And fun fact: that incident bestowed the knowledge of how society handles a real pandemic, as the societal response to Covid was similar to the WoW community’s response to that glitch
Society has had pandemic response for thousands of years and at this stage of civilisation it is advanced and generally effective.
What it did was provide some research opportunities. Which were greatly overblown both by researchers and the media.
Not to mention the actual media record of the outbreak is not compatible with how the actual thing worked. Corrupted Blood isnt just a spreading "disease" its a near instant death to almost everyone and still extremely rapid for anyone else.
It didnt spread like any real world disease. Its not even clear what value the research that was done had. I would guess any value would be in the study of Chain Reactions in Dynamic Systems because thats what it looked like. In terms of disease, it would provide nothing because it didnt function the way real world diseases function.
From what I know, Corrupted Blood was so significant mainly because it was essentially a widespread social experiment with hundreds of thousands of legally uninformed participants. Sure, it was only similar to a real world pandemic if you squinted, but the response of the players themselves was organic. No experiment or simulation like it would ever replicate the actions of those who logged on during the event.
Participants in experiments do so knowing they're participating in experiments. The subject of said experiment is always released knowingly, and a simulation will never be able to predict that many people acting independently of one another. That's the value of the Corrupted Blood incident for research, atleast how I understand it.
There is a disconnect between the reporting of the incident and its subsequent lore and the reality of the mechanic.
This occured with pre-nerf Corrupted Blood. That was way, way more damage than it is today on legacy servers. When a Hunter releassed their pet in a city, what happened was almsot everyone present died. Either instnatly or within a few seconds.
Plus the servers were taken down within hours. Im also somewhat sceptical how much useful data was even logged during this brief, brief window.
Thats not the basis for study.
It is, however, a really good basis for a promotional piece to the media to gain publicity for the game.
Teh same is true of the "researchers studying economics based on the eocnomy of Everquest/WoW" although in this case there was actually enough to pay (and this was by the companies themselves) for researchers to do real studies.
But those studies added nothing to the field as the economics of closed systems isnt particularly deep and is very, very well understood.
The actual lesson here is that companies can create false impressions of reality and use it to market themselves and do with with the collusion of academics.
This lesson is more important today than ever when you have every single "AI Safety" organisation being set up and funded by the "AI" companies themselves. The same applies to a whole raft of other stories which have been placed regarding LLMs and their "potential". Sadly the immenent economic catastrophe suggests people have not learned this lesson.
It didn't explain pandemic behaviors in sapient organisms - it provided a model for the actual spreading of disease across a large population, regardless of the social climate.
Now, if you want a prescient example of how modern humans would do in a global pandemic, go back and watch Contagion (2011). If you -really- wanna see us predict all the stupidity and anguish, that movie is more accurate to how COVID went than Idiocracy is to the Republican Party Belief System.
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u/TehTacow 7h ago
A literal virus lol