How a virus killed millions of people in World of Warcraft – Games

In September 2005 “World of Warcraft” was only a few months old, but millions of gamers were already playing it. The MMORPG (mass multiplayer online role-playing game) is still considered the largest of its kind. That is why millions of players once died virtually from the Corrupted Blood Plague.

Zul Gurub was one of the first big dungeons to be conquered. A group of 20 men went online against the blood god Hakkar and his henchmen. Since it was the first raid that was not in any dungeon but in the warm jungle, the enthusiasm of the “WoW” fans was huge. But “World of Warcraft” was still a young game that had some bugs in the program code. The largest was Corrupted Blood.

Corrupted Blood spreads like the corona virus

The debuff (negative effect) Corrupted Blood sucked life out of the player in the fight against Hakkar, which quickly led to death if you could not defeat the boss opponent in a very short time. The virus could also be transmitted to the other players. Everyone who was nearby was infected. So countless players died during the fight.

The Corrupted Blood Virus was programmed to make the battle against Hakkar more difficult and automatically disappeared after the battle. But there was a problem: Not only players, but also animals could be infected. The hunter class fights their enemies with the help of big cats or wolves, and so they too became infected – and spread the virus.

Animals were the problem

“World of Warcraft” consists of an incredibly large virtual world. So that you can get from A to B quickly, there is the soul stone, with which you can teleport similar to “Star Trek”. A hunter’s animal has now been infected during the boss fight with Hakkar. The hunter who survived the fight then teleported with the infected animal from the dungeon to the capital. The Corrupted Blood virus spread there and within a few minutes thousands of players died.

Blizzard had to restart the servers

The Corrupted Blood virus spread so quickly on Blizzard’s servers that players could be lucky if they weren’t instantly infected with the virus and died after logging in.

Blizzard finally corrected this mistake from “World of Warcraft” and has since learned from his mistakes. The legend of the Corrupted Blood debuff lives on and has even been investigated by an expert.

Corrupted Blood, a case for science

Epidemiologist Eric Lofgren investigated the Corrupted Blood debuff in 2007 with a special focus on player behavior. According to Lofgren, behavior in such a situation was difficult to understand, so there were players who went straight to the infected to cure them while others fled. Other players didn’t care about the virus because their character was strong enough and they could continue playing. They ignored the pathogen and further fueled the Corrupted Blood plague with their behavior.

The developer Blizzard tried to quarantine the players, but many did not stick to it. Finally, there was only one remedy: to set up the server again. We do not have this possibility in the real world. Therefore: keep your distance! This is the only way to contain the corona virus.

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