World of Warcraft has been one of the biggest gaming phenomena in history. The MMORPG was released by Blizzard in 2004, and ever since then, the game has been the subject of intense interest by both gamers and observers alike.
During that time, a lot of events have taken place that have fundamentally changed the game. The biggest moments in World of Warcraft history both inside and outside of the game include events planned by Blizzard itself and the strange, unexpected consequences felt on and offline.
The Corrupted Blood Incident is one of the strangest occurrences in WoW history and has since been used by epidemiologists in studies on human behavior during outbreaks. On September 12, 2005, just one month before the first BlizzCon, the Zul’Gurub raid was opened up in Stranglethorn Vale. “ZG,” as it would quickly come to be known, had a final boss who would drain players’ life to heal himself using a debuff.
This debuff, “Corrupted Blood,” would also pass on to any other players who were nearby, periodically inflicting some of the highest damage in the game out the time. While the disease was planned to stay contained to Zul’Gurub, hunters whose pets had caught the disease and then were dismissed and resummoned outside of the raid were able to spread the disease to others.
Soon, Corrupted Blood was instantly killing low-level players all across Azeroth. High concentration cities like Orgrimmar, Ironforge, and Stormwind were quickly overwhelmed and players fled to the countryside to avoid others who might carry the disease. Some intentionally spread the debuff, which drew some of the initial attention from researchers, as well as the redistribution of populations to less dense areas. The plague’s flawed design would be the influence for the zombie plague event used in WoW to launch Wrath of the Lich King in 2008.
Ahn’Qiraj was a raid released at the end of vanilla WoW in 2006, with a catch. The raid was on the server, but the gates into the raid could not be opened until a guild on the server had found the Scepter of the Shifting Sands.
In classic vanilla style, this involved a ridiculously long series of quests that required entire guilds to work together on different servers, with some guilds working entirely to help the efforts of those more likely to succeed in the quest. The quests included meeting some of the most important lore characters at a time when the games were a lot less driven by individual characters, with characters from Warcraft like Malfurion Stormrage making their first appearances in the MMO.
When the gates finally opened, players were faced with one of the most difficult 40-man raids in WoW, fighting insectoids and Lovecraftian horrors in the race to the heart of the ruin. It was the effort and community required to open the gates to begin with, however, that many players remember most fondly, even if it required spending hours farming Dragonkin mobs for Green Scepter Shards.
The Burning Crusade was WoW’s first full expansion, opening the Dark Portal and taking players to Outland for the first time. Outland, formerly called Draenor, was a fractured planet that the orcs inhabited before arriving to Azeroth through the Dark Portal.
The game also introduced a new race for each faction, Blood Elves for the Horde and Draenei for the Alliance. It kicked off with doomguards like Highlord Kruul attacking major cities across the game, throwing low-level players into panic. From Darnassus to Stormwind, cities were littered with skeletons as top guilds scrambled to repel the demons before heading to Outland itself. Burning Crusade also saw in the introduction of flying mounts and the game’s first neutral city, Shattrath.
The Wrath of the Lich King expansion kicked off in 2008 with the aforementioned zombie plague, which, like all great events in WoW history, threw low-level players into utter chaos as the undead overwhelmed Goldshire and infected players found themselves rising from the grave as ghouls.
Wrath of the Lich King sent players to Northrend and introduced the game’s first Hero Class, Death Knights who had broken their ties to the Lich King, and started the game at level 55 out of 80. It would not be until Blizzard released Patch 3.3 in December of 2009 that the Lich King himself would be included in a raid.
The first Lich King kill was recorded on the first day that the final wing of Ice Crown Citadel was opened up to players, gaining that party and those would follow during the remainder of the expansion the title of “Kingslayer”. However, it would be over a full year until the next expansion, Cataclysm, would launch in December of 2010.
It is at this time that WoW’s subscriber count peaked, at around 12 million players in October of 2010. By May 2015, the game would have just 5.6 million active subscriptions. During this time many WoW players, even those who had been playing since classic, left the game. Many became bored as Blizzard introduced new dungeon mechanics which allowed players to access pick-up groups of random players from across different servers from Wrath’s main city, Dalaran.
In 2010, WoW: Cataclysm revamped the vanilla world with an apocalyptic makeover. While the new quests were a lot more fun, player numbers continued to decline as more and more convenience measures were put in the game. Server communities began to disappear as Blizzard allowed players to form groups from across all servers with players they could not see outside of the dungeon or raid they were in.
Mists of Pandaria saw the Pandaren, the first neutral race that could play as either faction, introduced to WoW. Warlords of Draenor saw players go back in time to the planet before it was broken, as well as introducing a much needed rehaul to player character models. Legion introduced playable Demon Hunters and Zone Scaling, where the game’s mobs would level to match the player. Battle for Azeroth refocused on the Horde-Alliance war, and the upcoming expansion Shadowlands will take players to a new world entirely.
In August 2019 WoW Classic, a long-awaited revamp of the vanilla game was released. WoW’s subscriber base nearly doubled between then and the start of 2020. While it will likely never reach its peak again, the Classic community reminded old fans of what made them fall in love with the series to begin with, while taking new players on the journey for the first time.
World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth and WoW: Classic are both available now on PC.
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