Image by
Katie McKiernan
The travel brochure says “Don’t eat the food” and it’s not kidding. Crates of infected grain have been delivered to all the major cities in World of Warcraft, spreading the same scourge that created the undead and ultimately the forsaken faction. Taking a cue from Resident Evil Outbreak, players infected by the scourge become zombies and can then attack and infect other players. Of course, other players and guards can reciprocate the aggression, though they run a risk of infection if they do. There’s a brief incubation period where the players can be cured, but clusters of bodies near the healers indicate that things could be going better.
The last time a plague ran rampant through Azeroth, it was a little less scripted. The introduction of the Blood God Hakkar propagated a disease called corrupted blood that killed any characters who had not yet reached endgame instantly. Epidemiologists tracked the spread of the disease through the game’s transit networks and used it to develop disease transmission models that may one day be useful for real world outbreaks of fatal contagions.
While the current oubreak is a bit more controlled, it does have one distinguishing feature that makes it different than the corrupted blood epidemic. The world narrative calls for increasing urgency in the outbreak, a fact that Blizzard has chosen to simulate by gradually decreasing the duration of the infection debuff.
Put another way, you used to have 10 minutes to find a healer. Now you have two.
The combination of Warcraft’s dense server populations and the gradually decreasing incubation period make the scourge an interesting source of modeling data. Shorter incubation means less chance to travel, but also means more rapid spreading in denser populations. Whether epidemiologists take notice or not, players can hope to see resolution of the disease plot line in the upcoming expansion: Wrath of the Lich King.
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Tags: Blizzard · blood god · disease · epidemiology · hakkar · scourge · undead · World of Warcraft · Wrath of the Lich King1 Comment
Trackback to this article.
1 response so far ↓
It turns out that as of noon PST today, the zombie plague came to an end. It’s uncertain if this timing was due to the vast number of user complaints, or if it was part of Blizzard’s plan for the course of the coming Scourge invasion remains unclear. Particularly vulnerable to the plague were low level bank alts (which saw a migration to the much less frequented Exodar and Silvermoon via mage portal), but the AH economy ground to a near halt, as even level 70s trying to conduct basic business on Sunday could get infected and turn into a zombie before noticing, as the timer was only one minute long. Given the high number of players on the servers due to the Hallows end event, and the high latency issues from the most recent patch, a deadly combination was created. There was a high density of people in the cities and even a brief walk to an Argent Healer (conveniently placed around the cities to free you of your infection) could take longer than the 1-2 minutes before the zombiosity took over. Even priests, who boast a 30 second Abolish Poison spell, could face issues getting around in cities. As the duration of the buff got smaller, the chance of dispelling it seemed to decrease, as it took longer and longer for even level 70 priests to free themselves of the disease.
Other events foretelling Arthas’ arrival currently include the arrival of various necropolises in 60 zones of Azeroth that drop elite scourge from the sky continues. If it sounds familiar, you were around for the pre-Naxx world event. It’s frustrating that they seemed to have brought out the same old event, particularly since the quests and kills grant Argent Dawn reputation; the relevant Wrath of the Lich King reputation is with a new faction, the Argent Crusade. If players had the ability to get it it good with the new faction, they’d probably be more willing to look over the recycled content. We can only hope that the next phase will include something long time citizens haven’t seen before.