Plead the First

Its consequences are deadly. Its reach was unforseen. Luckily, it’s not happening in real life:

Players of Blizzard’s incredibly popular World of Warcraft are reporting the outbreak of a virtual plague that is spreading across major cities in the virtual land of Azeroth, infecting player characters at an alarming rate.

The trouble started when Blizzard programmers added a new instance [dungeon] … One of these instances, Zul’Grub, contained the god of blood, Hakkar. Hakkar was a powerful foe that could cast spells of his own, including a spell called Corrupted Blood. This spell did a large amount of damage to any player within the vicinity of the casting, and the effects lingered on after the spell was over.

What happened next was something Blizzard did not expect. Some of the players who had gone into the instance emerged back into the main world of Azeroth, and started spreading the Corrupted Blood disease to others who they came into close contact with. The infection soon spread into many of the cities and towns in the virtual world. Since the disease was intended to be a danger to powerful players, it tended to kill those less than level 50 almost instantly.

I play WoW, and it’s a very rich and detailed game. The amazing thing about this is that it’s an event that affects the entire game in a way totally unforseen by the developers, but it’s not a result of a bug or glitch. The game is working as intended, and one aspect of it has taken on a life of its own, unintentionally bringing even more realism to the game.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 23rd, 2005 at 11:44 am and is filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.