[Repost] [Games] World of Warcraft (Part 1: Beta and Vanilla) - dinosaur cartels, naked gnome protest marches, racist stereotypes, funeral massacres, and elf orgies in a tavern in the woods
Original post by Rumbleskim on /r/hobbydrama.
In this series I’ll be covering most of WoW’s biggest controversies, dramas and scandals, as well as plenty of smaller, weird little tales. Any one of these is worthy of its own write-up, but I assume no one wants to see 50+ different World of Warcraft related posts. By the time I finished writing up all the weird shit from WoW’s first release, I had double the character count of a single post. And WoW has nine expansions and several spin offs, not to mention drama at its parent company, Activision-Blizzard. So I have decided to split this post up into parts. As for the entries in this post, I’ve tried to put them in chronological order, but there are some dramas that stretched out over many years – and in those cases, I placed them where they started.
- Part 2 - Burning Crusade
- Part 3 - Wrath of the Lich King
- Part 4 - Cataclysm
- Part 5 - Mists of Pandaria
- Part 6 - Warlords of Draenor
- Part 7 - Classic and Legion
- Part 8 - Battle for Azeroth
- Part 9 - Ruined Franchises
- Part 10 - The Fall of Blizzard
- Part 11 - Shadowlands
What is World of Warcraft?
While I’m sure almost everyone has at least some idea of what WoW is, I’ll give a little overview. World of Warcraft is an MMORPG developed by Blizzard Entertainment – a fantasy game which takes place in the colossal online world of Azeroth, where players can quest, fight, and interact with other players. There are two factions – the Horde and the Alliance – each had separate playable races, separate cities, economies, questlines, politics, backstories, and attitudes. The factions acted as the cornerstone for the game’s PvP.
WoW was an immediate hit when it first came out in November 2004. It followed on the heels of games like Everquest and Ultima Online, but completely reinvented the formula, with more player conveniences, far greater variety, graphical fidelity, and storytelling. It was a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stagnating genre, and went on to dominate the MMORPG genre for two decades. Here is a video beginner’s guide to those who need it.
EDIT: Here’s a great video essay which came out just after this series ended which gives a good introduction to the history of WoW.
Part 1 - Beta and Vanilla
‘Vanilla’ is the term players use to refer to the game upon its release. The game was unpolished, its community a wild west where anything went. The rules and expectations of MMORPGs hadn’t really been figured out yet, and so this is when a lot of WoW’s strangest dramas took place. We won’t be touching crazes like the hilarious Onyxia Wipe or Leeroy Jenkins or The Talisman of Binding Shard, because there isn’t really enough meat on the bones there. But they’re fun to go back to anyway.
The Goldshire Inn
TW: Sexual abuse, Rape, Pedophilia
Let’s jump right in at the deep end.
From the start, one of WoW’s most niche (and enduring) attractions has been roleplay. The dominant RP (Roleplay) servers are Moonguard (US) and Argent Dawn (EU), and it is in these communities that we lay our scene. Over the years, many areas and races would be added to the game, giving players loads of different options for where, how and who they could roleplay. But in WoW’s early days, one building would develop a reputation for which it still lives in infamy today. A picturesque little tavern in a snow-white esque woodland. The Goldshire Inn.
One large aspect of RP is ERP (Erotic Role Play). After all, Roleplayers need love too. In case it wasn’t obvious, this is the process of meeting up with other players and roleplaying out sexual encounters.
Dwarves and Gnomes don’t do it for most players (not everyone can appreciate the taste of fine wine), so many ERPers would create a human character (or recreate one with a different appearance/sex) to get their digital rocks off. New humans started in Elwynn Forest at Northshire, and as you can see from the map, the nearest settlement is Goldshire. And Goldshire has an inn. With a bar, bedrooms, and a dark basement full of cobwebs. You can see where this is going.
Goldshire Inn quickly became the hub of roleplay debauchery on WoW. A hive of the blackest scum and villainy. On a good evening, the inn heaved with the pixellated bosoms of naked women dancing on railings, the ‘thip thap thip thap’ of steps as players awkwardly move back and forth, clipping through each other’s bodies. Of course, not all of the roleplay falls into what we would consider ‘legal’. There are plenty of adults roleplaying as children, children roleplaying as adults, abuse, bondage, rape, vore, furry, scat – no matter what you’re into, there’s always someone at Goldshire who shares your degenerate sexual proclivities.
The dwarf chases after an orc who runs through the inn with his snow cannon. Seconds later, a chat window pops up: “You horny? What’s your number?” Those who spend time in the tavern quickly run into various characters, such as the night elves, who scurry across the screen in their lingerie, intensely eyeing them before announcing in all caps: “I’m going to fuck you unconscious!”
Various Addons have been created which allow players to create RP profiles, detailing everything about them from age to gender to height to their no-doubt tragic backstories. But these profiles are only visible to other people with the Addon. So there’s often an entire subtextual layer beneath the obvious roleplay, only visible to those in the know.
There’s a slight problem here, however. Humans are the most popular race for first-time players, and for many of them, their first interaction with the greater WoW community is at Goldshire (LINKS TO REDDIT). There are even important quests which force them into the inn, where they are bombarded with booties and breasts, whispered offers of sexual bliss, and confronted with sights that will stay with them forever. This has resulted in a lot of scarred psyches and a lot of awakened fetishes over the years.
Aside from the obvious memes and jokes, Goldshire Inn has provoked discussions of ditigal consent, and child safety online. WoW has a minimum age rating of 12 and is available for free until level 20. For some ERPers, chasing and hunting down non-consenting players across the game-world is part of the fun. For others, they try to move the situation out of the game ASAP, offering to exchange pictures, meet up, or do video calls. In 2010, Blizzard announced it would ‘patrol’ Goldshire Inn and sanction players who infringed upon community guidelines, but that never seemed to do much.
“It was supposed to be a nice evening. I created a mage and went straight to Goldshire. The tavern was packed. All the guests were wearing either fancy costumes or nothing at all. I’ve never seen so many purple breasts. I thought I’d landed in a real sex club,” Klara said.
“A female human really wanted to 69 with me as a few paladins watch and simulate ejaculation through spells that emit white light.”
As the old saying goes, what happens in Goldshire stays in Goldshire.
The Warrior Indalamar
This is actually a story from WoW’s beta, but I’m including it here.
For WoW’s entire lifespan, it would see disputes, jokes, and complaints over which class is overpowered and which is underpowered. Before the game, one thing was certain – Warriors were the worst. A lot of players avoided them entirely, and refused to group up with them because they were so ineffective in battle. There were widespread demands for them to be buffed (made more powerful).
But there was one man who sought to prove that Warriors weren’t so bad after all. This was Indalamar. He went against the consensus, insisting that Warriors were, if anything, overpowered. No one believed him. So he posted a video which tore through the community like wildfire.
In the video, Andalamar ran around, downing enemies one after another in two hits or less. It turned out, the Warrior’s abilities held a power that no one had worked out yet. It all had to do with an ability called Bloodthirst – it became active after killing an enemy, and dramatically raised the damage of the next strike. As soon as you hit the next enemy, you would deal massive damage and raise your haste (attack speed) by 35%. The enemy would die almost immediately, activating Bloodthirst for the next enemy, and the next.
Indalamar had been right. Warriors hadn’t been weak, they’d been the strongest class in the game. But before the video had even finished making the rounds, Blizzard nerfed them. The fact that a player had singlehandedly forced Blizzard to change the game made him a household name in the community, beloved by some and hated by others (mostly other Warriors). In fact, he received huge amounts of abuse online from players who felt he had made an already weak class even weaker.
But this story has a happy ending. Indalamar was hired by Blizzard, and they have paid homage to him a number of times. He had his own card in the WoW Trading Card Game, and his own item in a raid named ‘Ramaladni’s Blade of Culling’ (Ramaladni is, of course, Indalamar backwards).
To this day, Indalamar is a legend among WoW players. He was one of the first to reach the heights of stardom – but he would not be the last.
The Suicide Scandal
We’ll continue our morbid theme with a particularly upsetting story from China. The Chinese relationship with World of Warcraft is long and complicated, and I’ll be returning to it periodically throughout this post. Perhaps this event is an omen of things to come.
On 27 December 2004, a thirteen year high school student named Zhang Xiaoyi logged onto his night elf and said his goodbyes to his fellow players. Then he leapt from a 24-storey window in Tianjin. He had just played World of Warcraft for a 36 consecutive hours. Players were quick to link his suicide to the trend of WoW Basejumping, in which characters jump off tall buildings or natural features and compete to see how far they can fall without dying. His suicide note said he wanted to join the heroes of the game, and he left behind a diary in which he obsessed over it day and night. The hospital in Beijing where Zhang was declared dead had this to say:
“Zhang had excessively indulged in unhealthy games and was addicted to the Internet.”
Zhang’s parents sued Blizzard at Chaoyang District People’s Court in Beijing, requesting 100,000 yuan ($12,500) in compensation, which seems a paltry amount. They claimed the game was inappropriate for young people, due to the way it trapped them in a cycle of addiction, and they called for a warning label to be added to WoW’s marketing and packaging which said ‘Playing games excessively can harm health’. At the time, a report issued by the China Youth Association for Internet Development stated that up to 13.2% of young people were addicted to computers.
The incident led to a massive outcry, both in the West and China, about the potentially harmful effects of video games. At the time, China had no age ratings like the US, where WoW was rated ‘T for Teen’. Zhang Chunliang, a Chinese expert on game addiction, called for ratings to be established.
Many foreign countries have established strict game classification systems to help parents determine which games are suitable for their children. China should also establish such a system."
The Chinese government refused. Several attempts have been made to push a ratings system, first in 2004 by the Chinese Consumer Association, then again by the Communist Youth League in China, then again in 2010 by the Institute for Cultural Industries, then again in 2011, then again in 2019. Critics accuse China of being too covetous over control.
“The government is not willing to let go of the [market] control,” Zhang Chundi, gaming analyst at London-based research firm Ampere Analysis, told Protocol. He explained that most rating systems involve an industry association that designated age-based labels for games, but Chinese regulators are wary of transferring such power to a private organization.
This was WoW’s first taste of the dangers of video game addiction – and it was one of China’s too. But it was really just the start. World of Warcraft would go on to shape the conversation on video game addiction for years to come. It was compared to crack cocaine and overplaying has been associated with numerous health issues. In June 2018, the World Health Organisation listed “gaming disorder” as a disease which impairs control and causes victims to lose interest in other daily activities or hobbies.
China would go on to create multiple laws combatting video game addiction, from limiting how long minors can play games, to banning all games on school days. They would even instate military-style boot camps to break video game addictions.
Critics of these laws have called them authoriarian, and insisted that it is a parent’s responsibility to control their childrens’ access to online games. Many have pointed out that video game addiction is often not a disease, but is rather a symptom of other issues, and tackling these issues should be the main priority.
To most, this seemed like a non-issue. What kind of idiot would get addicted to an online game?
They would change their tune soon enough.
The Million Gnome March
Time to lighten things up a bit.
This was one of WoW’s strangest dramas. Just two months after the release of the game Blizzard was still making drastic changes left and right to the balance of the classes. Players were eager to make their opinions known, because any change, however bad, could be the one Blizzard chose to stick with. But WoW had a huge playerbase, even then, and it took a lot to get Blizzard’s attention. Not everyone was an Indalamar.
Only collective action would do.
The date was 29th January 2005. It was a Friday evening on the server Argent Dawn, and the halls of Ironforge were bustling with players, all of them still new to the game, excitedly trading, looking for groups to tackle dungeons, discussing what new features might be on the way, and roleplaying in what would go on to become the game’s biggest RP server. Perhaps some of them knew about the thunderous anger boiling away on the official forums about nerfs to Warriors, but to the ignorant masses, what happened next came as a total surprise.
A few level one gnomes waddled through the city’s colossal gate. That in itself wasn’t weird. But then a half dozen more followed. And a dozen after that. And then a hundred. And then a thousand. The gnomes kept coming, rushing through the Commons in a fleshy, knee-high torrent of pigtails and low-quality shields. Most of them were naked. In the words of one witness:
”I cannot adequately describe how horrifying a vision that is.” Said one liveblogger
Ironforge was the main hub for Alliance players at the time, so they were welcomed by an audience of hundreds, which swelled uncontrollably as they were joined by other onlookers who wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and possibly join in the gnomery for themselves – first it was members of the Horde on Argent Dawn, then players from other servers. Nothing like this had ever been done before. Some of the locals demanded the protesters go protest somewhere else, and were presumably rewarded for their humbuggery with some nasty headbuts to the shins. But the Million Gnome March could not be stopped.
It began to hit critical mass.
The servers started to lag, players started falling through the world or being knocked out of the game. WoW couldn’t keep up. The Argent Dawn server was great at processing industrial amounts of elaborately emoted porn, but it had never handled crowds like this.
Xanan appeared at the gates. He was a GM – a Game Master. They were WoW’s in-game moderators, reachable only through a reporting tool. To see one in person was an anomaly. It never happened. But the protest had called and Blizzard had answered.
“omg omg, there’s an actual GM character here now in Ironforge near the bridge,” he wrote. "In 50-some levels, I have never seen an actual GM character EVER in this game.”
But Blizzard wasn’t there to parley. Xanan’s first request was polite. “This is severely impacting other players’ gaming experiences. Please be advised failure to disperse can result in disciplinary action.” He said, to much derision. The gnomes refused. They would not be moved. The revolution had come and they would rather die on their adorable little feet than live as slaves.
Meanwhile, Argent Dawn continued collapsing around them, to the point where many protesters couldn’t leave even if they wanted to. Blizzard manually restarted the server, knocking everyone offline, but they were back the moment turned on again. Xanan made one final warning.
Attention: Gathering on a realm with intent to hinder gameplay is considered griefing and will not be tolerated. If you are here for the Warrior protest, please log off and return to playing on your usual realm.
We appreciate your opinion, but protesting in game is not a valid way to give us feedback. Please post your feedback on the forums instead. If you do not comply, we will begin taking action against accounts.
Please leave this area if you are here to disrupt game play (sic) as we are suspending all accounts.
Shit had gotten real. A large swathe of protesters took this as acknowledgement of their goals, and logged off before the ban hammer started falling. Argent Dawn locals fled Ironforge in droves. And in a moment of uncompromising brutality that would foreshadow Blizzard’s treatment of protesters and unions for years to come, the suspensions began. The length of the bans varied from a few hours to multiple days, but the end result was the same. A desolated Ironforge.
The Gnomes had fallen.
They vented their anger on the forums once again, but the Million Gnome March had ironically pushed the plight of Warriors to the side. There was a far bigger debate going on now – the rights of players to assemble online, virtual protests, synthetic statehood and the ethics of Blizzard’s response. For its part, Blizzard claimed it had taken necessary action to protect its servers and to keep Argent Dawn running, and that repeating the protest would result in permanent bans. Did that make it acceptable? The protesters pointed out that disrupting society was the entire point of collective action. It was designed to force higher powers to pay attention.
Much like the issue of Goldshire Inn, [people were beginning to realise that online worlds often the same political dilemmas as the real world, but unlike the real world, there were no protections or guidelines in place. These were lawless lands. Years would pass before governments truly began to create and enforce policy on how people and companies can act online.
In the end, Warriors remained weak. Game Designer Tom Chilton wrote a totally separate post about the virtues of Warriors and their unique abilities, but outlined no plans to change them. Players had wide-ranging opinions on the protest.
MMOGs are suppose to be virtual playgrounds, or at least that was the original ideal. However Blizzard doesn’t seem to be able to handle that kind of abstract thinking.
Others condemned the protest
Blizzard does the right thing by breaking up the congregation and sending people away to reduce lag. It’s not like the CEO and his cronies are sitting around Dun Murogh waiting to be impressed by your ‘show of solidarity’, the only people who are noticing what’s going on are the people who suddenly can’t loot their kills, pick their herbs, etc. because the servers are starting to meltdown.
Another had this to say
a MMORPG isn’t a democracy. You do not have freedom of speech, you do not have the freedom to assemble. The Constitution does not apply to a virtual world that is owned by a company. The ToS you signed pretty much waive your rights in the real world.
Frankly, assembling a mass to cause lag and crash a server is an idiotic way to voice your opinions. There are the forums, there is email, there are phone numbers, and there is the allmighty credit card you use to make your payments.
Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow put it best
…real life has one gigantic advantage over gamelife. In real life, you can be a citizen with rights. In gamelife, you’re a customer with a license agreement. In real life, if a cop or a judge just makes up a nonsensical or capricious interpretation of the law, you can demand an appeal. In gamelife, you can cancel your contract, or suck it up.
Regardless of ethics or effectiveness, many protests would follow throughout WoW’s long history. From the Druids United protests to 2021 Stormwind Sit-in. When all else had failed, players would always return to collective action.
The Menethil Ganker
This is one of my absolute favourite stories from WoW. Legend tells of an orc Rogue who crippled his server for months in early 2005, slaughtering anyone foolish enough to step into his domain. His name was Angwe, and the server was Decethus (PvP).
At this time, Azeroth was made up of two great continents, Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms. There were only a few ways of getting between them. Members of the Mage class could teleport, Warlocks could summon, and all players had a hearthstone which would take them back to a place of their choosing, though it had a long cooldown. But the bulk of player traffic went by the ships, which would round-robin back and forth from select points. On the Eastern Kingdoms, your options were Booty Bay in the south, or Menethil Harbour in the Wetlands (just above Ironforge on the map I linked).
Since it linked to two of the three routes, Menethil was the pressure point of the game world. He who controlled the Harbour controlled the world (of warcraft).
Enter Angwe. He spotted a part of the zone leading to Menethil which bottlenecked players, and slaughtered every Allaince player who tried to pass through. He controlled the path day and night in his determination to stop anyone from reaching the harbour.
Angwe quickly rose into infamy, receiving more threats, insults and accusations than most people could imagine, but they only made him more determined. In fact, he lovingly collected them to preserve for future generations. That site has literally hundreds of messages.
Players speculated on when he might sleep, or work, or do anything other than massacring noobs. They wrote extensive guides on the alternatives to going through the pass, such as sneaking under the water along the coast or creating sacrificial clones to distract him. In some cases, max level players would organise convoys to shepherd groups of newer players through the pass. Large groups of PvPers charged the bottleneck to wipe him out, but as a Rogue, he could simply disappear from sight, waiting for individuals to break away from the pack so that he could pick them off one by one. A particularly intrepid sore-loser tried to doxx Angwe but only ended up with his girlfriend’s name – so they assumed he was a woman (because he couldn’t possibly have a girlfriend).
But Angwe was one step ahead of them. He created an Alliance character, inconspicuously named ‘Angwespy’, and used it to monitor his enemies, or taunt them after death. He infiltrated the forums of major guilds in order to intercept their comms.
But where some men see ruin, others see opportunity. Players approached Angwe with offers of gold if he agreed to gank certain other players. To many, he was a celebrity with near mythical status.
[Ancience] whispers: Can’t we make some sort of agreement, so that you can at least stop killing me? Gold? Armour? Exp? Something?
[Angwe] whispers: no
In October 2012, Angwe held an AMA, in which he finally revealed his secrets.
It was just me, typically 8-10 hours a day. I didn’t raid, level alts and only rarely did dungeons after 60. My goal was to get on average 100 honor kills in a day (this was before battlegrounds), which would put me either 1st or 2nd place weekly in the honor grind.
For context, an ‘honor kill’ is a reward for killing a player of the same level. Of course, Angwe would also kill any low level players passing by ‘to kill the time’, even if he didn’t get anything for it. Good murder is its own reward.
In 2006, the iconic South Park episode ‘Make Love Not Warcraft’ released, and while nothing has been publicly confirmed, there are those who speculate that the episode is based on Angwe’s reign of terror.
“All the lowbies would wait back there, and I’d usually be fighting whoever is trying to kill me to get on the boat,” Angwe explains. “And as soon as I’d die or whatever, you’d see a flood of people run for the boat. Even if the boat came [and I was still alive], they’d just try to get on the fucking boat. A lot of times, the goal wasn’t to kill people at that point. I just wanted to make sure none of these fuckers made it toward the boat. If they did, everyone would lose interest in being there and I wouldn’t be able to kill anybody anymore.”
Ultimately, it was not boredom that killed off Angwe, or defeat by combat. It was Blizzard. They introduced the new ‘Battlegrounds’ feature, which allowed players to fight in separate arenas. To get to a battleground, you had to go to its physical entrance, and the most popular of these was Alterac Valley – just north of Menethil Harbour. As a result, this once-remote zone was now throning with high level PvPers at all times of the day.
Angwe has spoken out many times over the years. After Battlegrounds dropped, he left the game and went to study game design. He now works as a programmer for MMOs, but does not play them himself.
The Kazzak Massacre
One of the highest level zones in the game was ‘Blasted Lands’. In order to give it a sense of danger, Blizzard like to place extremely powerful bosses in questing areas and make them walk around, so that players were forced to be wary of their surroundings. One such boss was Lord Kazzak.
Normally, it took forty max-level players to defeat Kazzak. He had many powerful abilities, including a shadowbolt attack that could hit anyone within a long range, as well as a skill called ‘Capture Soul’, which raised his health by 70,000 every time he killed. This meant that every player death made him considerably harder to defeat.
Due to how WoW’s combat worked, enemies could be kited. Kiting is when a player allows an enemy to attack them, holding onto that enemy’s attention, and gradually runs away, but never fast enough that the enemy stops chasing them. Through this trick, any enemy could be kited to any part of the map. And it just so happened that Kazzak’s little corner of the Blasted Lands was tantalisingly close to Stormwind – one of the largest cities in the game.
Kiting any boss to Stormwind would be an immense task, and Kazzak was no exception. Simply staying alive that long required entire groups working in unison. The trip from the Blasted Lands, up north through the Swamp of Sorrows, then across Dead Wind Pass, around Duskwood, and up into Elwynn Forest to Stormwind could take up to an hour, and Kazzak would continue unleashing fierce attacks the whole way.
But once he arrived at Stormwind’s pearly gates, a chain reaction took hold. The low level players amassed in the city were instantly swept away by his shadowbolt, and every one of them added 70,000hp to Kazzak. He was also able to kill NPCs, who would quickly respawn and die again and again. His health rapidly spiralled into the tens of millions, then the hundreds of millions, as he feasted on a never-ending supply of noobs. A famous video from 6th March 2005 shows him wrecking the city and leaving devastation in his wake.
Kazzak was unstoppable. Once he reached Stormwind, he became an invulnerable wrecking machine. Corpses filled the streets. There was no-where to hide – Kazzak’s shadowbolts went through buildings. The only option was to flee for the safety of the woods.
All seemed lost.
But those massacred players would come for Kazzak.
You see, Paladins had an ability called reckoning. After being the victim of a critical strike, their next attack hit twice. But this ability could be applied any number of times, without limit. If you got two critical strikes, your next hit would do 3x the damage, and so on. Players were quick to exploit this.
All it took was two people - a Paladin and a friend. The two would duel, and the Paladin would sit down while their friend hit them over and over. Hitting a player while they’re sitting down guarantees a critical hit, which meant they could trigger Reckoning as many times as they wanted. The highest recorded number of Reckonings at once is 1800 – that takes hours. But at that point, your Reckoning Bomb could instantly kill any enemy in the game with a single hit. Any player, any monster, and any boss.
Even Lord Kazzak.
And to this day, this is to be the only recorded way players were able to one-shot Kazzak. They never had a chance to try it out once he reached the city, because within 24 hours of the killing, the ability was nerfed.
But it wasn’t enough. Eventually, Lord Kazzak was removed from WoW, and Reckoning was nerfed. Blizzard began clamping down on the many ways players were able to exploit the game.
The Corrupted Blood
This particular incident began on 13 September 2005. Patch 1.7.0 had just released, and with it came Zul’Gurub, a 20-man raid into a troll infested jungle. The final boss went by the name ‘Hakar the Soulflayer’, and had a spell called ‘Corrupted Blood’, which would inflict gradual damage to players, and spread to anyone within a certain radius. It disappeared from players who left the raid, and wasn’t meant to least more than a few seconds. But there was an oversight.
The Hunter class are able to summon pets to fight for them in battle, and if a pet got afflicted with the Corrupted Blood and was dismissed, they would still have the curse when they were summoned again. Even if they were outside the raid.
The first outbreaks were accidental. Hunters brought out their pets in the game’s major cities, only for the Corrupted Blood to spread like wildfire, infecting everyone nearby. Low level players were almost immediately killed off by the plague as it ate away at their healthbars. Many never got the chance to flee – and those who did flee often simply created new outbreaks elsewhere. Before long, these curiosities had developed into a full-blown pandemic.
Much like a real virus, the Corrupted Blood was spread by animals. The NPCs could catch and spread the plague, but were almost impossible to kill, turning them effectively into asymptomatic carriers. Skeletons began to pile up in the streets of Ironforge and Orgrimmar. Dying causes gear to degrade, which is expensive to fix, so many players fled the cities to find safety in the wilderness. Others fuelled the chaos, deliberately causing new outbreaks wherever they could. These individuals were compared to biological terrorists. On the flipside, there were the ‘first responders’, who waded into the epicentres and attempted to heal the sick – though they often caught the Corrupted Blood themselves, and became spreaders in turn.
Many of WoW’s 2 million players would log on just to see what was happening (and then get infected), or log off to isolate themselves. The economy of the game totally shut down as the cities became ghost towns.
There were many parallels with how a real world virus would spread. To the powerful, it was just an inconvenience, so they went about their daily routines, whereas to low-levelled players (comparable to the weak and elderly), it presented an incredible danger.
Blizzard tried to impose a quarantine rule on players to stop the spread, but many refused to obey or didn’t take it seriously. The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of WoW players, common sense snuck in at number 79. In the end, it took several hard resets and patches to stop the spread. The virus was contained to Zul’Gurub on 8 October.
Academics at Ben Gurion University in Israel published an article in the journal Epidemiology in March 2007, describing the similarities between the Corrupted Blood and SARS and avian flu. The US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention contacted Blizzard and requested statistics for research. One factor that simulations at the time did not consider was curiosity – players put themselves at risk to see what all the fuss was about, in the same way journalists might do in the real world. Nina Fefferman, a research professor of public health at Tufts University, co-authored a paper in the Lancet Infectious Diseases discusing the implications of the outbreak, and spoke out for MMOs to be used to simulate other real world issues.
It should come as no surprise that many people have compared the Corrupted Blood to Coronavirus. Epidemiologists used research from the incident to understand the spread of COVID-19, specifically how societies respond to these kinds of threats.
In a recent interview with PC Gamer, Dr Eric Lofgren is quoted as saying the following:
"When people react to public health emergencies, how those reactions really shape the course of things. We often view epidemics as these things that sort of happen to people. There’s a virus and it’s doing things. But really it’s a virus that’s spreading between people, and how people interact and behave and comply with authority figures, or don’t, those are all very important things. And also that these things are very chaotic. You can’t really predict ‘oh yeah, everyone will quarantine. It’ll be fine.’ No, they won’t.”
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