The current global pandemic is inspiring a lot of people to look back through history to see how humans responded to the spread of similarly deadly viruses in an effort to, hopefully, learn from our mistakes and save some lives. With that in mind, let us venture back to the distant past of 2005 when a dangerous bloodborne illness nearly decimated the digital population of Blizzard’s World Of Warcraft.
As the host of the highly informative YouTube channel Half As Interesting explains, the “disease” that infected World Of Warcraft began with the introduction of a new boss, Hakkar the Soulflayer. Given this particular Soulflayer’s predilection for draining players’ blood in order to refuel his own health bar, the trick to defeating him involved infecting yourself with “Corrupted Blood” so that Hakkar found himself weakened as opposed to healed when he drained you of your fluids.
It was a fun mechanic that should have stayed isolated in the raid arena of Zul’Gurub, but, unfortunately, a coding error resulted in players’ pets retaining the corrupted blood when they re-spawned in the main world. This quickly spread to other pets, other players, and soon threatened to kill everyone’s digital avatars.
What resulted from this viral glitch was an epidemiologist’s dream: A live model of viral spread in which avatars were controlled by real humans making real choices about how to stay safe, how to help those in need, or, as the case may be, how to ignore warning signs and continue to infect other players. It’s a fascinating look at the diversity of responses to a deadly contagion with, of course, much lower stakes than our current pandemic.
In the end, over 4 million players were infected and Blizzard was forced to do a hard reset on the World Of Warcraft servers. We’re no scientists, but we don’t think that solution will work in the real world.
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14 Comments
i was there, man! the city streets were mass graves! We waded knee-deep through the bones and corpses of our allies and enemies alike!One detail that wasn’t mentioned in the video: max-level, top-geared elite players were not really in mortal danger — they could heal/resist their way through the disease, although they could of course spread the infection as easily as anyone. Mid and low level players, meanwhile, were practically guaranteed to die (feel free to draw your own parallels with the U.S. health care system there).
Yes! Totally remember this. Ironforge was hilarious.
Still, it was quite moving watching all those level 90 paladins singing ‘Imagine’ together.
pretty sure 60 was max level at the time.
We’re no scientists, but we don’t think that solution will work in the real world.We have to be willing to try all options. These are extraordinary times. Besides, this simulation has obviously run its course and is hopelessly corrupted. Let’s restore back to our save point in early 2016.
Make that the save point prior to November 2000 and upgrading a certain state’s ballot papers to reduce confusion while we’re at it.
let’s be real, it’s been pretty fucked from the start, but if i were to pick a minor detail to alter to positively affect how America turns out, it’d definitely be something to stop the initial slave trade from forming. we are still, to this day, reaping misery and violence from that atrocity.
Nah, you can’t change that. But we could change the period of Reconstruction and put a heel on the neck of southern insurrectionists who spat in the face of the federal government, who did absolutely nothing, and thus creating the climate for which the United States sits in today. If we stomped out the South when we had the chance, we wouldn’t be living through the hissy fits we are today.
No way. Losi g 3 years of grinding is bad enough, I don’t want to lose 20.But maybe… I wouldn’t mind being 23 again. I would certainly fuck a LOT more.
i’ve seen that alternate universe. You end up masturbating a lot again.
Get Neo to reboot the Matrix. This version sucks. It feels like the Merovingian is running it.
“the original universe was cool and original, but this second universe seems just like timepass till the third universe wraps all this up.”
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Wow, the smug is strong in that video.