[Mr.HappySilp]

Originally Posted by SkinnyPupp

How much actual panic is there though? I admit I don't watch a lot of western news sources, but really all I see are people preparing rather than panicking. There was that one picture of a dude climbing a shelf to get some rice at a Costco, or ladies fighting over the last pack of toilet paper. But that's all pretty common in any busy shopping scenario. We see it every single year with black friday and boxing day sales.

People keep going on about how the media is blowing the danger of the virus out of proportion... Actually the only thing I see being blown out of proportion is the level of panic being perceived.

To me there are two camps: Don't give a shit, like the non billionaire climate change deniers, and people trying to tell these guys "hey this could actually be a serious thing and our government is not doing enough to prepare for this"

It's totally not uncommon though. We've seen this in past outbreaks, from SARS to AIDS to everything in between. There is always a segment that will just not care enough. There are even some that WANT to spread disease to others. The thing is, do western governments have enough power to lock these people up if they aren't willing to do it themselves? Hong Kong alone has already had something like 17 people try to break their quarantines.

It's funny because epidemiologists studied this exact type of behavior in World of Warcraft. The boss gave players an infection that would do damage and die after a set amount of time. It would spread if you got to close to someone infected. It's not enough to kill high level players, but low level players would die from it quickly. There was a bug that caused the infection to not die out after a re-summoned pet got it. So it got spread to the general population.

It quickly spread, and killed huge segments of the population. I remember this, bodies lying everywhere. They couldn't patch it out, so told people to self quarantine. Some complied, some even stopped playing for a while.

But there was a certain segment of the player base who wanted to cause problems, and would purposefully take their infections and spread it. It caused so much chaos that they just had to revert the servers to take the entire boss encounter out.

Whether it's in a game or in real life, there will always be people who, for one reason or another, decline to believe in reality. This has been studied, and the game was one case of it happening. In general people all pretty much want the same things, but for some reason there's a certain population that don't have the ability to believe reality. I incorrectly called it "idiotic" before, but there's definitely something behind this that is kind of interesting (and scary)

I remember that! It was before the lich king expansion! It was actually pretty funny. You would get infected and die and then become a zombie. The bug allow an infected pet and bring it say a city IE auction house. Where then it would spread to nearby players and NPC. The AH and the major city was a chaos. I remember I got infected but didn't die (was playing a pally then so I can bubble) it was funny as hell! I got infected yes and I kinda of spread it to the AH NPC on purpose. But a game is a game I don't think anyone in the real.world would go and infect others on purpose. Is like blaming shootings when someone is playing COD