The fantasy/medieval-themed MMORPG known as World of Warcraft is the most popular such game ever for good reason. It’s friendly to the casual player as well as the hardcore, and breaks new ground in terms of how immersive and detailed the virtual world can be. Now publisher Blizzard has (deliberately or inadvertantly) introduced another staple of medieval life: a communicable plague (all errors in the original; [comments added] for clarity:

Heres the skinny: Blizzard adds in a new instance [Ed.: special dungeon zone], Zul’Gurub. Inside is the god of blood, Hakkar. Well, when you fight him he has a debuff [magical curse] called Corrputed Blood. It does like 250-350 damage to palyers and affects nearby players. The amazing thing is SOME PLAYERS have brought this disease (and it is a disease) back to the towns, outside of the instance. It starts spreading amongst the genral population including npcs [non-player characters, such as shopkeepers, trainers, quest givers, etc], who can out generate the damage [meaning the NPC doesn’t die, but does continue to spread the plague via proximity]. Some servers have gotten so bad that you can’t go into the major cities without getting the plague (and anyone less than like level 50 nearly immediately die). [WoW only goes to level 60] GM’s even tried quarantining players in certain areas, but the players kept escaping the quarentine and infect other players. ShackNews forums

The official forums have word of it as well. It seems likely they meant at least some of this to happen, but it’s clearly gotten out of hand on some servers (8MB Windows Media with poorly written text).

(via MeFi)