THE CORRUPTED BLOOD PANDEMIC OF WORLD OF WARCRAFT

By Captain Chris | 

On Sept 13, 2005, a pandemic world changing disease began to spread in the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft; a suddenly relevant incident in our 2021 lives. 

An update to the game had introduced a new area for higher-level players, known as Zul'Gurub. In the area, there was a boss called "Hakkar the Soul Flayer" a massive, winged serpent that had a power that hadn't been introduced to the world yet: "Corrupted Blood".

Hakkar the Soul Flayer had a special attack that caused a player’s health to slowly drain as long as they are in the dungeon, meaning high level players could survive, but would need to be healed by other higher level players in order to stay alive. he plague spreads to other players within 30 feet or so every 10 seconds and damages them as it spreads. The “Corrupted Blood” infected everyone and everything brought into a dungeon and in WoW there are different classes a player can choose and two of the classes, warlocks and hunters, had pets. 

Credit: Blizzard Entertainment

Normally the “Corrupted Blood” isn’t supposed to leave the dungeon as players are cleared of it when they leave, or they die, and are cured at either of those two points. But players pets were being infected, put into storage, and then brought back out again outside of the dungeon and still had the “Corrupted Blood” meaning that every ten seconds, the pets were sneezing or coughing or whatever all over computer Non-Player characters in towns and cities and places where people were turning in quests.  

This turned major cities from this: 

Credit: Blizzard Entertainment

Into this:

Credit: Blizzard Entertainment

The pets would start spreading out Corrupted Blood to nearby players, quickly killing off low-level players and continuing the spread. To make things worse, the DOT (Damage over time) could also spread out to NPCs, which would usually not die to it due to their higher health pools, and this continued the spread of the DOT to player characters. This would leave crowded areas with hundreds and hundreds of skeletons on the floor, as players attempted to resurrect and leave the infected areas, only to quickly die again.

In WoW the player is punished for dying by needing to repair their armor, meaning this costs time and resources. Most quests done in WoW were centered in cities, meaning the game could not progress until the plague ended or was no longer infectious. For the majority of low to mid-level players, “Corrupted Blood” killed them in seconds. 

Credit: Blizzard Entertainment

This also impacted people’s ability to trade resources (people in WoW gathered things like metal and others could buy it from them and turn it into weapons) so the entire economy of the game crashed as nobody could produce any special items or get money for doing trades in the auction houses. The auction houses were only in major cities and players had to stand right next to the auctioneer, and dozens of other players, to make trades at all. 

Since players need money to repair their gear and damaged gear can’t be used at all, this made some players completely unable to play the game. 

Many found it difficult to even escape one of these cities as people are packed together and the cities are quite large. Those who could, abandoned the cities, fleeing into smaller towns or just the countryside to try to wait out the pandemic. Going along with this, Blizzard, the parent company, told players to observe quarantine procedures. This had a mixed reaction as many … 

1. Did not take them seriously and died in droves by going into major cities anyway. 
2. Would go into major cities to get a firsthand look as if they were tourists. 
3. Players formed informal groups to warn people about the pandemic and set up little miniature mobile towns, trading posts, and “hospitals” where healers could keep people alive until the plague wore off (it would go away after an hour or so, it just killed most players in under a minute as it was designed for only really high-level players)    
4. Higher level players with enough health tried to go into cities to kill / purge the infected NPC characters (they could die and then would respawn after a few minutes but be cured, so this could help in a weird way if they all died)
5. The trolls and griefers intentionally getting infected and then infecting others. 

Eventually Blizzard had to hard-reset their servers, a costly expenditure as they make money for being online, and a lack of online players means they lose money. But if the game is borderline unplayable because of a plague, it might be the better option to reset. 

Credit: Blizzard Entertainment

What was REALLY cool was that this became an excellent case study for scientists who study pandemic diseases as it’s uncommon to see how people react to one. 

What did these scientists learn… 

"When people react to public health emergencies, how those reactions really shape the course of things. We often view epidemics as these things that sort of happen to people. There's a virus and it's doing things. But really, it's a virus that's spreading between people, and how people interact and behave and comply with authority figures, or don't, those are all very important things. These things are very chaotic. You can't really predict 'oh yeah, everyone will quarantine. It'll be fine.' No, they won't.”

"To pull it back to a Corrupted Blood analogy, and something I've been thinking about—one of the critiques we got from a lot of people, both gamers and scientists, was over this idea of griefing," Dr. Lofgren says. "How griefing isn't really analogous to anything that takes place in the real world. People aren't intentionally getting people sick. And they might not be intentionally getting people sick, but willfully ignoring your potential to get people sick is pretty close to that. You start to see people like 'oh this isn't a big deal, I'm not going to change my behavior. I'm going to the concert and then going to see my elderly grandma anyway.' Maybe don't do that. That's a big takeaway. Epidemics are a social problem... Minimizing the seriousness of something is sort of real-world griefing."

One aspect of the epidemic that was not considered by epidemiologists in their models was curiosity, describing how players would rush into infected areas to witness the infection and then rush out. This was paralleled to real-world behavior, specifically with how journalists would cover an incident, and then leave the area.

Then Covid-19 happened, and for many being told to not go to the movies or out to a bar was a bridge too far and some would not listen to reason, even if it maimed or killed them. The evidence of a lethal plague was all around them but they would not stop. We saw economic collapse and a lack of people engaging in social gatherings, but we also saw people coughing on others when told to mask up or when asked to maintain social distance, just as the griefers and trolls had done. We also saw people helping to stop or abate a problem that was out of their control, from a social aspect, and being responsible for themselves and their community.   

What did these scientists learn… 

"When people react to public health emergencies, how those reactions really shape the course of things. We often view epidemics as these things that sort of happen to people. There's a virus and it's doing things. But really, it's a virus that's spreading between people, and how people interact and behave and comply with authority figures, or don't, those are all very important things. These things are very chaotic. You can't really predict 'oh yeah, everyone will quarantine. It'll be fine.' No, they won't.”