A few days ago, players in the popular MMORPG World of Warcraft began to mysteriously drop dead in the streets of the game’s major cities.
In the above video, you can watch how the virtual doomsday occurred in the Alliance city of Stormwind.
Corpses lined the streets, others waited to die. By the time it was over, some cities, like Orgrimmar in the screenshot up there, were literally piled with player skeletons.
Parallels have been drawn to the game’s Corrupted Blood incident in 2005, when a glitch caused players to acquire the “Corrupted Blood” debuff — a spell that would drain a player’s life over time — outside of its intended zone. The debuff spread throughout Azeroth, leading to the (repeated) deaths of many lower-level players.
It was actually an interesting event, and even gained the attention of many scientists, who believed they could use such data as an analogue to real-world events.
This most recent event was the result of hackers, and Blizzard has since hotfixed the exploit. But honestly? If weird stuff like this happened in MMORPGs more often, I’d be far more likely to actually play one for longer than a week.
