Last week, Blizzard released the 1.7 patch to World of Warcraft, and in doing so created a bug that today unleashed a virtual plague on many servers today.
Included in the patch was a new 20-person raid instance called Zul’Grub. Some creatures in Zul’Grub randomly infect players with a Corrupted Blood, which causes a large hitpoint loss over a short period of time and can also be transmitted to other characters in the instance.
The problem is that a character with the debuff can apparently leave the instance using a hearthstone (a method of quickly teleporting back to one’s home city) and go to a major city, like Ironforge, and spread the disease to hundreds of characters. Most low-level characters will die very quickly. High level characters won’t, however, and will spread the disease. In addition, high level NPCs can also pick up the debuff and then spread it themselves.
The result is apparently chaos on many servers, with outbreaks wiping out entire cities full of PCs and making travel their very risky.
And, of course, there are already tasteless music videos of the plague decimating PCs, accompanied by debates in the forums over whether this is a good thing (players bored by the lack of world events) or a bad thing (players who just want to finish quests that require them to go to major cities, who don’t appreciate level 60 carriers camping the gryphons and auction house).