World of Warcraft turns ten: 10 unforgettable moments from WoW’s first decade

World of Warcraft turns ten: 10 unforgettable moments from WoW’s first decade



World of Warcraft is now officially ten years old, if you can believe it. If you started playing the game as a toddler, you’re now entering your teenage years, teenage players are now working twenty-somethings, and college players are settling down and getting married.To get more news about Safe WoW Gold, you can visit lootwow.com official website.

Before battlegrounds gave some semblance of structure to World of Warcraft‘s player versus player combat, there was the infinite battle between the Alliance town of Southshore and the Horde town of Tarren Mill.

Those two areas were basically inaccessible, as there was a round-the-clock tug of war going on between the two factions as to who controlled both towns. The Horde might capture Southshore only to lose Tarren Mill and vice versa, forever and ever. The battles got so heated at times that entire servers crashed under the strain.
The classic fight was resurrected recently for World of Warcraft‘s ten-year anniversary event, with a battleground designed to mimic the Southshore versus Tarren Mill struggle—except there’s an eventual end to the battle this time around, as players fight to score points for their team.

It’s arguably the most famous singular moment in World of Warcraft history: A team of players are laying out detailed tactics prior to entering a battle when one member breaks ranks, screams his own name out, runs into a cave and gets killed. And then everyone else gets killed too.

Alas, rumor has it the whole thing was staged. Regardless, that didn’t stop the video from going viral when “viral video” was barely even a thing, and Mr. Jenkins lives on as both an NPC in World of Warcraft and a card in Hearthstone.

It was intended to be temporary—a spell called Corrupted Blood that would rapidly drain hit points and could spread to (infect) nearby players, but only in the confines of a specific raid zone set up by Blizzard.

The problem? Player’s pets and minions could unintentionally carry the disease outside the confines of said raid zone and into World of Warcraft at large. Entire urban areas were left empty as the epidemic spread, leaving masses of bodies in the streets as survivors fled to the relative safety of the countryside. Blizzard scrambled to set up quarantine zones while players of ill-repute deliberately infected other users and NPCs—the latter being particularly devious as they were immune to the disease but could still spread it to players.

The event was so disastrous it eventually resulted in Blizzard hard-resetting the servers in order to stem the problem, though in the run-up to 2008’s Wrath of the Lich King expansion Blizzard ran a controlled epidemic that spread much the same way.

The upshot is that the Corrupted Blood Incident, as it’s come to be known, mimicked real-life diseases so well it’s been used as an actual model for epidemic research in years since.It was supposed to be the biggest moment in all of the original World of Warcraft—the massive Gates of Ahn’Qiraj would open, a massive enemy force would pour out, and both Alliance and Horde factions would have to team up to defend Azeroth. The event was hyped for months, with players fulfilling an enormous number of goals required to open the gates.

And then the gates opened and everything went to hell. It turns out that having every player in the entire game in a specific area at the exact same time is a terrible idea when it comes to actually running the game. Servers basically melted and performance plummeted as the remaining players valiantly struggled to make it through the actual quest content. You can get a glimpse of what it was like in this video here:

Even with all its problems, the day the gates opened is still considered by World of Warcraft players to be one of (if not the) most epic events in the game’s ten-year history, with nothing else approaching the same sense of scale.