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Networks in MMORPG: The Corrupted Blood Incident

Networks in MMORPG: The Corrupted Blood Incident

https://allthatsinteresting.com/corrupted-blood

We learned in class that the concept of network theory widely applies to a variety of relationships in social structures. One huge implication of network theory is analyzing the progress of contagious diseases. Contagious diseases typically flow through direct interaction (edges) between two humans (nodes), and this is no exception when it comes to infectious diseases in the virtual world.

World of Warcraft (WoW) is a huge online role-playing game set in the fantasy Warcraft universe. Created by Blizzard Entertainment in 2004, it is one of the highest-grossing video games of all time, with more than 100 million user accounts over its lifetime. Players control individual avatars who interact with each other, complete quests and gain abilities and skills.

The Corrupted Blood incident was a virtual pandemic in the WoW, which began on September 13, 2005, and lasted for one week. The epidemic began with the introduction of the new raid Zul’Gurub and its end boss Hakkar the Soulflayer. When confronted and attacked, Hakkar would cast a hit point-draining and highly contagious debuff spell called “Corrupted Blood” on players.

The spell, originally intended to last only seconds and function only within the new area of Zul’Gurub, soon spread across the virtual world by way of an oversight that allowed pets and minions to take the affliction out of its intended confines. By both accidental and purposeful intent, a pandemic ensued that quickly killed lower-level characters and drastically changed normal gameplay, as players did what they could do to avoid infection. Despite measures such as programmer-imposed quarantines, and the players’ abandoning of densely populated cities (or even just not playing the game), it lasted until a combination of patches and resets of the virtual world finally controlled the spread.

 

The edges connecting the source, involved characters, and uninvolved characters can be described as the local bridge. The only edge (boss raid) connecting the source to the involved users function as a local bridge between two regions, and the initial interaction between an involved character and un uninvolved character also act as a local bridge between two regions which ultimately spreads the pandemic to the virtual world of WoW. The most effective solution to this incident was cutting the local bridge between regions, and Blizzard Entertainment successfully stopped this incident by removing the infectious feature of Corrupted Blood curse between involved users and uninvolved users.

The Corrupted Blood network can be compared to a network of a real-world epidemic, in that the pandemic originated in a remote, uninhabited region and was carried by travelers (nodes) to larger regions through direct interactions (edges), and there were people, in this case, non-playable characters, who could contract it but were asymptomatic.

Although this case is often studied by epidemiologists for its implications of how human populations could react to a real-world epidemic, In real life, epidemics cannot be solved so easily like in the virtual world. There were elements in the Corrupted Blood incident that did not exist in the real world, including an indicator for carriers that they have the disease and how much risk they are at. Still, it was the network of this virtual world that epidemiologists and disaster planners discovered an untapped resource in trying to predict mass economic and societal responses to a global pandemic.

 

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