In 2005, Blizzard Entertainment, the developer of World of Warcraft, released an update to version 1.7 of the game, which included a new leader, “Haka Soul Deprived” in a copy of the dungeon named Zul’Gurub. When Haka battles, the player will be infected by his spell skill “Plague Blood”, and other characters that are too close to the infected character will also be infected.
Generally, plagues can only occur in dungeons and disappear with the passage of time or the death of a character. And some players successfully brought the plague out of the dungeon copy through a program loophole, which led to the widespread spread of the plague afterwards.
Within a few days, the fallen blood had become the black death in World of Warcraft, and the entire city became unresideable, and players had to avoid other gathering places.
Engineers have tried several times to fix this problem, including implementing quarantine measures in some areas. After repeated futile attempts, Blizzard Entertainment can only reset the game data.
The widespread outbreak of this plague (almost four million characters were infected) has attracted the attention of many medical institutions in the real world. Research by Ben Gurion University in the Negev of Israel shows that video games can be used as advanced research platforms to create research models for the spread of infectious diseases. At the same time, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also asked game developers for data on the outbreak of the plague in order to study responses to the epidemic in the real world.
