World of Warcraft Epidemiology - The Corrupted Blood Plague (And Why It Matters) - Extra Credits

Let's look at how, in 2005, World of Warcraft accidentally provided a virtual simulation of a pandemic that academics have been studying in papers since.

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♪ Intro Music: "Penguin Cap" by CarboHydroM

♪ Outro Music: “Madcap Magma"
By: Fxsnowy and Skrypnyk

[extrahistory]

If you or a loved one played World of Warcraft in 2005, you may be entitled to financial compensation.

[illidan]

Fun fact, in the current expansion Battle for Azeroth, Blizzard weaved the corrupted blood plague into the lore of the game. The plague had once ravaged the ancient troll empire of Zandalar, which was caused by a troll wanting to summon Hakkar. The result was thousands and thousands of death and the creation of blood troll, trolls obsessed with blood magic. Blood troll and blood magic is currently the main antagonist in the game as of patch 8.0.

[andrebetita]

"Other players decided that, sick or not, they still needed to make money. So they did the equivalent of going to work." => I'm watching this in 2020 and this hits so hard all my gear is broken now.

[delsquaredprogramming]

"pandemics are thankfully rare"

Cries in coronavirus

[adeadphish]

Fun fact, the CDC is actually referencing this event as a model Of pandemic response in addressing COVID-19 and some players have even cited similarities in behavior between current quarantines and back then

[GhostKitten]

"the next big epidemic" I'm from the future. Corona virus says hey.

[LagunaCrale]

A small note - the exact bug going on wasn't that people forgot to heal their pets, it's that pets could be swapped out. So a player would dismiss a pet with Corrupted Blood, and pull out a different pet more effective for the encounter. The battle would end, and corrupted blood would too. But the dismissed pet still had it - so when you called that pet back out, it could transfer Corrupted Blood. (So, the bug is that the game wasn't dumping states on pets dismissed during battle).

[conan]

i remember this so clearly. The corpses littering Durotar all the way to Thunderbluff and undercity. death was everywhere except the wilderness. luckily i was maxed out and tried to help as much as possible, i actually felt like a doctor and loved playing Priest. ah the good old days of WoW with the best community ever. Those were the days

[MisterB-dr]

One of the the things you didn’t mention was how their were groups of people going around as effectively hit squads killing anyone with the corrupted blood

[dragonslair]

Another important detail is that there was no way for players to develop an immunity to the plague, no matter how many times they were infected. The same player could be infected over and over indefinitely, meaning that herd immunity would never kick in to deprive the plague of new hosts.

[nelswolf]

"May help save actual lives in the real world."
Politicians: allow us to introduce ourselves

[moonstruck]

It was so fascinating to see how people reacted to the outbreak, the real-life methods people took to deal with it - some running and living in quarantine, some trying to help, some being malicious. It's neat to see how even in a virtual world, humanity always reacts the same way to situations that reflect ones in real life.

[chadirby]

For the Lich King expansion, Blizzard did an intentional tribute to the Corrupted Blood plague, with the zombie plague. It was pretty similar, but nowhere near as deadly.

On our server, we organized a countermeasure, intentionally using a real-world tactic: Ring Inoculation.

We'd start at the entry points (city gates, inns, and the tram tunnel), post some healers there, and start working our way to the middle of the city. We got to the point where we could clear Stormwind completely in just a few minutes, and cure the incoming "terrorist" players as they tried to enter the city.

After that, we just had to handle the occasional pop-up infection from the normal vectors and keep an eye on the entries for new zombies.

[zuus]

Me 6 months ago: yea but nobody would go out and purposely try to infect people just for funsies

Me now: oh my God they were right

[Shady]

Time to study this some more...




Might be needed soon

[CarMADforever]

I wonder if any dev companies running high count MMOs actually get approached by the scientific communities to "engineer" an outbreak, like this happened 13 years ago now and I personally haven't heard of anything like this happening since or on such a scale.... I think it's time to incite a little bit of chaos again, for science

[aelfrey]

I have heard of this tale before, and when I saw what this video is about, I dropped everything to watch it! Thank you for bringing this to us!

[peregrinemiles]

I was there.
Cleansing noobs trying to escape ironforge.
We only managed to hold the line for 2 hours.
We ended up driven all the way back into instances trying to find functional vendors.

[DVlicious]

"Because pandemics are, thankfully, rare."

Yet here we are a bit over a year after.

[deusexaethera]

When COVID-19 is over, please do some research and make a video about whether the studies resulting from this "digital pandemic" actually provided any useful strategies for dealing with COVID-19. I will be interested to hear what the similarities and differences were.