The epidemic began on September 13, 2005, when Blizzard introduced a new raid called Zul’Gurub into the game as part of a new update. Its end boss, Hakkar, could affect players by using a debuff called Corrupted Blood, a disease that damages players over time, this one specifically doing significant damage. The disease could be passed on between any nearby characters, and would kill characters with lower levels in a few seconds, while higher level characters could keep themselves alive. It would disappear as time passed or when the character died. Due to a programming error, players’ pets and minions carried the disease out of the raid.
Non-player characters could contract the disease but were asymptomatic to it and could spread it to others.[2] At least three of the game’s servers were affected. The difficulty in killing Hakkar may have limited the spread of the disease. Discussion forum posters described seeing hundreds of bodies lying in the streets of the towns and cities. Deaths in World of Warcraft are not permanent, as characters are resurrected shortly afterward.[3] However, dying in such a way is disadvantageous to the player’s character and incurs inconvenience.[4]
During the epidemic, normal gameplay was disrupted. Player responses varied but resembled real-world behaviors. Some characters with healing abilities volunteered their services, some lower-level characters who could not help would direct people away from infected areas, some characters would flee to uninfected areas, and some characters attempted to spread the disease to others.[2] Players in the game reacted to the disease as if there was real risk to their well-being.[5] Blizzard Entertainment attempted to institute a voluntary quarantine to stem the disease, but it failed, as some players didn’t take it seriously, while others took advantage of the pandemonium.[2] Despite certain security measures, players overcame them by giving the disease to summonable pets.[6] Blizzard was forced to fix the problem by instituting hard resets of the servers and applying quick fixes.[3]
The major towns and cities were abandoned by the population as panic set in and players rushed to evacuate to the relative safety of the countryside, leaving urban areas filled to the brim with corpses, and the city streets literally white with the bones of the dead.[7]
my cat has been fucking playing me for weeks, playing me like a fucking harp. I feed my cat twice a day with prescribed diet food because she’s really fat and doesn’t know when she’s full so she never stops eating. usually when I come home from class she is all over me like the whore of babylon all over me putting on a pity party and trying to get me to sin and give her more food but no matter what I only feed her the amount of food for her prescribed diet. but after awhile i started noticing that she wasn’t loosing weight at all and was actually just getting fatter. so I called the vet pissed and i’m just like the fuck she’s still getting fat. so I switched her to another diet food and that still didn’t work and I was so confused and frustrated like what is wrong with this cat? so a couple weeks go by and I start noticing that I go through bags of food really fast like a week fast and I remembered how I thought that was so weird like I God honest could not figure out why the food disappeared so fast (my former naive and innocent mind) well y'all ready here’s the fucking climax - the other day my class was canceled and I come downstairs at like noonish and do you know what I see when I get down? I see my fucking cat sitting in the food bin. with my own two eyes I see her sitting in the fucking food bin. my spoiled ass cat has been eating like a fucking queen and living it the fuck up while I’m in class and then pretends like she’s hungry when I get home. and you know what’s the real kicker? when she leaves the lid gets knocked shut which is why i never caught onto her scam. she’s fucking been working the system and playing the food game right under my fucking nose like i want to scream and now I have to call the vet and the morning and explain to him how I, a well educated adult in college, got one-upped in intelligence by my fucking cat
