The popular online role-playing game World of Warcraft has been hit by the first ever online epidemic.
Basically the story is this: Blizzard Games released a game update which endowed a non-player baddie with an disease attack called ‘Corrupted Blood’ (pleasant, eh?), a nasty piece of work that continuously damages infected players until they are healed or die. It also infects anyone within range of the carrier, making it one mean little motorscooter of an attack.
However, the programmers didn’t take into account the idea of a lone character being able to survive the disease long enough to wander back to populated areas, which of course had to happen, and wouldn’t you know it that those infected carriers went to other cities and towns, infecting whole servers. So now entire online cities are being ravaged by a virtual disease that the game’s developers have no idea how to fix.
That is so kickass on so many levels.