The Queue: Gold, ogres, and a desert odyssey

Welcome back to The Queue, our daily Q&A feature! Have a question for the Blizzard Watch staff? Leave it in the comments and we may choose it for tomorrow’s edition!

Cooking did that in Mists of Pandaria! I think I’d enjoy cooking being expanded again — but with materials coming from out in the world rather than from a farm. Personally, I see secondary professions as fertile grounds for game activities. More interactive cooking, quests related to first aid, fishing being used to fish up numerous, diverse sea monsters, all of that kind of thing. I suspect I’m a rare exception, though. Most people I know hate secondary professions and like cooking to be as simple as possible so they can easily get their buff food for raiding.

I assume you mean in-game! Taking advantage of the WoW Token to pay off my account for years to come. I wasn’t sure what to do with myself this expansion, so I turned my focus to making gold. I’d never had much gold before, I could never freely buy things for my character, so I figured I’d use Warlords of Draenor to get ahead. The WoW Token releasing when it did was perfect timing for me. If all goes well, I’ll never have to pay real money for my WoW subscription ever again.

It feels great.

Righto, onto the next question!

No, no. In all seriousness, there are a few reasons I might skip a question. First, it might be that I don’t feel qualified to answer it. Sometimes they’re hyper-specific, or they’re digging into a piece of lore I personally haven’t paid much attention to, and I don’t feel like I’d be able to get a satisfactory answer. When people ask very specific questions, they want very detailed answers. Half-assing a question like that isn’t going to help that person. Telling them to Google it isn’t helpful, either.

I might also skip a question if the answer to it would be extraordinarily long. If the question is very good and I have a lot to say about it, I usually jot it down in a notebook as something I might want to use as the subject of an opinion piece later. Sometimes that piece gets written. Sometimes it doesn’t. In either case, I tend to feel it’s outside of the completely undefined parameters of The Queue. In short, it’s arbitrary.

How I choose questions is wholly different than how other Queue authors do. Similarly, my skillset and knowledgebase is not the same as that of Anne, Matt, or Liz. Different authors might pick different questions. A question I skip might be something the next author will answer if it’s asked again.

I’m not a living encyclopedia and I need to recognize that. If I don’t, I’ll be spewing wrong answers all day long and that doesn’t help anyone.

I won’t put much detail into this answer because I don’t think it’d be fair. People who send in applications should have the expectation that their application will be confidential. No Blizzard Watch applications have been truly horrible. The only ones I feel I should mention from the Old Place are the applications that somehow managed to work outright brutal racism into their sample columns and the application we got that claimed to be written by a man in his 70s, and instead of talking about World of Warcraft, detailed his journey through the desert to Saudi Arabia. I have no idea what was going on there, but it didn’t seem like spam. It read to me like someone who wrote their memoirs and decided to email it to us. It was fascinating, but not really our area.

Player characters actually setting foot upon the island? Doesn’t seem likely. If this really is the final content patch of Warlords of Draenor, Tanaan Jungle is the only new zone opening. We aren’t going to Farahlon, either. Farahlon interested me far more than more ogres, so I’m pretty beat up about it.

This one gets asked a lot! It’s asked so often, I’ll answer it again for visibility. I’d guess they won’t be nerfed until the next expansion rolls around. So either in patch 7.0, or when the next expansion itself actually goes live. I can’t see them nerfing those missions while the expansion is still current.