A deadly plague spread through World of Warcraft’s Moonguard server over the weekend, making it the second time in WoW history a horrific virus has run uncontrolled through the game’s populace.
As broken down by Wowhead, the origin of the plague in question comes from a Dragonflight dungeon, Brackenhide Hollow. Within the dungeon, some enemies cast a spell called Withering Contagion, a disease that inflicts heavy nature- damage-over-time and spreads to all players within five yards.
Whether by accident or intentionally, a player was able to bring Withering Contagion out of the dungeon and into the heart of Alliance territory and Silvermoon City. Lower-level players were quickly killed by the contagion’s damage-over-time effect, while those who survived only helped spread it even further.
Before long, areas like Stormwind and the Goldshire inn in Elwynn Forest were awash in green slime, as players started to document the pandemic on social media. The virus was brought to an end thanks to a July 3 hotfix from developer Blizzard, but not before the virus had rampaged unchecked for several hours.
Players have quickly started referring to this most recent super-spreader event as “Corrupted Blood 2.0,” a reference to the previous time WoW servers were hit by an uncontrollable plague. Way back in 2005, a similar scenario played out with the release of the game’s 1.7.0 patch and its introduction of the Zul’Gurub raid. The raid’s final boss, Hakkar the Soulflayer, used a unique Corrupted Blood mechanic that would spread to players within the encounter.
Though Corrupted Blood was intended to stay within the raid instance, it snuck its way out via a bug that allowed it to remain on a Hunter’s pet. When that pet was summoned in a populated area, Corrupted Blood quickly spread among Azeroth’s citizens, killing players and even spreading to invincible NPCs, who then passively continued to spread it to others. The in-game “event” went on to be studied by real life contagious disease experts and even has its own Wikipedia page.
Thankfully, this new plague wasn’t nearly as deadly or disrupting as Corrupted Blood, which took Blizzard weeks to handle. Instead, Blizzard was able to quickly hotfix Withering Contagion within hours, sparing players from having to quarantine in Azeroth over the July 4th weekend.
In other WoW news, Blizzard continues to take aim at private servers it alleges are making millions illegally, while an alleged leak may have revealed Blizzard’s big plans for the future of Warcraft.