If you lived through World of Warcraft's Corrupted Blood incident, you'll probably remember it as one of the most memorable (and potentially terrifying) moments in online gaming history. This week, World of Warcraft Classic players got a chance to experience that very same plague anew.
Per Redditor Lightstruckx (via Massively Overpowered), players on Classic's Season of Discovery server managed to recreate Corrupted Blood a few days ago, carrying the eponymous debuff into the Alliance capital of Stormwind City, where it proceeded to decimate the population just like the first time.
Lightstruckx's accompanying video shows exactly the kind of carnage you'd expect from Corrupted Blood; players are taking periodic damage ticks from the debuff and dropping like flies as healers fail to outpace the relentless disease.
One commenter beneath Lightstruckx's video imagines the carnage if Corrupted Blood somehow made its way to one of World of Warcraft Classic's hardcore servers, which feature permadeath; you've got one life, and after you lose it, it's over for your character.
Of course, I hope this doesn't happen for the sake of everyone who's managed to build up a treasure trove of loot and gear in hardcore mode, but on the other hand, I can't deny it'd be fun to watch.
In case you aren't familiar, the Corrupted Blood incident happened back in 2005. Hakkar the Soulflayer, a boss in the Zul'Gurub raid, inflicted a debuff on players called Corrupted Blood, which caused their health to tick down periodically.
While players themselves couldn't carry the debuff out of Zul'Gurub, their pets could, and adventurers quickly found that resummoning their deactivated pets outside of the raid would cause Corrupted Blood to be applied in areas it should never have appeared in.
The event led to widespread sociological interest, with some epidemiologists looking to Corrupted Blood in order to try and understand how a real-life pandemic on a similar scale might play out.
Sadly, the scope and breadth of the original Corrupted Blood incident isn't likely to be repeated today; Blizzard is far more vigilant about such things than it once was. Still, it's almost nostalgic to see this disease murdering player after player yet again, so many years later.
