Great Moments in Gaming: The Plague

Welcome to another segment I have created called Great Moments in Gaming.  Obviously enough, it's about moments in games where something phenomenal happens.  It can be good, bad, interesting, funny, sad or whatever.  It's also not just limited to IN game.  If the contents of a game cause a culture shift or change the ideals of a person or thing in real life, all of that, is included.  These are times when it's truly awesome to be a gamer, as the experience cannot be copied by anything else in media.
For the first entry, I'll be sharing with you an amazing event that I was able to be a part of, and definitely one of (if not the #1) my favorite moments of gaming.  I present to you:

The Plague aka The Corrupted Blood Incident  (World of Warcraft)

This event was truly amazing.  It's not something that can be recreated, unfortunately.  The Plague was definitely not a happy moment, unless you were a troll.  I was neither, myself.  I was a victim of the event but I was in awe of what was happening around me.  How could something so huge go down like this?  Ok, I should get to the explanation.

(Skip ahead if you're not a WoW noob)
In World of Warcraft you create your character and explore the world as you level up to the max level (60 in this case).  Once you reach level 60, you're considered to be at the point of "end game".  The term was created back in the days of old school RPG's like Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger where you have finished 99% of the story, and all there is left to do is explore the optional dungeons and kill the last boss.  End game, for World of Warcraft, means being able to participate in 40 person raid dungeons and Player vs Player battlegrounds.  Raid dungeons were special because they would cut you off from the rest of the people in the game, so no one could interrupt or bother you.  In this case, everything starts because of a new raid dungeon that had just come out called Zul'Gurub (hereby referred to as ZG).  ZG was a jungle raid where you fought a ton of trolls, feeding off of witch doctor kind of vibes.  Almost everything in there was voodoo something.

This son of a bitch.

ZG was awesome for sure.  It was really fun when it was released, with a lot of new ideas and different boss fights.  One idea was particularly awesome.  The final boss, Hakkar, would hit random raid members with a special move called Corrupted Blood.  This move was a bitch, I know.  It would deal a ton of damage with a DoT (damage over time) that would apply for a few seconds, and hopefully you would get healed through it, as it wasn't able to be dispelled.  If you did get killed from it though, it would jump to a nearby ally, possibly creating a domino effect to kill everyone.

One day, someone came up with a maniacal idea on how to exploit this move.  In trolling ingenuity that would go down in gaming history, someone found a way to bring this 3 second debuff outside of the raid dungeon and into the world where everyone else was.
They figured out that a Hunter could allow his pet to get the debuff, and then dismiss him, which would make the pet disappear with the buff on him still, as it was unable to be dispelled no matter what.  That Hunter would then exit the dungeon, and summon his pet back to him in the crowded cities.  Once the pet died, the debuff, or plague, would spread to EVERYONE.

 

The skeletons are people who died and logged out.

EVERYONE.  If you've played WoW, 90% of the time you logged in or out, you did it in either Ironforge or Orgrimmar (depending on Alliance vs Horde).  So if you logged in, there's a very high probability that the plague was running RAMPANT on every poor soul around.
I was playing WoW myself, at the time.  If you came into contact with it, you were dead.  Luckily I had the one class in the game with an invincibility button, which gave me 10 seconds to gtfo as far as possible.  People literally could not play the game, especially if you were lower leveled.  Imagine getting killed and not knowing why, taking 5 real life minutes to run back to your body, just to die again 5 seconds after you spawn.  If you were not max leveled, you died in 1 tick.  Just as you thought that it died down, someone else would bring it back again.  People cancelled their damn accounts over this.

Now was this a good moment in gaming?  No.  This was a FUCKING AWESOME moment in gaming!  Gamers had recreated the god damn bubonic plague!  What other game could you figuratively break the game and kill the entire population with a disease?  The implications are amazing.  Hearing people panic in the chat and watching people come in to try to heal the poor dying people only to catch the disease themselves, it was quite a sight.  It was so powerful a glitch, that Blizzard themselves recreated the event on purpose when the Wrath of the Lich King expansion was almost out, but this time everyone turned into zombies instead of dying.  Hilarious.  Not just Blizzard though, scientists took notice and used it in the real world for epidemic and terrorism research.

A truly great moment in gaming, The Plague did something that no other game has done, and that is accidentally create an epidemic.  It'd be much less cool if it was on purpose, but the fact that it was so closely paralleled to a real life scenario and people had to make similar decisions based on that is something to behold.  I don't know if we'll ever see anything as cool as that again, but from the amount of trolling and pissed off people that came from it, it might be for the best.  Love it or hate it, WoW is truly an incredible game.

Wikidpedia - The Corrupted Blood Incident