One of the most notable community-sparked events of vanilla World of Warcraft in 2005 came back again in 2024.
This would be the Corrupted Blood plague, where players figured out in Patch 1.7 that they could take a nasty draining life debuff out of the Zul’Gurub raid and infect large swaths of the population. Cue decimated capital cities, voluntary quarantines, and even a post-event study by real infectious disease organizations to see how people reacted in this situation.
In any case, while Blizzard patched in a fix to Corrupted Blood, players have attempted to recreate the event ever since to varying degrees of success. The latest attempt happened just a few days ago when someone on WoW Classic’s Season of Discovery server managed to transport the debuff into Stormwind. As someone noted while surveying the dead bodies, “Imagine this on [the hardcore server].”
Learn more about the Corrupted Blood event in our Game Archaeologist column!
