Deadly Plague in World of Warcraft?

[Bagpuss]

So anyone got an insiders view on this?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4272418.stm


Deadly plague hits Warcraft world
By Mark Ward
Technology Correspondent, BBC News website

Artwork for World of Warcraft, Blizzard
Players get the chance to be heroes in World of Warcraft
A deadly virtual plague has broken out in the online game World of Warcraft.

Although limited to only a few of the game's servers the numbers of characters that have fallen victim is thought to be in the thousands.

Originally it was thought that the deadly digital disease was the result of a programming bug in a location only recently added to the Warcraft game.

However, it now appears that players kicked off the plague and then kept it spreading after the first outbreak.

Since its launch in November 2004, World of Warcraft (Wow) has become the most widely played massively multiplayer online (MMO) game in the world.

Its creator, Blizzard, claims that now more than four million people are regular players.

Last rites

Wow is an online game that gives players the chance to adventure in the fantasy world of Azeroth that is populated by the usual mixture of humans, elves, orcs and other fantastic beasts.

As players explore the world, the characters they control become more powerful as they complete quests, kill monsters and find magical items and artefacts that boost abilities.

Artwork for World of Warcraft, Blizzard
The Warcraft world is a familiar fantasy setting
To give these powerful characters more of a challenge, Blizzard regularly introduces new places to explore in the online world.

In the last week, it added the Zul'Gurub dungeon which gave players a chance to confront and kill the fearsome Hakkar - the god of Blood.

In his death throes Hakkar hits foes with a "corrupted blood" infection that can instantly kill weaker characters.

The infection was only supposed to affect those in the immediate vicinity of Hakkar's corpse but some players found a way to transfer it to other areas of the game by infecting an in-game virtual pet with it.

This pet was then unleashed in the orc capital city of Ogrimmar and proved hugely effective as the Corrupted Blood plague spread from player to player.

Although computer controlled characters did not contract the plague, they are said to have acted as "carriers" and infected player-controlled characters they encountered.

Body count

The first server, or "realm" as Blizzard calls them, affected by the plague was Archimonde; but it is known to have spread to at least two others.

The spread of the disease could have been limited by the fact that Hakkar is difficult to kill, so some realms may not yet have got round to killing him and unleashing his parting shot.
Artwork for World of Warcraft, Blizzard
In World of Warcraft players can be orcs, humans or other fantastic creatures

The digital disease instantly killed lower level characters and did not take much longer to kill even powerful characters.

Many online discussion sites were buzzing with reports from the disaster zones with some describing seeing "hundreds" of bodies lying in the virtual streets of the online towns and cities.

"The debate amongst players now is if it really was intentional although due to the effects of the problem it seems unlikely," Paul Younger, an editor on the unofficial worldofwar.net site, told the BBC News website.

"It's giving players something to talk about and could possibly be considered the first proper 'world event'", he said.

Luckily the death of a character in World of Warcraft is not final so all those killed were soon resurrected.

Blizzard tried to control the plague by staging rolling re-starts of all the servers supporting the Warcraft realms and applying quick fixes.

However, there are reports that this has not solved all the problems and that isolated pockets of plague are breaking out again.

The "Corrupted Blood" plague is not the first virtual disease to break out in game worlds. In May 2000 many players of The Sims were outraged when their game characters died because of an infection contracted from a dirty virtual guinea pig.

[Dacke]

Note the date on that article: Sep 22, 2005. It's almost two years old.

They fixed it in a patch, so that pets can't get the debuff and the disease itself can't exist outside the instance.

[Bagpuss]

Odd this was on the telly last night... hmm, try to refine my search.

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,22282563-11869,00.html

World of Warcraft may save man
Article from: Herald Sun

August 21, 2007 12:00am

ONE day, the nerds shall inherit the earth - or maybe even save it.

Boffins have said a fantasy plague that accidentally ran amok in the internet's most popular game world, populated by nine million flesh-and-blood players, may help scientists predict the impact of genuine epidemics.

Virtual playgrounds such as World of Warcraft, launched in 2004, could soon become testing grounds for the all-too-real battle against bird flu, malaria or some as yet unknown killer virus, said one of the authors, Nina Fefferman of Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Discussions are under way, she confirmed, with the game's California-based manufacturer, Blizzard, a unit of media giant Vivendi, on how future updates might yield useful scientific data.

"As technology and biology become more heavily integrated in daily life, this small step towards the interaction of virtual viruses and humans could become highly significant," she said.

The unlikely path to a collaboration between hard science and hard-core gaming began in late 2005, when Blizzard programmers introduced a highly contagious disease - dubbed "Corrupted Blood" - into a newly created zone of the game's Byzantine environment.

World of Warcraft is a "multiplayer online role-playing game" in which players - numbering in the tens, or hundreds of thousands - use computer-controlled avatars to fight battles, form alliances, and dialogue simultaneously on the internet.

At first the "patch", as new elements such as the disease are called, worked as expected: experienced players shrugged it off like a bad cold, and weaker ones were left with disabled avatars.

But then things spun out of control. As in reality, some of those carrying the virus slipped back into the virtual world's densely populated cities, rapidly infecting their defenceless inhabitants.

The disease also spread - much like real influenza or the plague - via domesticated animals abandoned by players for fear of infecting their avatars, leaving the sickened pets to roam freely.

Programmers tried to set up quarantines, but they were ignored. Finally, they resorted to an option not available in the real world: they shut down the servers and rebooted the system.

"This was the first time that a virtual virus has infected a virtual human being in a manner resembling an actual epidemiological event," said Fefferman, whose co-author, epidemiologist Eric Lofgren from Tufts University in Boston, was playing the game when the plague struck.

The authors had already discussed the possibility of using online gaming to study the spread of disease, and thus immediately recognised the opportunity.

To date, epidemiologists have relied heavily on mathematical simulations to forecast the spread of contagious diseases across large populations.

But crunching numbers has limitations, says Fefferman. "There is no way to model how people will behave" in a public crisis, she said.

"How many will run away from a quarantine? Will they become more or less co-operative if they are scared? We simply don't know."

Which is where the virtual netherworlds come into the picture. They can help scientists to "feed appropriate parameters into existing epidemiological models", she said.

Some sceptics have suggested that gamers are more willing to take risks online than in the flesh, and Fefferman acknowledges there is a difference.

But most players have invested a lot of time and energy into strengthening their avatars and forming alliances. For many, psychologists say, their virtual creations have become alter egos.

"We don't mean to suggest that people's reactions in this game would exactly mirror their reactions in real life," she said.

"But I think it is the closest thing we have to something that people really do become emotionally invested in protecting."

The researchers are working on a proposal for a new patch that would be a "compromise between what gamers would most enjoy and what would be most scientifically useful," she said.

and

http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9763651-7.html

Return of the Black Plague--on 'World of Warcraft'?
Posted by Don Reisinger
World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft
(Credit: World of Warcraft)

As I was struggling with my slow Internet connection today (it's fixed, thank goodness), I came across one of the best stories I have ever read. According to Techdirt, researchers were trying to find a way to simulate the death toll of another plague. And, luckily for everyone involved, they thought World of Warcraft would be a great place to start.

Yes, you read that correctly--your WoW character may soon be the recipient of some pretty serious bleeding of the organs, vomiting fleas that release bacteria and a whole bunch of other plague goodness.

Personally, I think this is great. How many times have we heard of people hiring others to get them up to level 70 or cheating their way to the top of the WoW social hierarchy? I'm sick and tired of it. If you play WoW, learn how to play it and earn your level 70 the right way--spending 16 hours per day for the next six months in a dark basement running through the world and picking up attractive "female" avatars. Now that is living.

If you ask me, the Bubonic Plague should be unleashed on these cheaters. Let's round them all up and keep them in a secluded area in the world. From there, let's see what a little bleeding will do to that god-like level 70 now. In a matter of minutes, the characters would start to know what it's like to be a level 15 trying to fight with the big boys. Then and only then would those bullies have some appreciation for the game.

Then, if we're really lucky, scientists will start releasing the bird flu and maybe even a scientifically engineered plague that rivals the great mouse plague of a few years ago. I like the sound of that!

OK, so you heard my hopes for the plague. What kind of plagues would you like to see in WoW?


and from Wired
http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2007/08/world-of-warcra.html

World of Warcraft to Become New Plague Testing Ground
By sonia zjawinski EmailAugust 21, 2007 | 1:46:25 PMCategories: Games, Medical

750pxwow_corrupted_blood_plagueGaming companies Blizzard and Vivendi are in talks to let a deadly virus loose on its subscribers. It's all part of real world research on how people react to genuine epidemics.

The idea is inspired by the highly contagious virus patch "Corrupted Blood," part of a patch installed by Blizzad programmers in late 2005, which introduced a dungeon whose boss infected players as they fought. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, "experienced players shrugged it off like a bad cold, and weaker ones were left with disabled avatars...but then things spun out of control."

While players who left the dungeon also left Corrupted Blood behind, pets they dismissed while inside and then resummoned when they got to densely populate cities still carried the virus. This led to an epidemic outside the controlled dungeon where pets infected nearby players, who then infected others.

"Programmers tried to set up quarantines, but they were ignored. Finally, they resorted to an option not available in the real world: they shut down the servers and rebooted the system."

Because mathematical simulations can only predict how quickly a virus can spread, not how humans will react, researchers are looking to virtual communities for answers.

The patch currently in discussions will be a "compromise between what gamers would most enjoy and what would be most scientifically useful," Nina Fefferman of Rutgers University in New Jersey told Agence France-Presse.

[via TechDirt]

Update: I just got schooled by a Wired Newser. Looks like I and the Herald misunderstood the history of Corrupted Blood's path of destruction. I've fixed the text appropriately. Thanks Marty!

[Utrecht]

gamespot also had an article


In-game WOW plague sparks real-world medical study Boasting a population greater than most real-world cities, Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft crams its 9-million-plus population into a comparatively tiny space. Granted, those massive numbers are dispersed over a sizable number of independently operating realms, but at any given time, hundreds of players can commingle or ply their wares in the game's densely packed cities. And with gnomes and trolls roaming the halls of the relatively few cities for each respective faction, it was only a matter of time before unsanitary living conditions arose.


Such was the case in September 2005, when World of Warcraft was racked by the effects of Corrupted Blood, a disease many have likened to medieval Europe's bubonic plague outbreak. As reported by Reuters, Princeton University medical epidemiologist Nina Fefferman and her former student Eric Lofgren have extrapolated real-world implications out of this in-game demitragedy in a study just published in the medical journal The Lancet. In the study, Fefferman noted that the disease was initially introduced by way of a newly implemented large-group encounter known as Zul'Gurub. It could be spread to other players through proximity contact, and as with the bubonic plague, it slowly ate away a player's hit points until it either ran its course or said player died.

In particular, Fefferman was interested in how the disease spread. According to her study, Corrupted Blood was introduced to the public by way of a few mischievous gamers, and it soon spread throughout the land of Azeroth, infecting those well outside the scope of the game mechanic, due to what she called the "stupid factor." "Someone thinks, 'I'll just get close and get a quick look, and it won't affect me,'" she said. This behavior led Blizzard to take drastic action, such as rolling back servers to prior play periods, according to the study.

Gamers' behavior during the outbreak presented Fefferman with an insightful take-away for her study of real-world disease outbreaks. "Now that it has been pointed out to us, it is clear that it is going to be happening. There have been a lot of studies that looked at compliance with public-health measures. But they have always been along the lines of what would happen if we put people into a quarantine zone--will they stay?" Fefferman added. "No one has ever looked at what would happen when people who are not in a quarantine zone get in and then leave."

Fefferman plans to work with Blizzard in the future to model outbreaks using WOW's massive player population. "With very large numbers of players, these games provide a population where controlled outbreak simulations may be done seamlessly within the player experience," she said.

[Ancalagon]

I find that this is a very valid research tool, and it could be done in a way that is fun too.