WoW Suffers from The Plague

No… newbies can sometimes be annoying, but they are not the plague that I speak of.

Apparently, WoW suffered from a virtual communicable desease, beginning with players infected by Hakkar the Soulflayer.

When infected adventurers returned to town at the end of their quest, they inadvertently passed along the Corrupted Blood infection to those nearby. In short order, the plague ravaged the population. Soon entire cities fell victim to the artificial disease. And while 280 damage points may be easy for a level-58 Night Elf warrior to contend with, it’s enough to kill a lower-level player in seconds.

Nasty, but ultimately very cool. This was an inadvertant bug, but Blizzard may have serendipitously discovered a very cool MMORPG feature. In fact, this is the kind of thing that I have craved from an MMORPG. A seemingly simple act, such as getting cursed by a dungeon boss, and having it cause some sort of lasting effect on the rest of the game world.

Now, granted, 280 points of damage to a poor level 5 hunter is a little extreme. But there’s no reason Blizzard couldn’t level limit these kinds of things. Maybe you get infected, and it requires people to gather some rare plant extract from the far reaches. Entire sub-economies based on the availability of medicines would crop up. If someone got infected, their entire guild may become infected and caught up in some kind of sidequest. I don’t know, this kind of gameplay would be really fun for me, kind of like the plague in Morrowind. I’m sure others would be really frustrated by this kind of thing, but if there were some kind of reward, like having better stats after being cured or something.

I don’t know.