10 Genius Ways Video Games Fixed Their Own Mistakes

6. A Virtual Epidemic Became An Emergent "World Event" - World Of Warcraft

The Corrupted Blood incident was a virtual plague that spread throughout World of Warcraft for a week in 2005, after Blizzard updated the game with a new raid.

The raid concluded with players battling the boss known as Hakkar of Zul'Gurub, who could hurt players with a debuff called Corrupted Blood, which could spread between party members and kill lower-level players within seconds. Though the debuff was supposed to disappear upon a player's death, many reported that their pets would remain infected upon resurrection, and the "disease" quickly began spreading through several of the game's servers courtesy of these afflicted pets.

Skeletons littered the streets, and while chaos reigned, Blizzard made the decision to hard-reset the servers to fix the issue.

Blizzard eventually stopped the plague by making pets immune to Corrupted Blood, yet even once things returned to normal, players debated whether or not the outbreak was indeed a glitch or not.

The plague proved popular enough that it was even studied by disease prevention institutions and Universities worldwide, in order to further track how infections spread and humans behave during a crisis scenario - even a digital one.

While for many games such a glitch could've been the kiss of death or at least presented a major PR problem, World of Warcraft's fiercely loyal player-base toughed it out and even embraced the insanity, as did Blizzard themselves.