Some of you might remember the 
Corrupted Blood pandemic from a few years back, when Hakkar became the Number 1 cause of death throughout the entire World of Warcraft.
Some of you (mostly those living in the Americas I guess) might be thinking about the recent Swine Flu H1N1 outbreak, which is still a reason for a lot of worries among most families in not only the Americas, but other continents as well.
But have you even imagined that the two events may not only be similar in character, but that the players' behaviour during Hakkar's madness could be used by U.S. Department of Homeland Security? Well, it's not only possible, but it's happening!
Read on to find out what MyFox National posted.
In 2005, "World of Warcraft" publisher Blizzard Entertainment introduced a virus called Corrupted Blood into the game world that players' characters could pass along to one another. A quarantine was ordered for infected characters, but many players ignored it and continued to interact with one another. Eventually, the virus was spread to more than four million characters.
"Suddenly, there did exist an experimental framework to watch how people would behave during an epidemic," said Nina Fefferman, assistant professor at the Center for Discreet Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Fefferman and a colleague published a study on the "Corrupted Blood" outbreak in the Lancet Infectious Diseases Journal. They are currently consulting with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on human behavior during pandemics. "We don't expect people to behave the same way in a virtual world, but it's closer than asking them hypothetical questions," Fefferman said.
"World of Warcraft" actually contains swine flu — in the form of a spell of the same name — which also has a chance of triggering an outbreak in the game world.
A hilarious Blog post I found on my (2nd) favorite Blog: the Wowhead Blog.
Back in September 2005, Hakkar did an AoE (Area of Effect) spell that did damage to players every couple of seconds, and if you were around another Player/NPC, it would get onto them. People found out that if you got it on a Pet or Minion and instantly desummoned that Pet/Minion, it would stay on it until you spawned it again and the spell ran it's course.
So, people exploited the bug and spawned their Pets/Minions around the world in all the major cities including Ironforge, Orgrimmar, Stormwind, and Undercity. People quickly became infected, and (as you could imagine) thousands of players died.
In the end, 4 million players were fully infected by this plague. All the cities listed above were layered in dead bodies, and they were free of any type of NPC or Player. Finally, in Patch 1.8.0 Blizzard fixed the issue.
Now, scientists are trying to figure out if there is some type of framework that could help with the Swine Flu 'pandemic'.
7 Comments
Lmfao, that’s strange, sad, and yet quite ingenious.
Yup 😛
LOL I agree with David too. 😛
I remember that epidemic. Although I don’t play the game, my friend listed every detail to me, i actually did some research into it with my colleagues.
It was quite an… entertaining time in WoW history 😛
That sounds sooo coool O-O
It’s not an original concept. Developers in Korea and China have did it with other “fictional diseases” like SRAS. ;0