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Blizzard negotiating with researchers for virtual epidemic study

arstechnica.com — An accidental plague that wiped out cities in World of Warcraft has drawn the attention of epidemiology researchers, who are negotiating with Blizzard about future studies. The next virtual horror might be intentional.

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  • rmw132, on 10/10/2007, -6/+34This would make a great South Park episode...
    • josegutz, on 10/10/2007, -12/+3Cartman as he plays WOW:

      I NEED MORE CHEESY POOFS GAWDDAMMIT!!! ... {{starts singing}} Don't stop... beleeven... Hold on to those feel leh ey yeeengs...
      • creep303, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5The 90's called. They wanted you to give them their time machine back.
        • DangerMouse9, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1My fist is calling, it wants to visit your face.
    • matthewf01, on 10/10/2007, -1/+12Not really.

      They did it once already. Why the ***** would they do it again?
      • ringo380, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1i'm fairly sure the guy was being sarcastic
  • thripper, on 10/10/2007, -2/+6the reason it worked that well was because it was kind of real in the wow.
    the article make a valid point that tagging users with invisible disease that has no consequences on the player's abilities might not prove useful.

    I guess this was a one-timer.
    • Akaji, on 10/10/2007, -2/+3Most diseases are carried by unknowing persons - incubation periods can be days or weeks. I don't know if this study would be all that accurate in that kind of a case, since WoW has some travel mechanics that work very differently from reality, but it would still be interesting.
    • simpleid, on 10/10/2007, -1/+6i remember walking in to stormwind, there were dead bodies every where, people would die over and over. i barely made it out alive... (around the sixth time i got a rez)
      • potp, on 10/10/2007, -13/+3you poor soul. you must have been horrified fearing for your life. those Ebola survivors from Africa have nothing on you.
      • debuggercll, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3Never forget.
    • gropo, on 10/10/2007, -0/+3Yeah, it's just too bad we don't have real-life shamans that can drop a disease cleanse totem and immunize their party...
  • shibbz, on 10/10/2007, -2/+15http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood

    The plague is known as Corrupted Blood and is acquired by players is the instance of Zul'Gurub from the last Boss, Hakkar.
  • Cossa, on 10/10/2007, -4/+2You mean it "was". This plague no longer exists in the game world.
    • skatastrophy, on 10/10/2007, -0/+4Go and fight Hakkar, it's still there. It's just not a pandemic anymore.
    • JoJoDilio, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1It's really more of a debuff...
  • Sub7, on 10/18/2007, -8/+8AIDS, EVERYONE'S GOT AIDS!
  • iNezy13, on 10/10/2007, -4/+1I see a potential sequel to the south park WOW episode here.
  • josegutz, on 10/10/2007, -4/+3SHENANIGANS!!!
  • dagr8tim, on 10/10/2007, -0/+14Being as my GF is an epidemiologist and I am a casual WoW player, we discussed this last night. We both agreed that this may be good for studying how panicked people try to flee (and thus carry the infection with them). Remember, Blizzard tried to do a quarantine, that alot of players ignored. Also, alot of players were scared to gather after due to fear of being infection. The players were real people who reacted the way that people in the real world would react. Most of the articles I've read about this (forgive me, I didn't read this specific one) said that was all researchers were trying to gleen from this is how people react to build better simulations.

    The infection had all the variables nailed down (with the exception of the whole being released into the wild). I think researchers may get some good data on how people react to pandemic situations.
    • Sedako, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Eh? I remember there being a group of us that were purposefully spreading it around for ***** and giggles. I'm sure things like that would skew the data a bit. Good times back then, WoW is a snore fest now though.
      • df12, on 10/10/2007, -1/+3You don't think there are people that would willing spread a disease in the real world... I think you might be mistaken. There have been numerous convictions of people knowingly infecting others AIDs and other diseases.
    • plhearn, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1real life reactions would be much more extreme because when you catch the disease in real life you don't get to respawn after you die.
    • kiddcode, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Except in real life you don't try to infect as many people as possible so you can watch the mass carnage.
  • Bajeda, on 10/10/2007, -7/+1Next thing you know characters will be getting AIDS!
  • tektalk, on 10/10/2007, -1/+16Noone is going to be happy when they find out they are paying 14.95$ /month just so that their virtual character gets sick.
    • Calibretto23, on 10/10/2007, -2/+0Yeah me too... making the world have more pitfalls increases the fun of it...
      I can see it now Typhoid Mary's from the other side running into Stormwind/Undercity lol
      BIOLOGICAL WARFARE!!!
  • jp3550, on 10/10/2007, -10/+2WoW.
  • jp3550, on 10/10/2007, -11/+1WoW.
  • DryMaltExtract, on 10/10/2007, -6/+1People infected other people in the game because there are no real world consequences. Failure of a study of real life situations.
    • Aticper, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0Ah yes, but there are ingame consequences to ingame actions.
    • Subliminational, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0There are quite a few people that take that game very seriously though!
  • Khorpo, on 10/10/2007, -0/+8I actually remember when this thing hapenned. It was really funny as everyone was dying around me. Corpses everywhere. It was spreading continuously and it was out of control. They had to shut down the servers in order to remove the plague :P Good times. I also remember seeing an article in the newspaper about that.
  • sh0rtstack, on 10/10/2007, -3/+8kek
  • darklord5907, on 10/10/2007, -1/+7What no one really knows, it only stayed around because invincible non-player characters caught it and never died.
    • TheShad0w, on 10/10/2007, -0/+5No, the NPC's did die. They just had insane amounts of health so it took them a lot longer to die.
  • akatherder, on 10/10/2007, -0/+10There has to be some high-level jerks out there who enjoyed getting infected and running through crowds of noobs to watch them get infected and die. That would totally blow the "experiment" and skew any study.
    • SuperMo0, on 10/10/2007, -1/+6Actually, no, that'd be a great part of the study. In real life there's always going to be some nutjob who, upon getting infected, decides he's going to wipe out half of the human race and deliberately will infect people. They can correct for the fact that more people would be willing to do it because of the fact that it's not life-altering, but seeing how many people did that is a perfectly valid result to look for.
  • daikonv, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1I remember that incident. The high level players purposefully contracted the "disease" and went back to the cities, following low level players on purpose to try and grief them. Was definitely a funny time.
    • dinergy, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1why does blizzard kill anything interesting that evolves in the game environment. call it an exploit if you like, but it in my opinion it adds something to the game. the developers should let incidents like this grow instead of stopping it. the developers need to stop being pussies and let the game just happen.
      • vafada, on 10/10/2007, -2/+1if your repair bill reach 100g because of a disease that you'll get once you rez up, its not fun anymore.
        • DreKor, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2That's not how it worked, but thanks for playing.
  • Drakk0n, on 10/10/2007, -0/+7I say instead of WoW bring it to Second Life...nothing like another plauge to ravage "virtual rome"
    That "game" has brought nothing but annoyance in my workplace and needs to be stopped :P
  • Skellbasher, on 10/10/2007, -7/+1The major spread of this was hunters / warlocks would get their pets infected, and then dismiss them. When they were resummoned in a city, they still had the debuff, and the timer that normally ticked down so it would expire was frozen. It wasn't hard to heal the pet through it, so was very easy to spread.

    Blizzard apparently didn't have the ability to prevent Corrupted Blood from existing outside of the ZG instance (although they could still cause you to lose temporary weapon enchants or poisons when you zoned), so they changed the mechanic of the fight and restarted all realms to fix it.

    I'm glad to see my tax dollars at the CDC going towards studying this. Moronic. What are they going to suggest, changing how AIDS infects someone, and restarting a continent or two?
    • xdamage, on 10/10/2007, -0/+0I really have no idea why you're being dugg down. Can anyone who does explain it? just for my curiosity?
      • Gerfervonbob, on 10/18/2007, -0/+3Becuase the study is about human reaction to pandemics, not how to solve them.
    • DMDekoth, on 10/18/2007, -0/+2I think this is a different or new 'outbreak', I remember the ZG one though. Funny as hell.
  • redstormpopcorn, on 10/18/2007, -1/+3This could be an interesting Wrath of the Lich King introductory event; Sylvanas has been brewin' up that new plague for a while.
  • plus1chromosome, on 10/10/2007, -0/+6This seems like a no-brainer to me. Part of the appeal of being in a seamless online experience would sometimes be surprises effecting your "community" ---- I feel shame for my industry in games, that nobody has ever really taken the concept and run with it. I know i would be more inclined to play online MMO's if something like this challenged the stability of my cherished online universe.
    • NJank, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1NO! there will be no surprises. there will be set standards of player balance and regular, planned, methodical activities. Every once in a while, a scripted 'event'. that's how the addictive, i mean fun, mmo recipe works. We don't like change here.
  • Saiing, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2In a strange kinda way, I actually admire the fact that Blizzard have created a world that has has become so 'real'. So much so in fact, that they can create a virus like this and not even be able to control it themselves, because it becomes a 'reality' all of its own. On the other hand, isn't this unpredictable and uncontrollable type of behaviour the kind of thing that caused Skynet to become self-aware!?
    • Murdats, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2you have obviosuly never played any other MMO, by comparison wow is rather limited and the world is very static.
      you get games that range from wow like worlds to very dynamic worlds, having your environment stay the same for a year doesnt seem too real to me.
      having an MMO (Wyrm) where you digg a hole and a hole appears, you chop down a tree, it falls down, you cut the wood and build a house with it. that seems a lot more real
  • CatalystGhost, on 10/10/2007, -0/+2Let's infect WoW with the Rage or T virus. That'd be interesting.
  • MOJIRA, on 05/17/2008, -0/+3So Blizzard has the WMDs?
  • spawnfree, on 10/10/2007, -2/+2seems like a good idea, if we first re-structure real life into distinct areas filled with different strengths of deadly creature, remove all unfair banking and taxation systems that rob people of their wealth and then replace all forms of advancement and education with 'hitting things until they die and stealing their stuff'.

    Then the gathered data may have some actual worth.
    • Weebs43, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I don't believe they mean for a 100% simulation, but more to see how people react. They could use this to find better procedures of how to handle people if an epidiemic hits. I don't know what our current plan is, but they could try it out on wow to find out it's pure ***** and have to come up with a new one and when they test that, it works like a charm. There's a sign that that method would just work a lot better in the real world.
      • spawnfree, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1my puerile sarcasm did not deserve such a level headed response.
  • egudahl, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1Although complete immunity doesn't exist for AIDS, there are documented cases of HIV infected persons deliberately infecting others as part of their reaction to finding themselves HIV positive. It was suspected but never proven in the case of a super-infector dentist who spread the disease to a large number of his patients. There were also cases of prostitutes who were taken into custody and/or prosecuted for continuing to have unprotected sex after being informed to their infectious status. So, if you're using the disease in WoW as a model for human behavior in an epidemic, the malicious spreader, invulnerable or not is definitely within the realm of real human reactions to contracting a fatal disease.
  • Dartaan, on 10/10/2007, -1/+1The article doesn't even come close to showing people what really happened in game. High-level people received the "disease" from a boss that maybe 5% of the population saw. Once they knew the could spread it, they didn't even attempt to quarantine themselves. They intentionally infected others to piss them off. An experiment would work if it was just a simple mark on the character that they couldn't see and didn't do anything.The article doesn't even come close to showing people what really happened in game. High-level people received the "disease" from a boss that maybe 5% of the population saw. Once they knew the could spread it, they didn't even attempt to quarantine themselves. They intentionally infected others to piss them off. An experiment would work if it was just a simple mark on the character that they couldn't see and didn't do anything.
    • Destined, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1That's what I was thinking. I doubt people would behave similarly to the real world if they knew they had the disease.

      However, the player interactions and how fast, where it spreads, where it doesn't spread, etc might be valid. Maybe they'll make the flight paths infect others (ie: sick birds) to simulate air travel.
  • bloodredxxx, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1interesting article. maybe there are more aspects of human behaviour that can be simulated in MMOs...
  • ahtu, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1how about negotiating about ***** DIABLO 3
  • o0joshua0o, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1I'd rather see them implement some really large-scale natural disasters into the game. Now that would be interesting.
  • liminaldust, on 10/10/2007, -0/+1AWESOME.
    SERVER ERROR from ARSTECHNICA
  • Kershalt, on 10/10/2007, -1/+0I welcome the change i would love to see diseases spread thrue the game maybe being attacked by the scourge can cause you to become temporarily undead till healed at a chapel but only so many players can get the cure every day? anyone else think it might be more fun with this?
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