8 Massive Online Community Events That Changed Video Games

In another entry from Blizzard's premier MMO, dew events have lived longer in the memory of players than the virtual curse that ravaged World of Warcraft for one week in 2005.

The Corrupted Blood incident began when the then new raid Zul'Gurub and its end boss Hakkar the Soulflayer casted a spell called "corrupted blood" on players during the battle. By draining the hit points and being highly contagious to others, the seemingly innocuous effect would have a major impact.

The developers intended this curse to be merely temporary, fizzling out when the raid was completed. However, the debuff lingered on afterwards within player characters. Thanks to their minions and pets, "corrupted blood" inadvertently started spreading across the game's populous at a rapid pace. Quarantines were imposed by the developer, and players spreading the spell on purpose were branded in-game terrorists.

Low-level players in particular were easy prey, and the devs were forced to make changes because of this. Eventually, the issue was fixed via hard resets and quick fixes in the servers. Yet for all its seemingly insignificant impacts, the event has gone on to be examined by some epidemiologists, who have used it to analyse how things of this nature spread in the real world.

Do you have any more massive online events that changed the game? Let us know in the comments below...