In 2005, World of Warcraft saw one of the strangest events in MMO history: the Corrupted Blood event, a plague that spread from person to person and infected so many players (around 4 million) that it was used by real-world scientists to study the spread of a pandemic. Now a player has, somehow, brought the plague back to Stormwind, although to a less-devastating outcome.
The video was uploaded to the Classic Wow subreddit by u/Lightstruckx. It shows the familiar red flash of the Corrupted Blood debuff as it affects nearly every single player on screen. When this plague last struck, it left a trail of destruction that reached across all of Azeroth. The game held no cure for the debuff, and it would hit characters for anywhere from 263 to 337 points of damage every two seconds.
To put that in perspective, a fully maxed-out character with raid-level gear would die in around 30 seconds. Lower-level players didn’t even know what hit them. The Corrupted Blood incident was a big enough deal that it caught mainstream attention — a rarity for video games in 2005 — but even then, the only fix Blizzard was able to implement was a hard reset that restored the game to a point before Corrupted Blood had been introduced.
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Ironically enough, the Corrupted Blood incident was one example scientists and doctors turned to while studying the COVID-19 pandemic. It also planted the seed for another pandemic-level event in World of Warcraft, held right before the launch of Wrath of the Lich King. This second (and intentional) disease lasted for six days before players began to complain that it distracted from the rest of the game.
Player response to the re-introduction of Corrupted Blood varied from excited to annoyed, but it didn’t continue to spread. The experience served as a nostalgic (for some) reminder of the glory days of MMORPGs when World of Warcraft was the most popular option by a wide margin. It isn’t likely that Blizzard will bring back the disease, especially since the game has hardcore servers that allow for only one death per character — but it’s nice to see throwbacks to the things that made WoW so charming back in the day.