World of Warcraft experienced many bugs and other technical issues in its 17 years. But there was an incident in 2005 that made WoW nearly unplayable.
It all began with the raid “Zul’Gurub,” which had a special final boss: Hakkar. He infected players and their companions with the negative status effect “Corrupted Blood.” When the companions were summoned back from combat with the status, they retained it. When a player recalled their companion in a capital city, it infected all players and NPCs in the vicinity. The plague spread incredibly quickly and especially low-level players died instantly. The capitals were soon filled with corpses.
This virtual epidemic became a subject of research in the years that followed. Some researchers wrote an article about what scientific insights can be gained from the WoW plague.
The video tells you how it all happened and what measures Blizzard had to take to remove the plague from the game. World of Warcraft was hardly playable for almost a week.
Were you there at the time?
