The Queue: Battle.net client, Bud, Heroes, BlizzCon, and zones

Have you guys signed up for our weekly newsletter yet? We just launched our first edition today! You should go sign up right over here and get in on all the Blizzard News Fun (it’s capitalized like that because it’s super fun).

I’m actually looking forward to doing this quite a bit — it’s always something we wanted to do elsewhere but never got the chance to. We have so many news, guides, and opinion articles that things tend to get lost in the shuffle, so this is a great way to stay on top of what’s really happening in our community. We’re considering making some other things happen with it too, like setting up a short lore spot for one of our lore nerds to opine on, or putting some guild LFGs in it (in a very subtle way, of course).

Okay, enough talk, Queue time!

I think there’s a lot of potential for the Battle.net launcher to make some advances, and I hope that Blizzard is working on it. Your suggestion of a voice chat system makes me intrigued and cringe all at the same time. The in-game voice chat was one of the biggest jokes in the game. But what would be cool is if Blizzard opened up its software to some third party developers and we got a Vent or Mumble client integrated into Battle.net’s desktop client.

A few of Blizzard’s devs have commented they’d eventually like to see addon settings stored in the cloud, meaning that when you play WoW on your desktop, you’d have the same addon settings as you have on your laptop (if you want that). This would be doable via the Battle.net client, and it could even go a step further by hosting the addon files themselves in a cloud environment. This would, of course, create some issues here and there, but it wouldn’t be crazy or anything. Especially if Blizzard were to partner with an already established cloud storage provider and use their API to keep everything in sync (Dropbox, Amazon, Microsoft, etc…).

So many awesome possibilities for that app, lots of small changes can be done that’d really make a huge impact.

We’re going to have people on the ground, but I’m pretty sure I’m going to be staying back and just doing BlizzCon via that. Not only is site coverage easier when I can sit in my pajamas all day long with my own food and huge desktop setup around me, but it’s also just a lot quieter.

BlizzCon is nice, but for us it’s a ton of non-stop work. A few years ago I didn’t go and did it all from home; it was a nice change of pace that I think I want to try again.

But then again, maybe not. There is something cool about getting dwarven beer and walking around running into everyone, everywhere.

I do exactly what you do — try them out and then buy it if you enjoy it. I’ve also been known to buy packs when they’re on sale; it’s an easy way to save a few bucks on stuff that I know I’m just going to purchase eventually anyways.

I’m pondering if I want to try to just buy every hero. It’d be a money sink, but I think it’d be kind of neat to have them all and leveled up.

Southshore. I’m a big fan of lake / port towns, and my ideal situation is to get a cabin up on (or very near) Lake Superior in northern Minnesota one day. Southshore is all that and then some.

And guys… some of your answers to this in yesterday’s Queue are just creepy.

Any answer other than Bud is wrong. I don’t even have anything more to say here. Just Bud.

It’s definitely Wrath of the Lich King for me, too. Draenor was a ton of fun, don’t get me wrong, but Wrath for me occupied this sweet spot between perfect and flawed, between easy and difficult, between pointless questing and epic storylines. It was WoW at its best and worst all at once — it is a very human questing experience.

There’s nothing quiet like going from zone to zone in Northrend, without flying, and doing all the quests along the way that you can. The zones are different enough too that it doesn’t feel very grindy. Just a wonderful time.