Virtual Virus Kills Virtual People

[hesperus]

Too weird . . .

Virtual plague spreading like wildfire in World of Warcraft

9/21/2005 4:47:00 PM, by Jeremy Reimer

Players of Blizzard's incredibly popular World of Warcraft are reporting the outbreak of a virtual plague that is spreading across major cities in the virtual land of Azeroth, infecting player characters at an alarming rate.

The trouble started when Blizzard programmers added a new instance, which is a separate area connected to the outside world that players can enter and attempt unique quests. One of these instances, Zul'Grub, contained the god of blood, Hakkar. Hakkar was a powerful foe that could cast spells of his own, including a spell called Corrupted Blood. This spell did a large amount of damage to any player within the vicinity of the casting, and the effects lingered on after the spell was over.

What happened next was something Blizzard did not expect . . .

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050921-5337.html

[the_JinX]

A funny reaction to this: http://wowaids.ytmnd.com/

Also check out this lice action video of hundreds of people dieing in the streets..
http://files.filefront.com/WoW_plaug.../fileinfo.html

[CXGJarrod]

Its a cool idea in thought, but I have heard that high level people camp the respawn spots so you die, go back to respawn and then die again cause the person infected you. It would be pretty lame to keep dying like that...

[keezel]

That's hillarious.

So how many people around here play WoW?

[foxyloxley]

It would be even more interesting if epidemiologists in the real world found that this event was worthy of studying as a kind of controlled experiment in disease propagation.

Hmmm .....
I 'think' I have just seen the future of medical research

[Cybr1d]

I played, for about a month....bleh. I think i'm tired of all these games. Trying out City of Heroes, and planning on Beta testing City of Villains. I dunno...it seems OK...but I think i'm better off just blowing people's heads off with an awp.

[xierox]

Originally posted here by keezel
That's hillarious.

So how many people around here play WoW?

I played for a month, then quite because I was enjoying it so much much that I wasn't spending any time with my friends. And considering I was only home for three months from college, that wasn't cool. I did manage to hit level 30 in that month, though, and that was only playing for a bit after work.

- X

[CXGJarrod]

Cybr1d has gone through most of the MMOrgs on the market. (Ragnarok, FFXI, Matrix Online, WOW and now City of Hero's)

I am still playing FFXI after he got me started on it. (After leaving me on the Siren server once he got me a World Pass there)