1. An In-Game Plague Became An Epidemiological Case Study
The most notorious player-driven event in World of Warcraft's rich history has to be the notorious Corrupted Blood Incident. A tale of how a seemingly insignificant glitch escalated into a full-scale pandemic, the incident serves as a reminder of how, even in the most controlled environment, the unexpected can and will happen. A bit like Jurassic Park. The epidemic originated on the 13th of September 2005, following the opening of a new raid instance named Zul'Gurub. The raid's final boss was able to give a debuff to players called Corrupted Blood, which acted like a disease and dealt huge amounts of damage over time. To prevent its spread, the disease was designed to disappear upon leaving the raid instance. However, thanks to an error in the programming, player minions and pets were able to carry Corrupted Blood even after leaving Zul'Gurub. The disease was transmitted to any characters that got too close, and it was damaging enough to kill lower-levelled characters within mere seconds. Of course, more powerful players could keep themselves alive through the use of potions and healing spells. The disease swiftly spread on at least three major servers, helped along by anarchic players that intentionally attempted to infect others. Even worse, non-player characters (NPCs) could catch the Corrupted Blood disease too and, although they took no damage from it, they could pass it on to others. What followed was more post-apocalyptic than any zombie survival game. Upon hearing the news, players fled to the remotest areas of the world, turning the typically densely populated capital cities into spooky ghost towns. Reports (and screenshots) at the time revealed that, in certain areas, the floor wasn't visible due to the thousands of corpses lining the streets. Blizzard tried numerous methods to resolve the problem. Voluntary quarantine programs were put in place, but failed due to players not taking it seriously. Eventually, one week later, the company was forced to issue hard resets to the affected servers, and hotfixing the issue that started it all. The event has since been commentated on by security and medical experts worldwide as a classic example of a population's reaction to disease outbreaks. Physicians have even used data from the event to study epidemics and the means by which to control them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3eLSkUfw-M
