World of Warcraft is Infectious

ringbarer writes "News is coming in that the lands of Azeroth have become infected with a deadly plague which the developers never intended to spread. Originating from the new Zul'Gurub instance, the plague has spread from player to player via town NPCs. Entire cities are being wiped out, yet players are finding this surprise content entertaining!" From the article: " 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." Commentary on Terra Nova.

Comments

Fixed

[interiot]

The issue was hotfixed on Friday:

Beginning at 4:00 AM PDT on 9/17 we will be issuing rolling restarts to all realms to apply a hotfix. We expect this to resolve several issues:

-Fixed an exploit with drakonids where players could get a head start.
-Nefarian's drakonids have reduced damaging abilities
-The wild polymorph cast by Nefarius in Blackwing Lair, can no longer be canceled early by clicking it off.
-Arathi Basin holiday honor should now be awarding the bonus properly.
-Hakkar's spell Corrupted Blood can no longer exist outside of Zul'Gurub

Re:Fixed

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

The hotfix didn't work

  It appears that the hotfix remedy concocted to combat the recent Azerothian outbreak has not yielded desired results. At this time, our medical staff is continuing to develop an effective cure. We look forward to ensuring the health and vitality of the citizens of Azeroth in the near future.

Re:Fixed

[Gojira Shipi-Taro]

Zul'Gurub is an "instance" zone. A fresh copy is created for every group that enters it. (more or less). The disease in question is caused by one of the encounters in the instance. It is not litterally raging in that zone.

It is in fact normally cured while the group is still in the zone. the current "plague" behavior is being caused by malicious individuals who are intentionally re-calling to populated areas in order to "greif" other players.

Unintentional?

[EvilAardvark]

This was unintentional? We had no idea on our server and assumed it was something Blizz had added to add some depth to the game. It was actually quite amusing to watch it spread as people attempted to go about their business between the bank and auction house in Ironforge.

Indiscriminate PK

[sethstorm]

Well, now WoW finally has taken indiscriminate PK to a whole new level with your body itself as the weapon. Question is, would those be honorable or non-honorable kills for every person you spread the disease to (disregarding the rollback)?

Unintended? I don't care

[Red Flayer]

This is absolutely great. This is an element of gameplay that even if unintended (which I'm not so sure about) can have far-reaching consequences.

Why shouldn't MMORPG characters get sick? Maybe once you're exposed and recover from a certain illness, you have immunity. Maybe this immunity will be helpful in a later instance.

I would love for more MMORPGs to release world-affecting things like this into the game. It might be hard to balance, but I think this is fantastic.

One of the reasons gameplay in MMORPGs gets boring is that typically, the world never changes except for the addition of new material.

Give me the four horsemen of the apocalypse any day!

But can you fling an infected player at a town?

[antifoidulus]

The Romans used to fling diseased corpses into the towns that they were laying siege to, and not surprisingly the tactic worked quite well. But can you fling a player into a town in WoW?

Sounds hilarious!

[Yeechang Lee]

What I posted on Usenet:

I'm sorry, but this sounds hilarious (I'm sorry I missed the streets paved with corpses of the dead) and absolutely appropriate. I mean, explorers returning from a remote, mysterious, newly-discovered jungle outpost bring back a highly-contagious disease that decimates the young and weak and severely weakens the strong? Entire books and movies have been written with less to work with!

Heh.

[Strell]

I think we all know who is to blame. LEEEEROOOOOY JHEEEKIIINS!!!!!!!!