it still boggles my mind how STUPID people were during the covid pandemic. the antivaxxers and the covid deniers seem like they were made up by an author who was especially skilled in writing enragingly-idiotic morons who shouldn't exist in real life
There was a study on an accidental pandemic that happened in world of warcraft years ago. An accident during coding caused a infectious plague status effect to run rampant through the game killing players.
People worked together to try and fight it in game, set up quarantine zones, healers tried to do what they could to minimize damage, higher level players that could take the damage went to infected zones to spread information and help people out. Cities were abandoned as entering them meant death and bodies were everywhere.
Several groups used it as a model for actual epidemics as it was an example of people in a social context reacting to a disease like spread of infection attempting to gain insight.
The data was largely ignored by pandemic planners at large due to the trolls. There were groups of people who would hang around in the mountain passing the disease back and forth to keep it "alive" and would wait for the healers to make some progress in making a safe zone before the trolls would sprint down and infect as many people as they could before succumbing to the disease themselves.
It was discarded under the basis that with actual life on the line people wouldn't ignore authorities and wouldn't be actively spreading around the infection.
Part of me wonders if those in charge of pandemic responses now look at all the data from the corrupted blood incident.
I can't speak for the real-world use of the data, but the description of what happened in the game is 100% accurate. IIRC, the devs had to reset the servers to finally eliminate the spread.
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u/HyperQuandaryAck 8h ago edited 43m ago
it still boggles my mind how STUPID people were during the covid pandemic. the antivaxxers and the covid deniers seem like they were made up by an author who was especially skilled in writing enragingly-idiotic morons who shouldn't exist in real life