Beginning from September, 2005, a pandemic outbreak of a Corrupted Blood debuff or curse in World of WarCraft. Pardon me if I get the terminology wrong, I don't play WoW.
This curse is from boss character that was supposed to attack high level player fighting them. It also spread and cause players to scatter and make melee player to stop attack so they can scatter. This curse take a bit of health each second, and don't last long enough to kill a high level player. But some player have pet and the pets also can get the curse.
If the player recall the pet, the curse stay with it and the timer for that curse pulse. When the pet is release the curse continue to spread. It even spread to NPCs. In large city, it wiped out a lot of low level players who don't have the hit point or the heal spell to save them self. Cities were abandon and no one cluster in group.
Blizzard didn't intent for the plague to spread outside of the boss area or to NPCs. Blizzard tried a few different method and even quarantine to stop the plague. It was cure when the programing of how the cures/plague interact with players.
In March, 2007, Ran D Balicer, an epidemiologist physician at the Ben-Gurion University in Israel, described how the WoW plague was similar to the SARS and bird flu outbreaks.
With millions of players online in WoW, Second life, and other MMOs, researchers hope that they can create more virtual outbreaks of deceases in games to study the way how deceases spread from people to people and what way can be use to quarantine and stop deceases.
Who would have thought that games could help find ways to save life!
Source: http://gamepolitics.com/2007/08/21/wow-outbreak-studied-by-pandemic-researchers/
With all this, why don’t they make a MMO for the researcher, and have people from the scientific community and collage volunteer to join. They can call it Pandemic Online.
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