This is so interesting. A plague is spreading through World of Warcraft, and Blizzard is having problems containing it.
Blizzard recently added the Zul’Gurub instance to the game, where Hakkar, the god of blood, uses a devastating disease attack on anyone who dares fight him. Seeing as how it’s a disease and most diseases are contagious, it shouldn’t be shocking when some players come back and haven’t been cured.
And that’s exactly what’s happened. Players are returning from this instance to towns with the diseases, spreading it, and Blizzard’s in a panic to keep things under control. GM’s have started to quarantine players in an effort to control the spreading, but players keep leaving the quarantine areas. Unless you’re above level 50, you more or less immediately fall over dead from the disease.
Getting it back to ironforge is entirely intentional. The disease only lasts like 3 seconds, but it infects everyone nearby once per second, so if you keep two people who have the disease near each other, they’ll keep reinfecting… then you can take it into the major cities and other busy areas and watch the plague spread. It doesn’t do alot to high level players, it’s more of an annoyance and a gimmick (the final boss in the new instance heals himself by drinking your blood; having this blood plague makes him be damaged by your blood instead of healing). But in these populous areas with people of all different levels, well, low level characters can die very, very quickly.. especially if people are intentionally spreading the plague around.
You can see a video of it here:
http://media.putfile.com/HellForge
Wow it made BBC News:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4272418.stm
The plague has not be found effective to world of warcraft.