May 2, 2010

The Plague that struck Azeroth

I ran across some old screen-shots from an event that occurred in the MMO World of Warcraft on September, 13 2005 after the opening of a dungeon called Zul'Gurub. One of the encounters involved a damage-over-time spell called Corrupted Blood that spread from the victim to anyone nearby. It was designed to be contained within the instance but players found that they could dismiss infected pets and later recall them with the effect still running, and massively contagious, regardless of where they went.

This is what the main Horde city of Orgrimmar looked like;




Like Morpheus said about The Matrix, this world was built on rules and it was fascinating to see those rules play out in completely unintended ways. Low level players running into town would die in a tick or two. Anyone high enough to survive the intitial damage only helped to spread it farther, including NPCs.