At approx. 2:20am, the "Corrupted Blood" plague reached IronForge, spreading quickly. It was a minor annoyance for some and instant death for others. Somehow, this disease was brought back from Zul'Gurub, but after almost an hour of constant deaths in and around the bank and auction house, it finally subsided. Our sources say however, that it's unlikely to have been completely eradicated.

Aftermath photos: Mailbox, Auction House & Bridge

Update (Sept 17, 2005): Blizzard is curing the plague by removing its existence from anywhere but the Zul'Gurub instance. A rolling restart of all servers is set for 4am. The Great Azeroth Plague of Sept '05 lasted approx 2 days.

Update (August 22, 2007): Corrupted Blood has resurfaced in the news.

Update (March 23, 2008): Corrupted Blood is back again.

This old story never seems to stop. Wired has revived Corrupted Blood once more, with a new spin from even more researchers, this time with a Terrorism angle. My original post was written while the unusual event was in progress, then I followed up again about it last year as it bounced back into the news.

I'm not sure if people ever fully understand this a few years later, but the Corrupted Blood plague that hit WoW servers in 2005 was an unscripted, unplanned accidental event that took on a life of its own. It was only meant to be a short debuff as part of an encounter in the Zul'Gurub instance, but it spread out across to the most populated areas of the game and lasted for days, killing unsuspecting players in its path.

I wonder how much information any new researchers have to go on? Although most players at the time experienced it over the course of a few days, few witnessed the first accidental outbreaks which occurred in the wee hours of the night. Of course, there were many intentional recurrences that followed.

It really was the most interesting thing that has ever happened within WoW. Or any MMO for that matter.

I'm still astonished at the legs on the old Corrupted Blood story (mirrored from original post). The plague that hit IronForge was the most fascinating thing I've witnessed in any MMORPG. This week I was indirectly Slashdotted over the story resurfacing yet again, this time someone has used one of my Flickr'd screenshots on Wikipedia's article of the plague.

Two years ago I'd posted briefly about the accidental plague event in WoW via the Silvermoon Update (semi-defunct but still technically online, I should migrate some of the articles here), along with screenshots which were referenced by the Guardian shortly afterwards.

If I was a more successful journalist, I should have had the foresight to have gotten paid for breaking the story. Ahhh well, me and half a dozen other schmo bloggers I'm sure.