WoW hit by deadly plague
p2p news / p2pnet:- A deadly, virtual plague has broken out in Blizzard’s World of Warcraft and although it’s hit only a few of the game’s servers, “the numbers of characters that have fallen victim is thought to be in the thousands,” says the BBC, going on:
“Originally it was thought that the deadly digital disease was the result of a programming bug in a location only recently added to the Warcraft game. However, it now appears that players kicked off the plague and then kept it spreading after the first outbreak.”
But the plague wasn’t unleashed by angry open-source BnetD supporters.
BnetD used to let Blizzard fans set up their own online MPGs instead of being locked into Blizzard’s proprietary Battle.net game service but, “In a decision with dangerous implications for competition, consumer choice, reverse engineering, and innovation, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals today ruled against three software programmers who created a free, open-source program to allow gamers to play games they purchased with others on the platform of their choice,” said the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) recently.
“The court held that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibited the reverse engineering needed to create the program and that ‘click-wrap’ and ‘browse-wrap’ licenses are enforceable to prevent reverse engineering.”
The plague arrived after Blizzard added the Zul’Gurub dungeon featuring Hakkar, the god of Blood, and, “In his death throes Hakkar hits foes with a ‘corrupted blood’ infection that can instantly kill weaker characters,” says the Beeb.
“The infection was only supposed to affect those in the immediate vicinity of Hakkar’s corpse but some players found a way to transfer it to other areas of the game by infecting an in-game virtual pet with it.
“This pet was then unleashed in the orc capital city of Ogrimmar and proved hugely effective as the Corrupted Blood plague spread from player to player. Although computer controlled characters did not contract the plague, they are said to have acted as ‘carriers’ and infected player-controlled characters they encountered.”
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See:-
BBC – Deadly plague hits Warcraft world, September 22, 2005
EFF – Federal Court Slams Door on Add-On Innovation, September 1, 2005
September 23rd, 2005 at 2:26 pm
This was not the first time that mass deaths occured in WoW. Each and every time the devistation has occurred, has been a deliberate act by players after discovering oversights in Blizzard’s design. For some of the battles in game, the high level monsters affect players trying to kill them with “debuffs” or magical effects that are detrimental to them. By design, the effects that can cause mass destruction usually occur immediately or in a very short time afterwards. However, do to the nature of the in-game virtual pets some characters have, they would allow their pets to recieve this debuff, then Dismiss Pet. This would make their pet disappear and freeze all of the effects in place, allowing them to travel wherever they wish, re-summon the pet, and allow the effect to continue to it’s bloody end in a high population area.
Prior to Hakkar’s Corrupted Blood, all the others effects have been one-time explosions, and players could only “suicide bomb” an area and that would be the end of it. The Corrupted Blood however, was designed even more deadlier as you could infect all nearby allies around you, and repeatedly infect players back and forth. Once “in-game terrorists” succeeded in transplanting it to the major population cities such as Orgrimmar, capital for the Horde, the sheer numbers of players in the area resulted in a sweeping spread to everyone. The persistance of the plague, for hours on end, was mostly due to the ignornance of the population and resulted in repeatedly reinfections in the huddled masses, as their eventual deaths.
September 23rd, 2005 at 4:32 pm
If anyone deserves a plague, its Blizzard… those stupid fucks…
I can’t believe we live in a world were its illegal to make free software that works with someone elses software… v.v
September 24th, 2005 at 2:41 am
Many people have reverse engineered their software to create bots, hacks, and emulated servers.
While i don’t condone hacking per se, i myself have emulated some of their binary protocols in starcraft and diablo II. They simply can’t stop everyone doing it.
I think the main problem is, they don’t distingish between hacking and emulation. Emulation is designed to work in harmony with existing protocols, however hacking is usually used to circumvent some sort of protection or modify existing behaviour. The latter is of course inherently destructive in nature.
September 27th, 2005 at 2:53 am
“Many online discussion sites were buzzing with reports from the disaster zones with some describing seeing “hundreds” of bodies lying in the virtual streets of the online towns and cities.”
I wonder if medical insurance will cover counselling for trauma from inside a game environment. I can see the gibering wrecks now:
“Oh my God it was horrible, there were bodies everywhere [sob]. My own Elven Wife, Klara, was infected and within minutes I watched the life slip away from her, I don’t think I will ever recover…”
On a more serious point, social dissidence in a game environment should make for particularly interesting sociological study.