World of Warcraft Spawned 2005 Virtual Pandemic, Drawing CDC Study
Updated
Updated · Boing Boing · Jul 1
World of Warcraft Spawned 2005 Virtual Pandemic, Drawing CDC Study
1 articles · Updated · Boing Boing · Jul 1
Summary
A September 2005 World of Warcraft bug turned the Corrupted Blood debuff from a single raid mechanic into a game-wide plague that left major cities packed with dead characters within days.
A programming oversight let infected players fast-travel out of the dungeon, while pets reactivated outside the raid carried the disease into crowded capitals and kept transmission going.
Player behavior made the outbreak look strikingly real: some characters healed victims or warned others away, while others intentionally spread the plague for amusement.
Blizzard tried quarantines and server restarts, but the infection kept resurfacing until the company hard-reset servers to their pre-outbreak state after about a week.
The CDC later contacted Blizzard to study the event, and researchers said the unscripted human reactions gave the accidental simulation value for pandemic modeling.