Mads Stokes on Tumblr (again!) @antlercalvestoo - Tumblr Blog

See you all on the other side eventually.

#miss you already

24ozsteak

thinking about that WoW epidemic

24ozsteak

swampgallows

i was telling my dad, ever the skeptic, about corrupted blood back in March at the start of lockdown, and how the cdc studied it. how it can be used as a model for what to do and how people might act in the event of an unpredicted pandemic, and how people were playing out the same behavior during covid.

he said “so they fixed it, right? how did they fix it in the game?” and i told him the truth: they didn’t. they couldn’t control it. they had to reset the servers and roll them back to the time before the ZG encounter.

a CNN article recently referenced another “viral” event in world of warcraft: leeroy jenkins facepulling as a metaphor for the expedited reopening of businesses. what it fails to mention however is how the video ends. everyone who charges in with leeroy dies. he wipes the raid.

it really feels like that meme where it’s like “wow, cool video game reference!” and the point soaring over their head says THE DAMAGE WAS IRREVERSIBLE. THE THREAT SPREAD TOO RAPIDLY AND EVERYONE DIED.

wheel-skellington

weird reframing of the corrupted blood incident to make it seem, for some reason, like it was all selfish actions that people said was unrealistic because real people would help others. in fact its literally the opposite, it was used as real world data specifically because of the player driven efforts to fix it

the-jellyfish-galaxy

The reason this plague in the game was a good model is because we had all walks of life type people reacting in different ways.

Those with healing magic would go into infected areas to see if they could save the infected or at least keep them alive through the disease. Those that couldn’t do that tried to warn players before they entered infected areas. NPC could be infected and have “no symptoms”; they could be asymptomatic carriers and pass it to nearby players.

The best part though was by the time Blizzard had finally come out and said “if you are infected, try to quarantine yourself so you don’t spread it!!” the player base was ALREADY DOING SO. The players had recognized the problem and worked together in myriad ways to fix it.

They also had negative reactions as well, another reason this was such a good example of a real outbreak. They had a couple people report healers or alchemists who were claiming to sell cures/treatments to the disease that ultimately would do nothing. They had a group of players that would hide in the mountains near cities and just pass the disease back and forth between themselves and then raid cities to infect them all over again. They had higher level players start rebelling on the servers. Saying it was an overreaction and if you get it you’ll just die and you can come back and be fine, etc. Since they could get the disease and survive, ie it didn’t do enough damage to them since they were higher level, they felt it unnecessary to care about whether they got it or not. They complained about not getting to play like normal just because this plague could kill lower level players.

ALL of these reactions, good and bad, were real enough to what we assumed a real life epidemic would play out that people started to use it as a model. And now look, we have proof that it was accurate.

However, what we needed to learn from it was primarily that it wasn’t reversible. The bad reactions and lack of care from the few players that weren’t cooperating made it impossible in the end to contain. The only reason it was fixed at all is the game had to reverse time, literally just delete their entire game log a few weeks and time travel weeks into the past to before the plague even began.

Think about that.

The reason no one believed it was a valid model is that it was a video game and thus the consequences weren’t permanent. “No one would act like that in real life.” But look at how we are handling this outbreak. Is it not eerily similar?

And we can’t time travel.

adobe-outdesign

pukicho

I do spells and shit for the elderly on weekends.

roseyturtles

What kind of spells?

pukicho

Lightning bolt, cast familiar, raise dead, hellfire

decommissionedrides

Have you killed an elderly yet?

pukicho

Why do you think I cast raise dead?

childhoodgrave

“omg how do u come up w this stuff” well ive been plagued by visions since birth

tagranon69-deactivated20221204

op that’s called having eyes

childhoodgrave

my name isnt op its monty and i bet God hasnt even spoken to you once

robertmitchum

THE X FILES | PILOT

bethfuller

the lady and her knight

zeusfuckedmymom

“Circe?”

“Yes Odysseus?”

“Where’s my crew?”

juanikuz-deactivated20210427

The moment abortion became legal in Argentina. Buenos Aires, December 30th 2020. 4 AM

going going gone

#playing bl3 and hiding in yet another wasteland

beckettatticus

hark the herald angel

memingursa-deactivated20250625

hauptfeuerwache

shine-sprites

this tweet of mine is gaining traction bc twitter knows what’s UP

jaubaius

Diver convince octopus to trade his plastic cup for a seashell

waffilicious

imagine if a fuckin……. giant alien just showed up and stuck a huge hand in front of your face and then proceeded to offer you three different houses and wouldn’t stop until you moved out of your old shitty apartment and then helped you fuckin move

and then just left

emilycarey

good morning to people who are touch-starved, bitches who put their shit on sock-sock shoe-shoe, people who desperately need to get railed, everyone who is not making a new year’s resolution, people who don’t go to bed until after 12, all the bitches not getting kissed at midnight next week, people who cannot swim, and as always, bad bitches who wear glasses