The world was soon facing a major epidemic, but while everyone was facing mass extinction, it was cool (from a psychological perspective). Some people travelled between contaminated and safe areas, to see what would happen, potentially spreading the disease back to safe areas. People in plagued areas emigrated to non- dangerous areas, which helped spread the plague. A new system of operation was also implemented that players would declare
themselves to be sick to avoid spreading it, but this idea was quickly picked up by trolls and griefers who began to spread the plague to non-contaminated players. These players soon heard of this and began to declare themselves ill, just to be left alone. Lower level players also surrounded settlements to warn passer byers that it was full of Corrupted Blood, or to tell people to leave to avoid spreading it too the new location. This takes on the role of travel being illegal, which we saw during the Covid years. This makes for a surprisingly interesting occasion. One, because WoW players are WAY too invested in their game, and secondly because humans do stupid things and are incredibly dumb animals under intense moments of stress, such as during a pandemic. These situations have been used by real world epidemiologists to look at real world plagues. Because of the unpredictable nature of humans, it is hard to really measure what humans will do, so this event was an interesting look at how we would act. The lessons we learn from this incident probably saved lives during the real pandemic and will hopefully save more into the future. The developers of WoW eventually fixed the game with a hard reset, and the problem patched, soon teenagers were able to sit in their dark room for hours once again with unsolicited chat with random people from all over the world potentially destroying their social skills and network. Truly humanity at its peak.
Thomas Hibbert
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