Corrupted Blood incident
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
I remember the Blood Plague, I was there when it happened. I distinctly recall someone in front of the Ironforge Auction House calling out "everyone come to me, it's better when we get close". Which, of course, it's not. It's a bad idea. But it was his idea of a good time. The solution was to abandon the cities. But there were always folks who enjoyed spreading the plague. And, honestly, that never bothered me. It IS fun. It was a fun encounter, and certainly fun in terms of the whole dynamic going on, appreciating what a novel "World Event" it became.
World Events is WoW have almost always led to disaster, so we don't get them anymore. The game simply doesn't handle huge volumes of players in a single area well. Their last big try was the Gate Opening that turned the Silithus zone into a slide show for most of the day. But as a player, it was still a great, epic experience, because you know it will never happen again. In a game of continual routine, outliers are always fun.
The Blood Plague was a novel event, it made the World more "alive". I'm glad I was there to see it and be part of it. Just one of those things the makes WoW history even richer.
Lots of fun, lots of memories, lots of people I met during those years who are still in my life today.
In the end they seemingly saw no other way than to roll back the whole game to the state before the "outbreak". This must have been an immense annoyance for players, to lose one week of progress.
I clearly do not understand how these debuffs function in the codebase. I wonder why they felt the need to do a full reset instead of just nerfing the debuff.
It was probably easier to reset from a backup than any real difficulty to apply a fix .
Same reasons we implement STONITH or just discard a game to restart from a save or use file from backup if it deviated a lot from where we want it to be, rather than fix the corruption so to speak even when possible .
There wasn't much of a progress during that week, you needed to be really high up in levels to be able to survive for even a minute after infection. IIRC max level was 70 at the time, and you needed to be in the upper half of the upper half to even be able to react to the infection.
In-game deaths was more of an annoyance than a deal-breaker. You'd spawn back as a ghost at the nearest safe town and then have to walk back to your corpse to revive, so basically for the majority of the players that week I'd just die, walk back to the corpse, respawn, and die again far away after interacting with an NPC, as my line of thinking was that the further I am from bigger cities, the odds of an NPC being infected decreased.
Weird, I played WoW for a long time and I was never even aware of private servers nor anyone who played on them. I'm almost certain it was against the ToS. When you say the player base was "split", how much of a split are you talking? I can't imagine it was more than 1% of players playing on private servers.
Really? I didn't think private servers came into their own until several years and expansions later. Color me surprised! During my time in vanilla I never heard many whispers of private servers.
> IIRC max level was 70 at the time, and you needed to be in the upper half of the upper half to even be able to react to the infection.
Still 60, to be pedantic. ZG was added in a patch about halfway through the lifecycle of Vanilla, prior to the release of the first expansion which upped the level cap. That said, it was still a death sentence.
Corrupted Blood Incident - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9463545 - April 2015 (14 comments)
Takes a few tries for the lesson to stick.
Is there "Griefing potential"? Yes, there is. But, man, the game is so mundane and routine the rest of the time, why not mix it up a little?
They brought this back at the end of Battle For Azeroth, during the end of expansion event. Players could become ghouls and infect other players. You'd see them lingering and lying in wait when bosses would spawn in Ice Crown, then shenanigans ensued.
They also did this back in Mists of Panderia, and not just for a short time, but it was end game content where you could use an object and become a hostile PVP player to EVERYONE, not just the other faction, even on PVE servers. Did the griefers have a field day with that? Yea, for a short time. More reason for the "citizenry" to posse up and beat the ne'er do wells back.
But there were always those that complain. "This happened and inconvenienced me".
I'm sorry. BFH. TDB. Boo hoo. Too bad. That game is playable that way the other 100 weeks of the expansion. There's lots of players, lots of playstyles, every decision Blizzard makes is a bad one in someones eyes. So, lighten up and let others have a turn.
This event was a callback to one of my favorite griefing exploits of vanilla WoW.
There used to be a Horde-only quest called “Test of Honor” in one of the mid-level Kalimidor zones. Most players would just finish the quest and carry on with levelling - but, in the rare instance where the player FAILS the quest, they get hit with a several hour long debuff called “Mark of Shame” that flagged them as hostile-on-attack to all factions.
This meant that players with the debuff could still safely move around inside Horde capital cities (though they couldn’t interact with NPCs) but if any “friendly” player was unwise enough to try attacking them, they’d immediately be swarmed with lvl 60 elite Horde guard NPCs.
By the time Blizzard removed the debuff, the griefing meta was to level a Tauren (largest hitboxes), get the debuff, and then either camp on top of the Org mailbox or clip through into the back of the Auction House and sit on top of the auctioneers. Any player attempting to check their mail or auctions would muscle-memory right click, which caused an auto-attack on the debuffed griefer, which shortly resulted in a trip to the graveyard as the elite lvl 60 NPCs would spawn to rock your world.
We had gimmick guilds like <On Strike> where the characters were named AuctioneerX to prevent savvy players from using the /tar Auctioneer command to bypass the hitbox.
Ah, those were the days siiip
Some other groups also weren’t happy but managed to figure out workarounds.
(this is from memory plus the less-incorrect looking sources I can find; I'm probably wrong about something but less wrong than the Wikipedia)
The corrupted blood effect is a relatively weak, short lived negative effect ("debuff") that appeared on one of the players in a group trying to fight Hakkar. This effect did a modest amount damage over time, lasted a few seconds, and would (and this is very rare for the time in the game) spread to nearby players, each player getting their own countdown starting from the time of infection.
While the debuff cured itself automatically after a few seconds, it didn't cause immunity, so if two or three players stood next to each other, they would re-infect each other over and over again.
The strategy to defeat Hakkar was to do this intentionally, preserving the short-lived disease until the team could use it against him -- there was no "panic" and nobody was confused about how the debuff worked -- understanding it was necessary to attempt the fight.
It was not possible to spread the disease by fast traveling.
What actually happened was an "exploit" (or clever strategy or cheating, whatever you want to call it): A player with a summonable pet could get their pet debuffed, then put away the pet -- freezing time for the pet preserving the contagious debuff. That player could then bring out the pet anytime in the fight they needed to have the debuff to use against Hakkar. Much easier than intentionally juggling the effect.
Nobody put away their pet in a panic to protect it not knowing how the debuff works, that's not a thing for several reasons.
Someone performing this exploit, by accident or experimentation, found out that the debuff was not restricted to portion of the game world where Hakkar is, nor restricted to the team members fighting him.
They then intentionally released debuffed pets in crowds, and more significantly, released the information about how to preserve and transmit the short-lived effect.
This is important: the only way the corrupted blood effect spreads (between in-game cities, for example) is by intentional action, its a griefing weapon, not a emergent property like a disease. Once it's out in public and you don't need to qualify for a high level raid group to see it, however, it's easy to transport and deploy.
The Wikipedia article makes it sound like "Azeroth" is a single virtual space that things can spread within; this is not the case, there are a hundred-odd (named) servers each with their own mostly identical world (only the players are different). Nothing can spread between these servers but information; they are totally independent.
The way the disease spread and persisted over time was memetic: while the condition would self-persist in a few virtual cities on a few servers on its own [1], Blizzard could fairly easily fix this, what was less simple to deal with was the masses of players intentionally preserving or re-acquiring from scratch the debuff and gifting it back to any crowd of players they could come across, on every server in parallel.
This was unusual because the game has few to no ways for players of the same side to grief/harm each other, so lots of players jumped on the opportunity to be the bad guys. Also, the non-participating players could not do anything to deter or stop the players intentionally repeatedly introducing the debuff -- this was fixed in the later, by-design, zombie plague which made the infected (temporarily) a third side hostile to and attackable by all other factions, even in otherwise enforced no-PvP zones.
There was no singular "Hard Reset" (though Blizzard may have experimented with unscheduled server reboots). A server reboot is disruptive to players mid-dungeon or mid-fight so they are usually scheduled in advance.
At no time was a player's, or the world's state or progress rolled back to before anything. Rolling world server reboots were used to apply patch 1.8 that altered the encounter to prevent the spread but that was the normal process for patching at the time.
[1] It may have been possible for two NPCs standing next to each other to bounce the debuff back and forth. Maybe it was just transit terminals where the game was constantly dropping in unsuspecting players, I don't remember. The primary vector was dense clumps of players and intentionally stored pets.
Your comment is much more informative than the linked article, it would be great to see it updated with your information if you can find references for it.
Almost all the wrong information in the article has a high-quality source (presumably repeating either the Wikipedia article itself or some other random journo playing telephone about an event that happened in a then-relevant video game almost 20 years ago.) Or maybe the author pulled the ol' claim not found in source. I didn't check!
Serious answer: This is a job for Internet Historian https://www.youtube.com/c/InternetHistorian who is... (double ironically? anti-hyperbolically? I'm not sure how to express surprise he actually lives up to the name) someone who does some quality research about dumb old internet stuff everyone misremembers and the news media got wrong the first time.
But Good (and Featured) Article ratings often have little to do with the factual content of the article. The reviewer checks a lot of cosmetic and stylistic features, and they largely check that every claim is cited to a source that can be considered generally reliable. They're not going to really check the actual quality, veracity, or reputation of those sources in regards to the specific topic. GA reviews can have such awful blind spots. I've seen many, many things slip by the reviewer when they were just eager to put another green dot on their profile.
So logically, the appropriate thing to do is deliberately get his minion afflicted with Living Bomb, dismiss it, and re-summon it in the middle of the auction house, killing everyone.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGYOt3hETYE
IIRC, he got a week-long suspension.
They fixed that one pretty quickly.
I am also personally guilty of kiting Lord Kazzak from the Blasted Lands all the way to Stormwind, and watching him wreak havoc.
Fun times.
I'm a bit skeptical how useful this is; it's "just a game" after all. There's always the assumption that you can survive/win the game, and typically nothing you do really has a lasting negative impact, even in-game, and even less outside of it.
I would have gone to a city as well, to find the in-game cure which I would assume exist, not expecting it's just a bug.
I don't think Blizzard profited from either of those. As far as I'm aware, their only paid WoW product at the time was monthly subscriptions to the game -- there was no officially supported way for players to buy in-game currency, and players paid Blizzard the same amount regardless of how much time they spent in game.
In fact, I worked on server code for TinyMUCK, and Jonathan Blow was a prominent player in those days, going by the name of Stinglai. Stinglai actually helped create the first TinyMUCK-based worm in the Forth language.
We had added this nifty feature where, in addition to static strings as fields such as descriptions, you could run a program instead. So it was like "#!/bin/bash" in a shell script; we called it "@#" because you just entered "@#xxx" where xxx was the database ID of the program you wished to call. So it was really flexible and programmers enjoyed generating dynamic strings instead of the static ones from before.
Of course we had no authentication or permissions system to protect players from one another. Every program ran under the credentials of the user who called it. Now by putting this in descriptions, a player could unwittingly call a program just by looking at something or someone.
Needless to say, this was ripe for abuse and immediately turned into a pernicious worm, where anyone who looked at anyone else became infected with the same "@#" description which was designed only to propogate itself through setting of descriptions. If I remember correctly, it only propogated among players, and not objects or rooms, because it needed to be actively called by someone "look"ing at a description.
I can't remember if, when or how we settled on a solution for that, but it sure was a wakeup call.
The original Corrupted Blood incident is fun to look back on. Obviously it was a pain to die, but once you did, it became a game within itself of locating "safe" spots to rez and get out of the city asap. This was still during the MC/BWL days, so I remember being lucky enough to have my hearthstone set to Kargath. There were griefers there as well, but much fewer than Orgrimmar.