Found this link in the http://thisweekintech.com/ show notes (and heard about it on the podcast episode 24).
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050921-5337.html
Although I don’t play World of Warcraft, I think that’s just a fantastic twist to the game.
2 comments on “Virtually deadly virus”
IMHO they’re going to have a HELL of a time trying to control that thing until they actually disable the script or its contagiousness. But it doesn’t sound like it has an incubation period, that’ll help slow the spread a little. I wonder if there’s a visible sign of having the disease – if so that MIGHT help… But all it takes is one person who wants to spread the thing and all your effort to contain it is wasted.
The reason I think that is that many years ago I was a scripter on a free (player-run) UO shard, and actually scripted a spreadable plague. It spread across the entire shard like wildfire, and despite numerous tweaks to try to slow it down, it continued to infect and reinfected virtually everyone on the shard. It was intended to be a special event, and eventually the players figured out the cause and rallied to wipe it out. At that point we disabled the script since the plague turned out to be so resilient that it would have really been impossible for the players to wipe it out.
If you’re curious about what happened when we tried this, I’ll link you to a post I wrote a year or two ago on Shardwire. This link takes you to the thread it’s in, have your browser search for “Also, here’s another idea that we tried… Diseases:” and read from there. The next couple posts after that one talk about it some more, but after that the topic changes to trying to consider ways to fight inflation in an MMOG economy. Here’s the link: http://www.shardwire.org/index.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=92
Just looked at the date on the article. They’ve contained it by now, haven’t they? 😛 *reads http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/174096756/m/667008545731/p/1 *
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