Virtual plague wipes out Warcraft characters

An inadvertent bit of game programming resulted in a virtual epidemic among players in the World of Warcraft online role-playing game. Higher-level characters returning from a dungeon infected with the virus/spell/disease "Corrupted Blood" unwittingly passed the disease on to lower-level characters, who couldn't withstand the attacks.

In the days since Blizzard eradicated the plague, the company has remained surprisingly quiet about what happened. But you can still find plenty of players willing to talk about it. One 14-year-old Orc told me openly of the incident: "Humans were dying left and right. We just laughed and laughed."

You can read the full Gadgeteer entry on the incident here.