I fucking dare you to take all the shit youve said in this thread in a print out and read it to your grandma.
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The plague began on September 13, 2005 when Blizzard Entertainment, the developer of World of Warcraft, introduced a new instance called Zul'Gurub into the game as part of patch 1.7. Inside this instance was a boss named Hakkar the Soulflayer, the god of blood. Players who fought Hakkar were affected by his debuff (a spell which has a negative effect over a fixed period of time). The debuff, in this case, was Corrupted Blood, a spell that caused 250–300 points of damage (compared to the average health of 4000 for a player of the highest level) every few seconds to the afflicted player. The affliction was passed on to any players standing too close to infected players. While the curse would kill most lower-level players in a matter of seconds, higher-level players could keep themselves alive (via healing spells and other means) long enough to spread the disease around the immense landscape inside the game. Death caused by the debuff did not cause any durability penalty, unlike most other causes of death in the game. NPCs, combat pets, and non-combat pets were key in spreading the plague.[1]The disease would eventually go away as time passed or when the infected character died. The only way that a player was able to bring the disease outside of Zul'Gurub was by allowing a pet to get the debuff, dismissing the pet in less than five seconds, then summoning it in a populated area. This debuff transmission technique was first seen with the "living bomb" debuff from Baron Geddon in Molten Core.
After a few days, Corrupted Blood had become World of Warcraft's version of the Black Death, rendering entire cities uninhabitable and causing players to avoid large clusters of other players, and in many cases, stop playing altogether.[citation needed]It is widely suspected that, due to the curse's peculiar behavior, it was never meant to leave Zul'Gurub and that the ability to infect pets and NPCs was a side effect unconsidered by the developers. Blizzard Entertainment tried several times to fix the problem, including imposing quarantine on certain places, eventually finding a cure.Due to the large scale outbreak of the "plague" (some servers had half of their players infected), it drew wide attention from the media. Nina Fefferman, a Tufts University assistant research professor of public health and family medicine, calls for research on this incident, citing the resemblences with real-world plagues. Some scientists want to study how people would react in real life situations, by using the virtual counterpart as a point of reference.[2]In addition, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had requested statistics on this event for research on epidemics. [3]
