Gaming’s Weirdest Moments: The Corrupted Blood Incident

July 14, 2016

When Blizzard introduced the new raid Zul’Gurub to its massively successful MMORPG World of Warcraft back in 2005, the last thing they expected was to inadvertently expose thousands of players to the video game equivalent of an Ebola monkey.

The raid’s end boss, Hakkar The Soulflayer (Wasn’t that the name of a Manowar song?) possessed a special move where he would unleash a spell named “Corrupted Blood”, a crippling hit point draining debuff that was also highly contagious. Programmed to only operate within the raid’s location, a bug in the code meant that pets and minions could carry the affliction beyond its intended parameters.

deathshire

Spelling instant doom unless your character was of a high level, The Corrupted Blood pandemic started to slowly infect entire cities, wiping out populations of players in mere hours and without a World of Warcraft version of Dustin Hoffman present to lend a hand, shit hit the fan fast.

Of course, there was also those who sought to propagate the spread of the plague because even in a world where there are ACTUAL trolls, it’s the players that prove themselves to be the real beasts, reveling in the chaos and destruction left in The Corrupted Blood’s wake.

as2

These bio-terrorists would willingly infect themselves and other pawns and stage raids on unsuspecting townships, quickly spreading the disease with the efficiency of a Dwarven Tom Jones before retreating into the mountains to avoid the frantic quarantines being put in place by Blizzard’s programmers.

The World of Warcraft players reacted in a variety of ways: Some persisted in staging biological attacks, some set up healing stations to try and help the afflicted and some tried to take advantage of the confusion by attempting to sell bootleg Alicia Keys CDs… It was a crazy time for everyone.

The once open community became wary and distrustful and many players abandoned the city, seeking refuge in the forests or by simply logging out of the game; corpses littered the streets and once thriving metropolises were reduced to large scale mausoleums, piled sky high with the bleached white bones of the deceased.

as3

Lasting just over a week and requiring a series of resets and patches in order to ensure that the virus wouldn’t be making a phoenix like reappearance, the event even managed to catch the eye of epidemiologists who noted the possibility for use of similar virtual scenarios in order to gauge possible reactions by the population.

Also of interest were the implications behind the terrorist attacks carried out in game and how these can be used as a model to base research upon.

Who would have thought a simple little glitch could have created such a stir?

as4

Oh.

Although entirely accidental, an epidemic modeled after The Corrupted Blood incident, only in a controllable environment, has the potential to add a unique spin to online events for games like GTA Online; just think, your character gets infected and, if they’re unable to stave off the effects, they die and are resurrected as a zombie for the duration of the event.

Higher level characters and those bestowed with random immunity would have to band together to scavenge medical supplies and fend off hordes of both NPC and player controlled undead, endowed with special abilities and all of that fancy stuff.

as5

An open world Dawn of the Dead game with a dynamically evolving viral system? We can only dream.