"The entire world chat would burst any time a town fell," says Nadia Heller, an ex-World of Warcraft player whose persona lived through the episode. "We kept a close attention not only on our guild conversation but on earth chat too to wow classic gold determine where not to proceed. We didn't need to catch it."
The spread of Corrupted Blood, and the player's behavioral modifications to it, captured the attention of epidemiologist Dr. Nina Fefferman, that was a World of Warcraft player at the time of the episode. Fefferman achieved to her colleague Dr. Eric Lofgren. In 2007, the two released a paper that detailed their findings, including complex models of individual behavior during a pandemic. Fefferman claims the incident has helped inform her current research into predictive modeling about covid-19.
"What I do is research all the aspects of infectious disease outbreaks which help us prepare for pandemics," said Fefferman, a mathematical biologist. "We saw the complete gamut of behaviors we see in the actual world reflected from the player characters during Corrupted Blood."
Dr. Dmitri Williams, an associate professor in USC who was also playing World of Warcraft through the Corrupted Blood episode, queries if Fefferman's findings are legitimate mirrors to real-life behavior.
"There are games in which you're encouraged to behave in a manner which you would never act offline," Williams stated. "You must understand [the game], play with it and understand the culture so that you can make these kind of determinations that, yeah, this is a fairly good proxy"
Despite this, Fefferman believes that virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft are perfect testing environments for mass behavioral reactions to buy classic wow gold outbreaks. "It is not simply that people were role-playing. Individuals were being themselves," Fefferman explained.