The QueueOct 31, 2016 11:00 am CT

The Queue: The Flight

It’s Monday. I’m super tired and I’m working on a project and BlizzCon is this week and it’s Halloween/Hallow’s End and, let’s get this party started.

This is the Queue. The dog and cat in the header image are Marrina and Puck.

SCOTT LEYES

I may get flamed for this, but does anyone else get the feeling that this year’s BlizzCon is a little “phoned in”?

1) They’ve done this 10(?) times now, so it makes sense that a lot of things are on automatic, but there seems to be much less “hype” now
2) Gamescom (and other big shows) seem to be the places Blizzard makes “big” announcements now
3) Maybe its due to a loss of long-time staff, but I’m seeing a lot of community members being used to “host” panels and such – not a problem, but this is BlizzCon, not FANcon

I think some of the feeling of ‘less hype’ comes from the fact that we really have no idea what they’re going to talk about at this year’s BlizzCon.

Legion came out in late August. We seem to be getting the Sombra news tomorrow and I have no idea what they’re going to announce for Overwatch, if anything — the game itself launched earlier this year. If they’re doing a Diablo announcement this year they’ve done an excellent job of keeping it under wraps, I can’t imagine Starcraft is likely to get anything major. There’s supposedly a new property that Tom Chilton will be working on but who knows what that is, when it will be announced or what form it will finally take.

Add in the departure of Chris Metzen (seriously, I hope Chris is still at this year’s BlizzCon) and it feels like there’s just a lot less to talk about this year. I could be wrong. I want to be wrong. I’d love a Diablo announcement, a preview of patches 7.2 and beyond for Legion, maybe some awesome news like ‘Tom Chilton is working on a Starcraft themed 4x strategy game’ or what have you. But right now, Blizzard has maybe done too good of a job keeping us guessing.,

JDMAC

With all the talk of traveling to Anaheim, those of us stuck at home might be wondering: “Gee, when will the BIG announcement cinematics shown at Blizzcon show up on the YouTubes?”

In fact, I have thought of that very thing. Anyone have a good guess? Two days later? Longer?

/salute all
For Azeroth!

I know that for both Warlords and Legion it felt like the cinematics were on YouTube in seconds. I would expect any cinematics from this year’s BlizzCon will be up post haste.

FALLANGER

so i was thinking about the idea of ending the faction divide and cant think of a good reason to keep it. any ideas?

There are lots of story reasons for the faction divide to keep going. There’s almost no good gameplay reasons for it.

PvP? You could keep PvP, and even use the mercenary system from the end of Warlords to make all battlegrounds two teams of randomly assembled players, no ‘Horde v. Alliance’ at all. Likewise, world PvP could be an utter free for all, or you could leave the Horde/Alliance divide for World PvP content while getting rid of it for instanced PvP.

PvE? I am frankly at a loss why we can’t just join a group with our Real ID/Battletag friends already. Seriously, why? Why can’t we do this?

Now, in terms of story, I get why the factions don’t get along. We could sit here and list various reasons — Camp T! Theamore! Azshara! Gilneas! Ashenvale! — In the end, though, while it’s extremely unlikely that the Horde and Alliance will achieve an actual peace and work together, players shouldn’t be kept from playing with their friends.

LORD OMEDON

Q4tQ: Ok, so, maybe my guild is just too time economical and altoholic and this is an isolated gripe, but are we the only ones looking at the profession approach for legion and saying LOLNOPE to the hoops being expected to go through to get the level of satisfaction that past expansions offered for what was ultimately a side game? I don’t know, maybe it’s the “side game” element that brought this approach on (with a stable of alts, most could be almost expected to have, say, a master alchemist of their own on retainer), but they’ve swung too far the other way, in our opinion… and so most of us, being casual players with more “reasonable” goals are voting with our time and hoping blizzard will notice a proffexodus (TM) in their demographic info.

Are we alone in this protest? I mean I’m certainly glad professions “have meaning” again, but for those of us for which professions were something we “just had” before, and got around to “just having” sometime in the expansion, this does seem like a lot is being asked. Are we crazy?

(I mean, we are, but I’m referring to it in this crafting vein ;) )

Professions feel like they’re best suited to people who want to make Professions what they do in Legion — that is to say, they’re not so much a side game as an alternate progression path. If you want to pursue a Profession, it’s a ton of work, and there’s dungeons you need to run, drops you need to get… I mean, I’m sure some players have already gotten some awesome stuff from their professions, but for me just running World Quests seemed a lot better use of my time.

This saddens me because I really wanted to focus on my blacksmithing this expansion. But in the end I haven’t bothered.

DOMEHAMMER

What would be the best way to farm blood of sargeras? As today learned you need 20 to craft item for hunters to tame robot pets.

I tend to see four or five WQ’s a day that reward 2 or 3 Blood of Sargeras. I then get a bunch of them from mining as well. So I would suggest checking your map to see what World Quests reward them, then running a few Heroic or Mythic dungeons and then if you have a gathering profession hit that up.

Okay, that’s the Queue for this Monday. Liz Harper will be handling Tuesday and I’ll be back on Wednesday. It’s BlizzCon week so try and be kind to us.

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