With the World of Warcraft expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard did what it always does with new content and created a server wide event to go along with the release, the Scourge Invasion. Blizzard has used its experience from past events (cramming a couple thousand players into a small portion of a single zone while they wait for the only person on the server with the hammer to hit the gong to open a gate creates enough lag so that you can't move, which would seem obvious at first, but apparently not for Blizzard) and spread the main the goals and content around the capital cities, so that repeats of things like the AQ opening (server crashing), the dark portal opening (server crashing), and the 3.0 content patch (server crashing). I'm sure if you asked them, they would assure you that they knew before hand about the effects of these events, and to not be alarmed, for server crashing is “working as intended”.

If you have ever played Warcraft 3, you'll recall that the Scourge plague broke out in the Northern Kingdoms of Azeroth, due to infected grain, turning all who came into contact with it to die and then be reborn as an undead servant of the Lich King. Well it appears that Azeroth's food inspectors haven't gotten any better, and a diseased grain shipment was brought in from Booty Bay (Goblin harbor/trade town) from Northrend (HERE BE UNDEAD DRAGONS) and delivered to all the factions capital cities. Interacting with these crates will of course give you a plague, and a debuf (its a curable disease, if you make it to a healer in time) that will count down the time left until you become a zombie. Can't find a crate? Well lucky you, there are also plague infested cockroaches over these cities, all of which will gladly transfer their disease unto you upon death. Ok so now that you've gone out of your way to get yourself infected (I mean who wouldn't want to be a zombie?), what next? Well if you were smart you would have used your remaining time among the living to get to a near by town, that way you won't have level 75 guards beating you down. Once at your destination (any place with a lot of npc's or players works) begin infecting. You can change any humanoid into a zombie by killing them, hitting them and waiting for the infection timer to go down, zombie explosion (you blow yourself up and infect everyone around you), or if they sit long enough in zombie poison cloud. You can build up an army of NPC zombies and order them to follow you as you march on towards your next target, or you can infect other player characters and communicate with them to plot your attack (any /say or /yell appears as “.......BRAINS.........” for non zombies). It's also worth noting, that you can talk across faction as a zombie, so it makes it worth going to neutral cities like any goblin cartel city or Shattrath to infect the opposite faction to talk to them. It's always fun too to have a raid of zombies attack largely populated cities, and if you have enough to go for the capital cities. Either way it's a cool little break from the grinding, and something different.

The Scourge Invasion isn't the only part of the expansions opening event, since Naxxramas is coming back as a Lv 80 dungeon despite already being in the game, the Naxxramas event is being rehashed too. It's pretty much EXACTLY the same event, only the mobs are re-tuned for a Lv 70 instead of 60. You get the floating Necropolises, invading Scourge and Lich, and farming quests for Argent Dawn reputation so that you can buy gear that will be outdated in about 3 weeks. All the usual timesinks that you'd equate to a free korean grindan mmo can be found here, just about as well disguised as leftover cafeteria food that they recook and pour onto your plate at the end of the week.

It's really too bad that there's a good chance that a large portion of your server will be infuriated at your zombie oriented antics. I mean how dare you go around infecting various NPC's and making them run off to a healer to cure their disease, they have important things to do! If you delay them any longer they will never get their Argent Dawn rep to exalted to get a tabard (same tabard as the previous naxx event and same design as the Dark Portal opening one), or grind through the useless achievements just because they're there. The zombie plague is a nice refresher to a game that can easily get stale.