What the heck did you just hecking say about me, you little bully? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Elven Gymnastics Academy, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on Robbie Rotten, and I have over 300 confirmed foiled plans. I am trained in classical gymnastics and I’m the most slightly above average hero in the entirety of Lazytown. You are nothing to me but just another villain. I will exercise the heck out out of you with calisthenics the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my hecking words. You think you can getaway with saying that about aerobics to me over the Internet? Think again, meanie. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of sports elves across multiple towns and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, lazybones. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life without eating healthy and exercising. You’re lazy lifestyle is hecking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can make you work out in over seven hundred ways, and that’s just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in classical gymnastics, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the Lazytown Public Gym and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable bad habits off the face of the continent, you little bully. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little “clever” comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your hecking tongue. But you couldn’t, you didn’t, and now you’re paying the price, you god dang bully. I will pour positive affirmations all over you and you will drown in it. Your bad habits are hecking dead, kiddo.
The epidemic began on September 13, 2005, when Blizzard introduced a new raid called Zul’Gurub into the game as part of a new update. Its end boss, Hakkar, could affect players by using a debuff called Corrupted Blood, a disease that damages players over time, this one specifically doing significant damage. The disease could be passed on between any nearby characters, and would kill characters with lower levels in a few seconds, while higher level characters could keep themselves alive. It would disappear as time passed or when the character died. Due to a programming error, players’ pets and minions carried the disease out of the raid.
Non-player characters could contract the disease but were asymptomatic to it and could spread it to others.[2] At least three of the game’s servers were affected. The difficulty in killing Hakkar may have limited the spread of the disease. Discussion forum posters described seeing hundreds of bodies lying in the streets of the towns and cities. Deaths in World of Warcraft are not permanent, as characters are resurrected shortly afterward.[3] However, dying in such a way is disadvantageous to the player’s character and incurs inconvenience.[4]
During the epidemic, normal gameplay was disrupted. Player responses varied but resembled real-world behaviors. Some characters with healing abilities volunteered their services, some lower-level characters who could not help would direct people away from infected areas, some characters would flee to uninfected areas, and some characters attempted to spread the disease to others.[2] Players in the game reacted to the disease as if there was real risk to their well-being.[5] Blizzard Entertainment attempted to institute a voluntary quarantine to stem the disease, but it failed, as some players didn’t take it seriously, while others took advantage of the pandemonium.[2] Despite certain security measures, players overcame them by giving the disease to summonable pets.[6] Blizzard was forced to fix the problem by instituting hard resets of the servers and applying quick fixes.[3]
The major towns and cities were abandoned by the population as panic set in and players rushed to evacuate to the relative safety of the countryside, leaving urban areas filled to the brim with corpses, and the city streets literally white with the bones of the dead.[7]
