WoW Dragonflight Accidentally Copies Infamous Corrupted Blood Plague

While World of Warcraft’s infamous Corrupted Blood Plague incident is well behind it, a new debuff in Dragonflight is repeating history.

While World of Warcraft‘s infamous Corrupted Blood pandemic is well known, Dragonflight, the game’s most recent expansion, has (accidentally) replicated it to a degree. Taking place in 2005, the Corrupted Blood incident stemmed from WoW‘s very first raid, where a contagious debuff from a boss, in combination to a bug, led to an unintentional “pandemic” – which has since even been subject of study for real-world epidemiologists looking to study how actual pandemics spread.

As reported by Destructoid, a prominent Dragonflight bug is having effects reminiscent of the Corrupted Blood incident. While Warcraft has undergone a great deal of evolution over its long history, WoW‘s latest expansion brings with it a debuff called Contagious Cowardice – yet another debuff which can spread between players. Although the debuff is intended to last for 12 seconds, a bug has led to it lasting indefinitely, and although the status’s damaging effects can be cured, visuals and sound effects associated with it continue to play.

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Dragonflight’s Contagious Cowardice Accidentally Replicates Past WoW Pandemic

While World of Warcraft has a long history to be proud of, and certainly isn’t shy about celebrating it, Blizzard is unlikely to have wanted a call-back to one of the game’s most infamous, game-breaking bugs. With Dragonflight‘s other issues, like server and login failures, already having somewhat marred the expansion’s release, the developers behind World of Warcraft are likely hard at work on a fix for the Contagious Cowardice bug. In the meantime, however, players who “catch” it will simply have to mitigate its effects and bear with the associated visual and audio effects.

The Corrupted Blood pandemic was undoubtedly an unwanted situation for both the developers and the playerbase, but it was also an undeniably important and prominent piece of WoW‘s history. In fact, a large part of what can make long-running MMO’s interesting is their ability to sometimes break out of any in-game storyline or event, letting the community take center stage. It remains to be seen just how much the Contagious Cowardice situation will escalate, but if it does, then WoW could very well have yet another historic incident on its hands.

With Dragonflight‘s new features, including dragonriding, most players are likely to care more about being able to play the game than any resemblance to past events. While Contagious Cowardice isn’t quite as dire as Corrupted Blood – being, for one thing, unlikely to kill as many players – World of Warcraft players afflicted with it will still have to deal with some annoying visual and audio effects until a fix is implemented.

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Source: Destructoid