In 2005, a bug in World of Warcraft turned Azeroth into a virtual pandemic, and gave scientists a rare glimpse into human behavior during an outbreak.
So recently I started a page in a notebook where I jotted down article ideas. Older games with interesting stories to them. Just as a part of a series of retrospectives I’ve been writing. So far I have done:
- Seaman
- GoldenEye 007
- Star Fox 2
- EarthBound
- Dune II
- Uniracers
…and now, obviously, World of Warcraft. This one is a bit more brief than the others, but the story is fascinating to me. An unexpected bug caused so much drama, and it ended up being studied. It came back to focus when Covid hit, it was covered by regular ‘big’ news services, the whole thing is such an odd story to me.
Anyway, I had a great time writing this up, maybe you were ther when it happened? I’d love to hear a comment if so!
I started playing just after this, so I missed it. I was there, however, for the opening of the AQ gates. That required a single person on each server doing a huge quest chain, along with the entire server donating war provisions. The only reason to open the AQ gates at that time was for big raiding guilds to do AQ, since smaller raiding guilds weren’t much of a thing back then. The whole server knew exactly what time the gates would be allowed to be open, so any player level 58+ showed up to the gates for a massive PVP kill fest. Opposing players who weren’t on raiding guilds were griefing the single person who could open the gates, since they didn’t care if the gates were ever actually opened. The server crashed so many times. It took hours for the gates to finally be opened.