"We saw the complete variety of classic gold wow behaviors we see in the actual world reflected from the player characters during Corrupted Blood."

Dr. Dmitri Williams, an associate professor from USC who was also playing World of Warcraft during the Corrupted Blood incident, questions whether Fefferman's findings are valid mirrors into real-life behavior.

"There are matches in which you are encouraged to act in a manner that you would never behave offline," Williams said. "You must know [the sport ], play it and understand the culture so that you can create these types of determinations that, yeah, this is a fairly good proxy"

Despite this, Fefferman believes that virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft are ideal testing environments for mass behavioral responses to outbreaks. "It is not simply that people were role-playing. Individuals were being themselves," Fefferman said.

Unlike the modern sport, there's absolutely not any official-looking for team' system that finds people to play with you and teleports all of you to the dungeon. Instead, you'll look for party members in conversation stations in major cities or on your guild, and you may all fly or run together to the dungeon that you want to do. And you will all have to move there -- in the first days of Classic, there will not be a summoning stone in the cases themselves.

Quests for Classic dungeons come from outdoor quest lines, typically in the zones in which the dungeons are located. In certain later dungeons, you'll find quests indoors, but that practice did not really start in earnest before the LFG system was created. This implies that if you want to do dungeons while leveling, you'll often finish a zone first, then attempt to safest place to buy wow gold discover a group for this zone's dungeon.