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I was around for this. It was amazing fun. It really made the world (of warcraft) feel more.. alive somehow. You'd do everything you could to avoid infected players, I'd only play on an alt since my main was parked in Stormwind when the epidemic broke. I just stayed hidden away in the more obscure levelling zones and survived. It's a shame stuff like this doesn't occur more often, it really adds flavour to the game.
>It's a shame stuff like this doesn't occur more often, it really adds flavour to the game.

I'm not sure. WoW as of today looks like it's engineered to avoid the slightest inconvenience or annoyance to players. :P

Oh I absolutely concur, I came back for WoD.

LFR, LFG, bonus loot rolls, facebook minigame of garrison management, Bind on Account for all pets, mounts and Heirlooms.. Heirlooms themselves.

It is definitely far more casual than it used to be. I'm not going to whine, I understand the game needs to play to the market and I'm not going to pretend I enjoyed having to find a group in a chat channel, run to the actual instance and then grind away about an hour for resurrecting and loot squabbles that existed before LFG and Personal Loot, some of the changes are great. I suppose I'm also older and 'wiser' now (At least busier, with a 9-5 and whatnot), so this new style of WoW suits me, I can't just stay up all night playing like I used to.

I was playing WoW when this happened and witnessed it.

They call it "abusing game mechanics" now, but personally I find the act of discovery of this sort of thing possibly the most fun aspect of games. WoW was particularly vulnerable because of the raw complexity of mechanics introduced in a short timespan.

See: Gamesmanship vs. Sportsmanship

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamesmanship

There was another time in WoW when a mage soloed a raid by discovering they could use spellsteal to steal invulnerability buffs off of bosses. (Hey... that's what it says on the tin, right? "Spellsteal"? ;) ) Anyway... That got patched. ;)

I remember playing Neverwinter Nights 1 and somehow I was able to squeeze 1 more weapon enchant than was supposed to be possible, onto my weapon, without cheating. My monk became pretty OP :)

I remember in Vanilla as a mage you could make yourself completely immune to the damage that Air Elementals caused in the Blackrock Mountain area (I think? I don't remember specifics, this was a good 9 years ago or so), and so could farm highly sought after crafting mats in bulk. Nobody got banned AFAIK, blizz just quietly patched it and moved on. I agree that some of the most fun things in WoW were unintended (Twinking, exploration, GM Island etc), it's a shame they're so much more against it these days.
I'll never forget the day I got an escort to Ironforge from Menethil Harbor. It was a walk that took close to an hour, as nobody had mounts then. I was a lowbie night elf from Darnassus, before it had an auction house (or flight paths, for that matter), and I needed to see it! But the areas we'd walk through were dangerous, so someone nice volunteered to escort me. I wish I could meet that person IRL and buy them a beer. ;) And then... finally walking up to and through those gigantic doors... it was pretty amazing. I still think IF is my favorite city in that game.

Another time, someone showed me how to get to the top of Ironforge. That too was amazing. Sort of meta-gaming!

It was certainly an interesting phenomenon, however I'd be wary of applying any scientific significance to it. In a videogame, there is no penalty for death, and it was expected for players to infect others "for the lulz", which wouldn't be the case for real world epidemics.
I wonder if this was possible in Second Life, and so a disease could actually be engineered by a player.

That would be pretty interesting.

I don't know much about Second Life, though--I'm not even sure if you could die.

Well, it's been years since I last touched SL. But last I checked it was really easy to make infinitely self replicating items that would end up completely filling up, and eventually crashing sims.

Something like this, https://youtu.be/YCc0hDuQt3w?t=72

I don't think you could die, but sims could make their individual rules.

I think for a sword fighting sim (as an example) you would put the rules into the sword (hitpoints, damage and so on). Then everybody with a sword could participate in the fight and the sword would tell you when you are dead. Presumably instead of death a sim could teleport you away from the sim.

I suppose you could also have an external object (the mastermind of the sim) track player stats, but there might be limits on how many players you could track at the same time (not sure).

I remember this. I don't recall specific chats, but I remember it being complete mayhem, some people not understanding what was happening to them, some intentionally inflicting it on others and some understanding it and getting away from everyone. I thought it was pretty funny at the time and then recall that some group was studying it for the parallels of an epidemic in real-life. Pretty interesting!
a freeform mmo with an economy like EVE might be able to swing user-created viruses with user-manufactured cures...
I think it would actually be really hard. In game lore, capsuleers can't meet in stations because decontamination is insufficient. Capsuleers already have compromised immune systems as a result.

Not to say it couldn't be made to work, but I highly suspect it'd just result in a pandemic that perma-deaths the player base. Could be handy if you could dope a capsuleer with a debuff though, like a stim with no upside. (Maybe pay off an NPC corp for the subterfuge?)

Cool when an artificial world takes on a life of its own