World of Warcraft Fan Server Runs Pandemic Event to Encourage Social Distancing
World of Warcraft is a fairly unique game. It's remained relevant for well over a decade and continued to release new content, like the Shadowlands expansion, and run events for its players. Fan servers have also started to pop up, giving players a chance to enjoy the game as it was during a specific expansion, or to simply play the game a bit differently than originally intended.
One fan server, Elysium, used its independence from the official World of Warcraft channels to run a special event, or maybe a social experiment, depending on how players look at it. Over the weekend, Elysium created its very own pandemic in WoW to show how quickly a disease can spread and to encourage social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic.
To do so, Elysium spread a virus in the game, initially putting it on a surface, which a player, referred to as "patient zero," then touched. That began the spread of the disease, which by the end had infected 4,669 players, according to an infographic released on the Elysium forums. That may not seem like many, but it equates to over 37% of the server's player base.
Those familiar with World of Warcraft may remember the corrupted blood incident, during which a different plague was released into Azeroth that was easily transmissible between players, as well as being lethal. This event was similar, but players couldn't die from the plague. Instead, they simply suffered debuffs, and were able to use items like hand soap and facemasks to fight back against the disease.
World of Warcraft offers a fairly unique way to experiment with social measures. It's a surprisingly accurate model of how diseases can spread in the real world, and that's not all. In the past, the game has been used for studies on economic models. While fans may be split on it now, World of Warcraft is still one of Blizzard's greatest games.
It will be interesting to see if a similar event is run in the future. It's certainly strange to consider how people might react to a digital plague, and it certainly isn't the best for escapism, but it does achieve the point it set out to make.
World of Warcraft is available now on PC.
Source: Elysium Forums
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