A deadly plague is ravaging the World of Warcraft.
According to recent media reports, last week a new "digital plague" began to appear in World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft is a multi-user, online virtual world based on the Warcraft series of strategy / fantasy games by Blizzard Entertainment.
Apparently a new expansion dungeon introduced an new NPC (non-playing character) called Hakkar The Soulflayer, who could cast a powerful spell called Corrupted Blood. Corrupted Blood would cause about 280 points of damage to the player's character and would also infect other players within a certain radius.
According to Gadgeteer "what happened next was just plain weird.
When infected adventurers returned to town at the end of their quest, they inadvertently passed along the Corrupted Blood infection to those nearby. In short order, the plague ravaged the population. Soon entire cities fell victim to the artificial disease. And while 280 damage points may be easy for a level-58 Night Elf warrior to contend with, it's enough to kill a lower-level player in seconds.
Game administrators were baffled. As they scrambled to quarantine areas of the game world, the disease quickly spread beyond their control. Partially to blame was the game's "hearthstone" feature, which allows players to essentially teleport from one area to another, and which made it possible for the plague to reach the most distant regions of the map in just minutes. "
Curious, I went digging in some of the player sites and soon discovered that the talk among the players is that the spread of the mysterious plague was anything but random. Certain players discovered they could infect their "pets" and then introduce these reservoirs of infection into major population centers, deliberately spreading the virtual plague to kill off low level players, create havoc and "just to see what would happen". As the plague infects but doesn't kill NPC's, many major population centers in World of Warcraft became plague centers, wiping out low-level characters enmasse. One wonders if the cry of "Bring out your dead" is now echoing through the virtual world....
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Article comments
1 - Rich Powers
It's sometimes weird to think how these online worlds can mimic reality in so many different ways. Just look at the economic system in these games. I've read that some programmers in World of Warcraft and Everquest have become "virtual economists." They have to monitor currency and item-value inflation and adjust accordingly, for fear of losing their players to an unstable in-game economy.
Heck, some people make their living off of these virtual economies, selling their spoils on Ebay...
2 - Deano
I understand that a number of professional economists are openly studying some of the online worlds in order to understand the economic structures and the impact of changes to the gameworld. The social impact is probably almost as fascinating.
I recall one article that looked at the initial Ultima online world and the fact that the lack of resources,and economic activity forced most players into specific actions in the game that we not directly intended by the designers - namely a great deal of player-killing, virtual theft etc.
I hope that there is some thesis student out there working on their dissertation...it would be fascinating reading.
3 - JS
If you're interested in virtual economics I can suggest the work of Edward Castronova. He'll have a book out soon called "Synthetic Worlds : The Business and Culture of Online Games".
Recently the Guardian did an interview with the man that you can find at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1573071,00.html
Some of his research papers:
1) Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=294828
2) On Virtual Economies
http://www.gamestudies.org/0302/castronova/