For those of you unaware, The Queue is Blizzard Watch’s daily Q&A column, primarily focused on World of Warcraft. In the comments of The Queue, you can ask us whatever you want to know about WoW and we’ll pick a few to answer — if we know the answers ourselves. Today, however, I’d like to focus on answering questions about Blizzard Watch itself. It’s a brand new site and you all have a great number of questions about it, so let’s begin.
Puntable asked:
Going by your new name, can we assume that there will articles about other Blizzard games all mixed in with the WoW stuff?
Yep! We’re going to focus on World of Warcraft first, since the vast majority of you followed us here for World of Warcraft. However, we have every intention of expanding to cover other titles as funding allows. One of our design goals for this site will be making it very simple for you to display only WoW content if you only want to see WoW content, or only Hearthstone, or so forth. It will probably be as simple as clicking a “World of Warcraft” button at the top of the page and it will take you to the appropriate game category. We had an early implementation of that in place shortly after launch, but turned them off for now because none of those categories have any content yet. We’re newborns!
Benjamin Seeberger asked:
Do your lore writers have any interest doing lore (or tin foil lore) topics on the Diablo, Starcraft, and Overwatch universes? How much Patreon support do you need before that can happen?
Matthew Rossi has already voiced an interest in writing about Diablo lore. Anne Stickney was considering dipping her toes into writing about StarCraft lore, but that isn’t final. I suspect it’s a little early to go too deeply into whether or not we’ll have such a thing for Overwatch given how limited Overwatch materials are right now, but I’m confident one of us will bite when Blizzard gets the game off the ground. Rather than give a specific Patreon amount for that exact column/type of column, I’ll say that everything north of what’s required for launching class columns will be put toward exploring what different types of content we can do and diversifying beyond just World of Warcraft.
Benajamin Seeberger also asked:
Is it possible to use a theme for your site where readers can see the number of comments before they click on an entry? (Is this going to be the final theme ya’ll are going to use or are you currently open to suggestions?)
Nothing in our current layout is final. Actually, if it turns out people really love most of what we have, our final product might resemble it. For now, though, we’re considering it a placeholder. We pulled this new place of ours together in less than a week and that wasn’t enough time to design and build from scratch. As mentioned in our launch FAQ, we’ll be looking into a proper logo and design once funding is nailed down. What I like about the temporary theme we have now is it’s mobile-ready. Whether you’re on your desktop, phone, or tablet, it will fit to look good without stripping away all of its elements.
It’s a pretty good time to give us feedback on things you’d like to see on our site so we can take it into consideration when we get to that stage. Displaying comment numbers is something that’s been requested a lot already. It’s something I’d like, too.
h4wow asked:
did you expect to hit your goal in less then 7 hours?
I don’t think any of us did. When striking out on your own, there’s always a fear of crashing and burning, and I certainly did fear that. You all proved me wrong, though. And I couldn’t be happier about being wrong.
kitsunewill asked:
Can we have more Ask A Faction Leader? Please?
That one was Mike Sacco’s pet project — he was the man behind it from conception to execution. Without him with us, Ask a Faction Leader is one of those few things where it wouldn’t feel right to reboot it. He’s moved on to other things.
SpaceBard asked:
What time shall we expect The Queue to be posted? Same timing as before?
We’d like to shoot for 12 p.m. Eastern. Though running on Eastern time is a legacy of the old gig, so maybe we don’t need to do that anymore. Maybe we’ll shoot for 11 a.m. Central instead! We’ll nail it down sometime soon.
DiamondDustVIII asked:
Are we going to have an Around Azeroth section still? If so, where do we send submissions? I’m sure we all have some weird pictures we’d like to share, like turtle racing or something.
Is your name a Final Fantasy reference? It is, right? Because Final Fantasy VIII was awesome despite everyone crapping on it. To actually answer your question, Around Azeroth was one of those things that relied on funding. It’s looking more and more likely we can bring that one back on.
Overseer asked:
Will you be sticking with livefyre for comments, or will you be moving to something more robust.
We’ll probably stick with Livefyre. Commenting systems is one of those things where everyone hates everything and all you can do is pick one. No matter which platform we decided to use, someone would try to burn us a live for it. Livefyre, I think, is pretty solid. It also has a number of cool features we didn’t really take advantage of in Times Past because they weren’t at all aesthetically pleasing over there. I don’t think that kludge gave people the best impression of what Livefyre can do. Our current implementation is less squashed, so things like featuring good comments will just plain look better.
Livefyre has some awkward aspects, like how it handles avatars, but I really do think it’s a solid platform. And having briefly met some of their staff in-person some years back, they’re good people, too.
SpaceBard asked:
What was the scariest moment if any, in the process of starting up Blizzard Watch?
Not knowing if people would come through with funding. All of you did, and that’s amazing, but the opening hours were all of us staring at Patreon and wondering if we’d make it or crash and burn. It was a matter of needing to walk away completely and find something else to do with our lives or being able to continue doing what we’re passionate about.
erogroth asked:
What are you looking forward to most about this new site? Do you plan to bring back some of the old fun columns as well like the Boss Fights and Addon Spotlight and all those other great columns?
Freedom. Freedom.
We’ll bring things back little by little largely dependent on the feedback we receive. We’re open to most things. Addon Spotlight is one I’d like to see for sure. Two Bosses Enter was always an odd one because it was hard to muster interest in it. We consistently saw requests to bring it back, so we resurrected it multiple times, but it’s highly dependent on readers/audience engaging with it and there wasn’t much of that. I even took my Hail Mary in its last incarnation and tried to turn it into some kind of crazy Pro Wrestling thing with surprise entrants, fictional writeups, and some comedy, and that just made people mad. So that one is something we’d be nervous about doing again. We’ve already tried so many times.
I, for one, had a blast with the pro wrestling angle. Yeah, the comedy option was sure to win, but it was still fun to write.
WarlockAman asked:
Will the podcast be available on iTunes?
Yep! We need to set up the feed first, which we couldn’t do without having an episode recorded, and then it might take awhile for that first show to get aggregated on the various podcast platforms. But we’ll get it done as soon as we can.
JordanPhillips asked:
how do you like your Chicken Pot Pie?
The only pot pie I’ve ever eaten are frozen ones out of a box. We ate them all of the time when I was a kid. They’re pretty good, I guess. So that’s how I like them.
NRD80Y asked:
Are you expecting traffic spikes to the new site whenever there is a huge snowstorm?
That’s probably something that will happen, yes. But nobody was using the domain before, so… /shrug
Xerrabaldy asked:
Obviously looking to fund the site like most people but I’m curious about the backer perks listed in the initial post. You’re saying competition entries is one of the main benefits but how does that affect us Euro folks who’ve traditionally never had much of a look in before when WoW Insider had something up for grabs?
Since we’re running this thing as an actual company, certain legal limitations are still in place. We’ll examine that as we go and see what we can do. Not needing to go through thirty levels of lawyers before we can get an answer/permission to do something will help. None of those limitations include virtual items and we can give away pets, mounts, and that sort of thing free of restrictions.
Jack_Aubrey asked:
How can you guys tell who is a backer based on the comments? Alex said that backers might get preference in Q questions…
We’re still working out the exact system we’re going to use. The most straightforward method would be we post a place on the Patreon page for backers to ask questions there. Is that the best method? We don’t know yet, but that’s like how we’ll start doing it when we’re ready.
DiamondDustVIII also asked:
I’ve seen a couple of times now that Blizzard Watch is an idea that’s been floating around for a while. Will we ever get to hear the whole story behind it?
I’ve wanted to do it. I couldn’t do it. Now I can do it. That’s the gist.
Shuanna asked:
Is there any chance that something like the “community blog topic” will return in the near future?
That is certainly something I’d like to do again! This is a model that has more allowance for that kind of thing.
Atanae asked:
I know I asked on Twitter, but what is the milestone we need to reach to have the BW team sing sea shanties on the next podcast?
I don’t even have a good talking voice. You do not want to hear me sing.