Posted on 09/23/2005 5:50:14 PM PDT by Rodney King
A deadly virtual plague has broken out in the online game World of Warcraft. Although limited to only a few of the game's servers the numbers of characters that have fallen victim is thought to be in the thousands.
Originally it was thought that the deadly digital disease was the result of a programming bug in a location only recently added to the Warcraft game.
However, it now appears that players kicked off the plague and then kept it spreading after the first outbreak.
Since its launch in November 2004, World of Warcraft (Wow) has become the most widely played massively multiplayer online (MMO) game in the world.
Its creator, Blizzard, claims that now more than four million people are regular players.
Last rites
Wow is an online game that gives players the chance to adventure in the fantasy world of Azeroth that is populated by the usual mixture of humans, elves, orcs and other fantastic beasts.
As players explore the world, the characters they control become more powerful as they complete quests, kill monsters and find magical items and artefacts that boost abilities.
The Warcraft world is a familiar fantasy setting To give these powerful characters more of a challenge, Blizzard regularly introduces new places to explore in the online world.
In the last week, it added the Zul'Gurub dungeon which gave players a chance to confront and kill the fearsome Hakkar - the god of Blood.
In his death throes Hakkar hits foes with a "corrupted blood" infection that can instantly kill weaker characters.
The infection was only supposed to affect those in the immediate vicinity of Hakkar's corpse but some players found a way to transfer it to other areas of the game by infecting an in-game virtual pet with it.
This pet was then unleashed in the orc capital city of Ogrimmar and proved hugely effective as the Corrupted Blood plague spread from player to player.
Although computer controlled characters did not contract the plague, they are said to have acted as "carriers" and infected player-controlled characters they encountered.
Body count
The first server, or "realm" as Blizzard calls them, affected by the plague was Archimonde; but it is known to have spread to at least two others.
The spread of the disease could have been limited by the fact that Hakkar is difficult to kill, so some realms may not yet have got round to killing him and unleashing his parting shot. In World of Warcraft players can be orcs, humans or other fantastic creatures
The digital disease instantly killed lower level characters and did not take much longer to kill even powerful characters.
Many online discussion sites were buzzing with reports from the disaster zones with some describing seeing "hundreds" of bodies lying in the virtual streets of the online towns and cities.
"The debate amongst players now is if it really was intentional although due to the effects of the problem it seems unlikely," Paul Younger, an editor on the unofficial worldofwar.net site, told the BBC News website.
"It's giving players something to talk about and could possibly be considered the first proper 'world event'", he said.
Luckily the death of a character in World of Warcraft is not final so all those killed were soon resurrected.
Blizzard tried to control the plague by staging rolling re-starts of all the servers supporting the Warcraft realms and applying quick fixes.
However, there are reports that this has not solved all the problems and that isolated pockets of plague are breaking out again.
The "Corrupted Blood" plague is not the first virtual disease to break out in online worlds. In May 2000 many players of The Sims were outraged when their game characters died because of an infection contracted from a dirty virtual guinea pig.
How about foil fencing? Who says we don't do sports? My older boy just got his black belt. The difference is I am a grandfather and I am always with my kids. If fact I outran the little one on a Barbie jeep two hours ago.
I had a 60 night elf shadow priest I loved until it got inadvertantly nerfed by the rogue anti-fear trinket.
I used to laugh in the face of rogues :(
That is some great content!
I'm just worried that our country's getting so damn fat. AND, I see a lot of kids who are slaves to their games, be it on the console, at the computer, or with their gameboy on the plane. (I remember when I was a kid flying in a plane meant you go to talk to interesting people from all over the world!)
A mix of real-world sports and games is great - people playing games helps my paycheck! And it helps pay for technology and tools that advance more important things. But playing sports too keeps us from becoming a bunch of pasty-face wankers, so we gotta do that to!
Just as long as it doesn't spread to the actual players in the real world.
(snicker)
Sorry, couldn't help...someone had to say it.
(laughter)
Do that too. Hey, I have an idea. How about doing both!!!??? Then you can claim you're well rounded.
Honestly, sports aren't all they're cracked up to be. Wait... maybe that's cause I'm remembering the time I "cracked" open my chin big-time on some cheap 4x4 goal post that ran up and smashed me in the face when I wasn't looking. Lots of real blood for sure. I guess in retrospect I prefer cyber-blood 8^).
Hmmm, me thinks you haven't played a real MMORPG.
Right now as I am typing this on what I call my right hand Computer, My Left hand computer is logged into a game called Anarchy Online.
This game is a persistent world where the only time it is not operating is when it goes down for patches and maintenance.
The game was developed in Europe but the game servers are in the US.
Right now in that game I am in a conversation with people from seven different countries on three different continents. See in this day and age I don't have to get on a plane and go somewhere to meet interesting people. I just turn on my computer and log into my game and turn on the voice chat system. What is really fun is ribbing each other in game and learning how to cuss in different languages while we fight the bad guys!
Yeah, I hear the complaints about Priests, Paladins and particularly Druids as well. Supposedly, if I knew how to do all the right things at the right times under the right circumstances with my Druid I could rule in PVP battles. But, I pretty much suck at PVP (and don't really care). Then again, maybe if I could push 87 gazillion different button combinations in the span of 1 second like my son does, while simultaneously carrying on chat conversations with 2 other players plus someone in his guild, I'd be better. I truly marvel at the number of in-parallel actions & operations he manages to pull off, and the fluidity and speed at which he does it. Ahh, the younger cyber-generation.
Well, off to try to play my sucky 30 Tauren Druid for a while. Been fun.
If you want to be really cheap, should have done a tauren shaman. Blizzard hasn't nerfed those in forever.
The key to druids is moonfire spam. No cooldown, no cast time. They did nerf it a little. Root, moonfire.
I never really played a druid so I don't know all the intricacies.
Have any of you that play World of Warcraft ever read the forums there, especially the Off Topic one? For the most part it's a vast wasteland of stupidity but sometimes a political topic will be posted and among the mandatory Bush Sucks comments someone will actually say something intelligent. So fess up, which of you are trying to plant a seed of conservatism in the minds of those uninformed kids?
They should have heeded these words of wisdom:
"You can love your pets, but you can't loooooove your pets."
Im on that server! =D
Iron Forge was mass carnage during the outbreak. The splatting blood was pretty humorous. I have not seen an outbreak in a while though.
Craziechick of clan K C
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