World of Warcraft: Everyone Has The Plague!

I couldn’t resist adding a little bit about this here, because I’ve found this bug (or should I say “intended feature that completely backlashed”?) to be highly interesting in the way it has spread. What I’m talking about is the Corrupted Blood debuff, that will kill low-level characters, and be transmitted like a viral agent by characters high enough in level to survive it:

Blizzard adds in a new instance, Zul’Gurub. Inside is the god of blood, Hakkar. Well, when you fight him he has a debuff called Corrputed Blood. It does like 250-350 damage to palyers and affects nearby players. The amazing thing is SOME PLAYERS have brought this disease (and it is a disease) back to the towns, outside of the instance. It starts spreading amongst the genral population including npcs, who can out generate the damage. Some servers have gotten so bad that you can’t go into the major cities without getting the plague (and anyone less than like level 50 nearly immediately die).

My first source about this was a post on Shacknews, but I also found this entry on Brian Carnell’s blog, that describes how exactly the “plague” was able to start spreading:

Included in the patch was a new 20-person raid instance called Zul’Grub. Some creatures in Zul’Grub randomly infect players with a Corrupted Blood, which causes a large hitpoint loss over a short period of time and can also be transmitted to other characters in the instance.

The problem is that a character with the debuff can apparently leave the instance using a hearthstone (a method of quickly teleporting back to one’s home city) and go to a major city, like Ironforge, and spread the disease to hundreds of characters. Most low-level characters will die very quickly. High level characters won’t, however, and will spread the disease. In addition, high level NPCs can also pick up the debuff and then spread it themselves.

Of course, while it wields promises of terrific roleplay for a person like me, I’m also very aware that low-level players probably don’t find this very amusing—nothing’s more frustrating than dying like that when all you wanted was to grab a couple hours playing after a day at work! I’m not sure as of yet how this is going to be fixed by Blizzard, since quarantining players hasn’t worked so far (they keep on breaking free!), but the very process has been fascinating to follow. It’s almost more true than real life itself, in a way—and almost more frightening as well, to see how something supposed to be completely created and kept in control by the hand of man has just… well, escaped from any control.