"The entire world chat would explode any time a city dropped," says Nadia Heller, an ex-wow classic gold player whose character lived through the episode. "We kept a close eye not only on our guild chat but on world chat as well to see where not to proceed. We did not want to catch it."
The spread of Corrupted Blood, and also the player's behavioral changes to this, captured the attention of epidemiologist Dr. Nina Fefferman, who had been a World of Warcraft player at the time of this episode. Fefferman achieved to her colleague Dr. Eric Lofgren. In 2007, the two published a paper that detailed their findings, including complicated models of human behaviour in a pandemic. Fefferman says the episode has helped inform her current research to predictive modeling around covid-19.
"What I do is research all of the elements of infectious disease outbreaks that help us prepare for pandemics," explained Fefferman, a mathematical biologist. "We really saw the full gamut of behaviors we see in the real world reflected from the player characters during Corrupted Blood."
Dr. Dmitri Williams, an associate professor in USC who was also playing World of Warcraftcheap classic wow gold during the Corrupted Blood episode, questions whether Fefferman's findings are valid mirrors into real-life behavior.
