World of Warcraft
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World of Warcraft it is on his own merits MMO most important in history. Blizzard’s game has been able to hopelessly catch fans of the genre, but also those who had never approached this type of title and even video games. Musicians, artists and actors have openly acknowledged their passion for the Warcraft online universe. It is not for less if we take into account the moments that it is capable of leaving.
One of them and also one of the most remembered is related to a pandemic that devastated the world of Azeroth. And is that health crises are not only a thing of real life, they can also occur in persistent universes such as WoW. Known as the Corrupt Blood Incident, the pandemic lasted a week, more than enough time for it to spread among millions of players around the world.
The pandemic had its origin in the Zul’Gurub dungeon. The final boss of the place, Hakkar, carried out a highly contagious attack called Corrupted Blood. If you were damaged by the attack, despite believing that you had recovered from it, when you left and unknowingly you were spreading the virus affecting the statistics of the lowest level characters.
The Corrupt Blood Incident Powerfully Drew the Attention of Epidimiologists Around the World
As would happen in a real pandemic, not a few players left the main cities in order to avoid contagion, and even confine themselves to less populated areas. Other players even left World of Warcraft until the pandemic was over.
The impact of the event was such that it caught the attention of epidemiologists who wanted to collect data to find out how human populations would react to a possible pandemic of great proportions. And curiously, we are already suffering it with the COVID-19.
Several universities around the world joined the investigation. One of them was the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, in Israel. In an article that was published for the journal Epidemiology, they compared the outbreaks of Corrupt Blood with those of SARS Y avian flu. Cataloged by epidimiologists as fascinating, they did not hesitate to ask Blizzard for all kinds of data regarding the statistics of the players and their reactions to the virtual pandemic. The study assured that everything was an accident due to a glitch.
