Has the idea of terminal illness or genuine disease been discussed? For example: Players happen to discover a shipwreck and they find some food stuffs/strange biological container and possibly try to eat the food or sell the container. They get sick, possibly only as carriers and then you know you have an in-verse pandemic. I'm curious if this simple add-in by developers would cause the entire verse to go nuts, both 'government' and player-forced euthanasia, extreme traffic control/blockades....that sort of thing. The point is that player psychology would be studied for decades by IRL teachers/students doing term papers...etc about how in-game players react to a pandemic, was there blood/did they handle it well, how different was it to a real scenario? So devs don't even need to set up the government, let the players do the work and I bet dollars to donuts the publicity would go through the roof. I will leave you with this link of something similar that happened in World of Warcraft years ago albeit not intended.asked by Fallunlite

So this is actually an interesting story for both of us because, the link Fallunlite mentions at the end, at the time I was actually a customer support rep on World of Warcraft and you were mentioning that you were actually in-game when this was happening.

I was playing. I logged in when this was happening.

So just for a little bit of context the incident in question is what was described. So a virus got unleashed into a massive populous.

It was a bug. There was a DOT.

Yes, there was a debuff effect that was causing this virus and it wasn't intended that it was going to wipe out the world but it did.

Yeah the timer wouldn't end. And it was contagious.

Yeah, very contagious. So the high-level idea of this, where you do have this uncontrollable viral outbreak is an insanely cool high-level thing, but something to consider with it is just how destructive that is. In this example it even as it says here players-forced euthanasia or government-forced euthanasia. That was how that situation had to be contained. Entire player, well not player cities, but like main hubs ...

Ogrimmar.

... in the game had to be just wiped out, every living thing had to die! So to do that for the PU, having some sort of a viral incident: definitely want to explore that. Having it be something that could contaminate and infect the entire universe is a little less likely.

And that's a huge content shift.

Because that would effectively be like "cool, let's just eradicate Terra and everyone who lives on there". And it's not really the friendliest option.

And also that becomes the story. You can't do "I'm going to pick up three tonnes of iron ore and move it to Stanton because, oh my god, there's a pandemic making people bleed on me". It feels like everything else grinds to a halt. That was a thing like I mentioned: I logged in randomly while that event was going on and I spawned in Ogrimmar and there were just corpses everywhere, and I had no idea what was going on so I just took off because I saw bleeding people and just started running. So it's a great narrative hook, no doubt, but it would be dangerous.

The dangers of it are definitely there. Although even on a smaller scale like having a ship-wide event, that's probably something you could see. So you're doing some research on your Endeavour or other science type ship, and something goes wrong there, that could definitely be more of a case where it's that same kind of fear and same kind of panic but in a much more controllable scale where billions of entities won't have to die just to get things back to normal.

There could even be a planet that needs to be quarantined because they have a thing but then again it feels like it's a very guarded type thing where it's like "oh well they need more resources to maintain this quarantine" then maybe you can have the narrative hook of "oh the quarantine starts to fail". But again that feels more kind of a scripted thing rather than just creating a virus bug and just letting it go and run rampant.

So it's definitely something that we want to explore but it is making sure that we can explore it without being too punishing to everyone else who may not find viral outbreaks the most valuable use of their gaming hours.