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.

All of the examinations over WoW's success gets pretty tedious at times. Some people are still baffled by it, many have mistakenly taken it as everything Blizzard does is golden. It makes me weep for the designs of future games, because the WoW-cloning (and itself a clone of EQ) is going to get tired really fast.

Want to know the real secret? I'm not just rambling here, flat out I'm completely positive this is the very core of WoW's breakthrough mass-market success:

WoW was the first MMORPG that wasn't ugly.

That's it. All of it. Right there. Go ahead, list a bunch of other features, they're important too and some of them no doubt keep people playing, but that reason right above is the only one that matters when it comes to explaining how WoW captured such a huge audience in the first place.

The MMORPG genre was all set to take off, it had since before it's conception, virtual worlds are a blessed idea straight from the gods themselves. It didn't have to be done right, that's bonkers, it just needed to be pretty. I'm painting with broad strokes, there are parts of other MMORPGs that were nice to look at, but they've been horribly inconsistent in their styles until WoW. Blizzard's art direction was notable at a glance.

Never underestimate the ability for screenshots to sell a game.

Presentation is everything.

I didn't come up with these tenets, they've been widely known since the dawn of videogames and probably could have been theorized before they existed. We're a visually obsessed species. Sure, gameplay is king once the game is in the hands of the gamers, but in order for gameplay to sell games a namebrand needs reputation first. Blizzard had that too mind you, but seriously, it wouldn't have sold a tenth as much if it was as ugly as EverQuest.

I'm thinking the same thing with Spore. A few months back, I was wondering if it may flop even after all the hype and press. Then the creature creator came out and there's no doubt to me that Spore will be a runaway success, because you can't make a creature that isn't cute. Even the phallic ones. Damn cute.

It even affects why we leave one game for another. I had all sorts of gameplay beefs with WoW after 3 years of Blizzard's blandification of their best property, but in the end the main reason I left for Age of Conan? I was sick of staring at elves, dwarves and orcs. Evem the best graphics can feel shallow after a long while and I've had my fill of WoW's cartoonish style.

Feel free to keep debating the gameplay features tho. =)

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.