The presumption of this event is that it wasn’t intention but did allow not only the game developers to know what was possible in games but gave a new insight of testing real life scenarios in a controlled environment such as game worlds.
This feat allowed for the 2008 promotion of the new expansion, Wrath of the Lich King which saw Blizzard make another plague. This plague wasn’t quite as disastrous and deadly as the first but was still interesting. This plague was through a week period but was planned as the introduction to the new storyline of the Lich King. That week had things in order to be done on each day, the last day being the release of the new expansion.

Was you playing during this plague? What do you think of it?

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