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2005/9/22-23 [Health/Disease/General] UID:39821 Activity:nil |
9/21 A deadly plague hits Warcarft world. Hundreds of dead virtual bodies lie on the streets. 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. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4272418.stm \_ Well you know vaccines and cures aren't always 100% effective in the real world either. |
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news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4272418.stm Printable version 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 Warcra ft. Although limited to only a few of the game's servers the numbers of chara cters 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 g ame. 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 f antasy 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 pow erful 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 cha nce to confront and kill the fearsome Hakkar - the god of Blood. In his death throes Hakkar hits foes with a "corrupted blood" infection t hat 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 prove d hugely effective as the Corrupted Blood plague spread from player to p layer. Although computer controlled characters did not contract the plague, they are said to have acted as "carriers" and infected player-controlled cha racters they encountered. Body count The first server, or "realm" as Blizzard calls them, affected by the plag ue was Archimonde; The spread of the disease could have been limited by the fact that Hakkar is difficult to kill, so some realms may have fallen victim to his part ing shot. Artwork for World of Warcraft, Blizzard In World of Warcraft players can be orcs, humans or other fantastic creat ures The digital disease instantly killed lower level characters and did not t ake 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 virt ual streets of the online towns and cities. "It's giving players something to talk about and could possibly be consid ered 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 ou t in online worlds. In May 2000 many players of The Sims were outraged w hen their game characters died because of an infection contracted from a dirty virtual guinea pig. |