Corrupted Blood

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This article is about a virtual reality plague. For the legal concept see Attainder.

Corrupted Blood was a virtual plague that infected characters in the computer game World of Warcraft; it was also the first disease to affect any MMORPG with a significant game effect.

1 Information
2 Scale and effect of Corrupted Blood
3 Real life comparison
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Information

The plague began on September 13, 2005 when Blizzard Entertainment, the developer of World of Warcraft, introduced a new instance called Zul'Gurub into the game as part of patch 1.7. Inside this instance was a boss named Hakkar the Soulflayer, the god of blood. Players who fought Hakkar were affected by his debuff (a spell which has a negative effect over a fixed period of time). The debuff, in this case, was Corrupted Blood, a spell that caused 250–300 points of damage (compared to the average health of 4000 for a player of the highest level) every few seconds to the afflicted player. The affliction was passed on to any players standing too close to infected players. While the curse would kill most lower-level players in a matter of seconds, higher-level players could keep themselves alive (via healing spells and other means) long enough to spread the disease around the immense landscape inside the game. Death caused by the debuff did not cause any durability penalty, unlike most other causes of death in the game. NPCs, combat pets, and non-combat pets were key in spreading the plague.^[1]

The disease would eventually go away as time passed or when the infected character died. The only way that a player was able to bring the disease outside of Zul'Gurub was by allowing a pet to get the debuff, dismissing the pet in less than five seconds, then summoning it in a populated area. (When dismissed, the pet retains the debuff and the timer of the buff is paused.) This debuff transmission technique was first seen with the "living bomb" debuff from Baron Geddon in Molten Core.

[edit] Scale and effect of Corrupted Blood

After a few days, Corrupted Blood had become World of Warcraft's version of the Black Death, rendering entire cities uninhabitable and causing players to avoid large clusters of other players, and in many cases, stop playing altogether.^{[citation needed]}

It is widely suspected that, due to the curse's peculiar behavior, it was never meant to leave Zul'Gurub and that the ability to infect pets and NPCs was a side effect unconsidered by the developers. The intended behavior involves the final boss fight with Hakkar. Every so often, Hakkar will drain life points out of everyone in the group fighting him. However, if the group kills a much smaller, significantly less powerful enemy, the "Son of Hakkar", he releases a poisonous cloud that afflicts everyone nearby with the disease. Then, when Hakkar tries to drain life from the players, he is instead affected by the poison and is damaged instead of restored. Players need to do this procedure multiple times during the boss fight to ensure that Hakkar does not continue to restore himself. Blizzard Entertainment tried several times to fix the problem, including imposing quarantine on certain places, eventually finding a cure.

Due to the large scale outbreak of the "plague" (some servers had half of their players infected), it drew wide attention from the media. Nina Fefferman, a Tufts University assistant research professor of public health and family medicine, calls for research on this incident, citing the resemblences with real-world plagues. Some scientists want to study how people would react in real life situations, by using the virtual counterpart as a point of reference.^[2]

In addition, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had requested statistics on this event for research on epidemics. ^[3]

[edit] Real life comparison

[edit] Infection behaviour

Corrupted Blood would be best described with the SIS model from the medical specialty of epidemiology. Because reinfection is possible with Corrupted Blood, susceptible players are those who have either never contracted the disease or who have managed to live through a bout or be resurrected after succumbing. Infected players are those experiencing the effects of the disease and capable of passing it to other players. Susceptible players are infected only by coming in contact with other infected players or NPCs. One notable difference from the SIS model is that players who are infected remain susceptible to further infection, as the effect is "stackable". An infected player standing near another infected player will suffer twice the negative effects as one not near another infected player. The negative effects have a direct positive linear correlation to the number of players around an individual player; this has no biological analogy.

[edit] Similarities

Even though it is a virtual plague, some similarities can be found in real-life epidemics. The psychological effects are the most notable. The spectrum of behaviour, including the onset of mass hysteria and mass migration with explosive spread to distant areas mimics real life epidemic response. Blizzard's attempts to control the epidemic through quarantine also reflects real-life infection control methods. The Plague is often transferred from population center to population center through animals (pets) much like the Black Plague was spread by the fleas of rats.

[edit] Dissimilarities

While superficially similar to an actual novel pathogen outbreak, there are several key differences:

The effect lasts only five seconds, though the effect is proportional to a character's health.
The effect is impossible to transfer from one population center to another accidentally.
A large percentage of the player base actively spread "Corrupted Blood" intentionally. While in a real-world analog a few individuals might deliberately spread such an infection (as in fact has happened as long ago as the Black Plague and as recently as AIDS), this is rare.