September 20, 2005

WoW's black plague

The lands of Azeroth have been infected! Originally the message boards lit up with posts about some plague spreading accross the land and killing untold thousands of players. Wannabe heros raced accross the land in search of cures. What was causing all this death?

A bug. Just your run of the mill "Oops missed this on Test Center" bug. This quote from Shacknews sums it up best. "Blizzard adds in a new instance, Zul'Gurub. Inside is the god of blood, Hakkar. Well, when you fight him he has a debuff called Corrputed Blood. It does like 250-350 damage to players and affects nearby players. The amazing thing is SOME PLAYERS have brought this disease (and it is a disease) back to the towns, outside of the instance. It starts spreading amongst the general population including npcs, who can out generate the damage. Some servers have gotten so bad that you can't go into the major cities without getting the plague (and anyone less than like level 50 nearly immediately die).

GM's even tried quarantining players in certain areas, but the players kept escaping the quarantine and infect other players."

Here is a short flash put together by WoWaids.YTMND.com that IMO describes it best.Click at your own risk!

But WTF? This was actually something exciting to drown out the boringly repetitive gameplay of WoW. Like everyone else I truly believed this was a LIVE EVENT... something Blizzard promised to be part of WoW. Sadly it was not the case.

I wish Blizzard was quicker on their feet and would of offered a quest of some sort to cure the disease... making a bug into an actual event. This is the sort of development I want to see from Blizzard... from any MMO developer... PLEASE.