Online gamers taking advantage of "plague" affecting virtual characters

Irvine (CA) - A mysterious and apparently unintentional plague has recently ravaged the popular World of Warcraft (WoW) online game. The plague is caused by a bug in the game code, in which a spell generates damage to some characters continually. Lower-level characters who have low ’hit points’ die quickly, while high-level players are slightly inconvenienced. Blizzard, the game’s manufacturer, has tried to contain the plague by "quarantining" characters, but some players have responded by breaking quarantine, spreading the plague to others as though it were a feature of the game itself.

Travis Meacham, a media computing analyst at Disney and author of a recent Tom’s Hardware Guide article, "How to Meet Women in World of Warcraft," told us, "Spells like these are supposed to wipe (disappear or dispel) when leaving the area, but this one didn’t."

The four million plus players of WoW spend countless hours fighting monsters and completing quests to gain better equipment and more experience points (XP). As the characters gain levels through acquisition of XP, more areas of the virtual world can be safely explored. In a recent game patch, a high-level monster called Hakkar was added, who had the capability of casting a so-called ’Corrupted Blood’ spell. Over time, the spell inflicts damage points, and eventually causes a victim’s blood to explode and infect nearby characters.

As players made their way back into crowded cities, the plague’s damage multiplies. Inflicting about 250 hit points of damage every few seconds, lower-level characters are killed almost instantly, while high-level characters maintain enough hit points to outlast the effects. While Meacham’s main character, a Level 60 Night-Elf Warrior, hasn’t been infected with the plague, he told us a strategy has developed among players for maliciously passing the plague around. "People have been infecting NPCs (non-player characters) and city gate guards who then pass the disease back and forth," said Meacham. The end result is that players cannot enter or leave a city without getting hit by the plague.

In a testament to the open-ended nature of WoW, players figured out ways of escaping to the countryside and other cities, thereby continuing the cycle of death.

Meacham says the plague could be also used as a "first strike weapon" against cities. In WoW, players can form large groups and raid opposing cities. A plague could be unleashed before the raid to soften up the town by killing off lower-level players and weakening higher-level characters and town guards.

The plague’s indiscriminate killing reminded WoW players of the unintentional destruction caused by another bug, the Living Bomb. Cast upon unsuspecting characters by a boss monster called Baron Geddon, the Living Bomb spell would cause people to explode after a short delay. Some evil-minded players managed to get the spell cast on animals and then transported them into a crowded room. When the animal exploded, massive damage was caused and nearby players would be killed.

While such widespread virtual destruction is far from new to the realm of multiplayer games, Meacham says that the level of destruction seen thus far in WoW has yet to compare to that of another multiplayer game, Ultima Online. "The gloves were completely off in that game. I was always in fear for my life in Ultima Online," remarked Meacham.

Are the millions of players, who pay up to $14.99 a month, angry that their characters are succumbing to the plague ? Meacham says that players with higher-level characters think it’s the best thing to happen to the game. "It’s a neat game dynamic and fits into the story," says Meacham. The majority of the posts on the WoW official forums seem to agree with his sentiment. One poster wrote, "I think it’s awesome ! I hope Blizzard leaves some element of plague in the game, because it sounds like a happy world-defining accident to me." Another participant wrote, "I think they should create more plagues."

While the majority of at least the more vocal game participants seem to agree the plague was a good thing, a spokesperson for Blizzard remains tight-lipped about how the bug occurred, characterizing it as "short-lived," and pointing out the company has quickly released a hot-fix for the bug. How the patch will affect WoW’s gaming universe, and whether players will have incentive enough to adopt the fix, are questions to be answered in this game’s next exciting chapter.

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