Ghoul Prepatch

Baridorielor-22024 · September 3, 2020, 5:49pm

…Where did you get this quote then? Or the Official Documentation if you will? Is it from WoWhead?

Edit: Found it.

Baridorielor:

The rage virus

Despite how amazing this event was in hindsight, for those who lived through it, it was a massive disruption to the game. Naturally, there was a lot of complaining.

Part of the reason the event garnered so much outrage from the community was how dependent we were on NPCs for everything back then. If you ran out of reagents — for example, to create a mage portal to escape the zombies — and the reagent vendor was dead, you weren’t porting anywhere. You weren’t able to Reincarnate yourself as a Shaman. And you could forget about a combat rez.

Each city had just one auction house back then. Those NPCs made for popular targets, so you could forget about buying or selling anything that week. If you wanted to queue for a battleground, you needed to talk to the Battlemaster NPCs. No NPCs, no BG access whatsoever.

In fact, if the Battlemasters transformed during your contest, they would infect you while you watched the loading screen — because the game always brought you back to them after a match. Players also made clever use of arrival points such as Stormwind’s Mage Tower. You could be transformed before your screen even showed that you were in danger.

Such an event today would be far less disruptive both due to flying and to our general self-sufficiency compared to 2008. Modern players often scoff at people who took to the forums to complain about this event, but you have to put it in the perspective of its era. You couldn’t just mount up and zip away from the plague. It was all around you. You were trapped.

And that was kind of the whole point, to give you a darn good reason to want the Lich King dead. I would say it worked as intended.

On Day 5 of the event, new quests became active. The Horde sought a cure for the plague, while the Alliance looked for a weapon to bring down the Scourge necropolises. On Day 6, our efforts succeeded. The Argent Dawn discovered a cure and stopped the invasion. The event came to an end. Like the Dark Portal event from Burning Crusade , the plague only lasted about one week. One gloriously insane week.