Warcraft players suffer unintentional in game plague |
Even the vast, thriving creative worlds of MMORPG are not exempt from plagues and unintended in-game social consequences. Such is the case of a new instance Blizzard added to their game, Worlds of Warcraft (which is one I haven’t ever played, actually, but has gotten positive reviews). In this instance there is a god of blood called Hakkar which has a debuff called Corrupted Blood that can do a whopping 250-350 damage to players and players nearby. The problem is that some of these players are bringing this back to the general game population, including NPCs, user pigz at shacknews forums writes:
Some servers have gotten so bad that you can’t go into the major cities without getting the plague (and anyone less than like level 50 nearly immediately die).
Too bad it’s a bug, because this could be a new kind of enemy for higher level characters to fight against in MMORPG: the threat of plague. Blizzard could have protected lower level characters by making them carriers only of the disease. But their solution is: “Hakkar’s spell Corrupted Blood can no longer exist outside of Zul’Gurub.”
Bummer. I would imagine that higher level characters would find fighting this kind of “enemy” exciting. Maybe Blizzard will change its mind on this long term.
Alice seems to agree by writing: “This pretty interesting stuff! Imagine all the context this kind of thing could be used for.. I wonder how serious the consequences of contracting it are? And are there rats? Pyres? Facemasks? ”
Tim O’Reilly write: “All I can say is: just extend that line of sight for a few years, a decade, and tell me what you see! ”
Tim gets it. I sure hope Blizzard and other MMORPG use accidents and bugs like this to their advantage for increasing realism among their game worlds. Also, they should look at natural disasters like asteroids hitting the planet, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc. The last time I played MMORPG I got bored by the whole go out and find monsters, kill monsters, gain experience, buy stuff, go out and do it again. There’s more to it than that, but fundamentally this hasn’t changed.
Plagues and natural disasters add a random and unpredictable element to the landscape and it would be interesting to see more of these environment shifts coming into the MMORPG landscapes. Maybe they already are?
Did this post make you go hmm?
(Hmm, no ratings yet)
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If they were to decide to add this as a sort of enemy to fight against, they would have to change something so that npcs either eventually die after getting it, or are curable in some way. The biggest problem was that npcs were contracting the debuff and then out regenerating the damage, therefore just keeping the disease for an undefined and foreseeably unlimited period of time.
Otherwise I’d say that’s about the coolest thing that could happen in an MMO since PVP.
Comment by Jeter — September 20, 2005 @ 6:37 pm PST
they could have made it a server quest to find the cure or give pallys the ability to cure this buff god knows they need something.
Comment by devan — October 5, 2005 @ 2:47 pm PST
[…] Argh, I wish we were back discussing the much less dicey in-game WoW plague. […]
Pingback by Make You Go Hmm: » Blizzard responds to concerns about their warden allegedly spying on players — October 15, 2005 @ 12:15 pm PST