The Queue: Background downloader, professions, and the Brox paradox

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!

I’m guessing somewhere around mid-June. I’ve seen people speculating the patch is this upcoming Tuesday due to the background downloader being active, but that’s highly unlikely. The current PTR build isn’t marked as a release build. The background downloader could simply be providing the completed art assets that aren’t likely to change in future PTR builds.

There is indeed much speculation that Blizzard has been meddling with the market as of late, but it’s impossible to know whether they have or not unless they say so. It’s certainly suspicious that the WoW Token market suddenly stabilized across all regions at the exact same time. Blizzard could have been tampering with the market, or it could be a coincidence that supply and demand hit its equilibrium simultaneously across all regions.

If it is a matter of Blizzard meddling with the market, it’s possible their goal was to smooth out prices within a 24 hour time period. If you were a person who could only play in off-peak hours, your Token prices were completely different than someone who could only play in peak hours. Is that fair? Maybe. Maybe not. Similarly, I’m sure there were people tracking the ideal time of day to buy Tokens and taking advantage of how quickly the market would adjust to supply. If enough people started doing that, the price fluctuations could get absurd. But we don’t know if Blizzard did anything at all, so this entire paragraph could be moot.

Classes with class-based mounts are automatically given riding, but I’m not sure that’s documented anywhere in the game. Paladins and warlocks get apprentice riding for free, but have to pay for everything else after that. Druids get basic flight for free, but nothing else. Strangely, I believe worgen — the entire playable race — gets apprentice riding for free thanks to Running Wild.

The quests to earn class mounts aren’t in the game anymore, so getting riding for free is the consolation prize, I guess.

If the elves hadn’t defeated the Burning Legion on their own in the first place, the people who traveled through time to the past couldn’t have existed to travel back in time at all. You could make the argument Broxigar made it worse because, if I remember correctly, Broxigar being present (thanks to time travel) put the orcs on the Burning Legion’s radar. The orcs were such a sweet prize when the Draenei ended up on the orcs’ planet because the Burning Legion already knew them as a threat thanks to Broxigar. But if the Dark Portal hadn’t been opened to let Broxigar go to Azeroth, then back in time to show the Legion the orcs were useful warriors  and give the Burning Legion the idea to use the orcs to invade Azeroth, then… well. Time travel.

So yes, the elves won without Broxigar. But because Broxigar went back in time, the timeline now says he was always there. For him to have gone there, though, the victory had to have happened without him before it happened with him.

Speaking personally, if leveling in WoW required me to get all of that stuff (flasks, food, etc), then I probably wouldn’t level anymore. It’s a lot of work for something that shouldn’t be work. I’ve played RPGs where you need to pause and use your potions and so forth to buff up before every battle. What usually happens is I get bored of scrounging around for that stuff and stop playing. For big bad bosses, or endgame in general, I don’t mind so much. For every single part of the game? That’s tedious.

As for gear, one of the few things I think was done well with professions in Warlords of Draenor is the low level requirement for crafted gear. You can equip all of those items at level 91. If you only have one character, that isn’t useful. If you play alts, though? Between crafted gear and archaeology items, you can potentially kit out all of your alts in some amazing gear and tear through everything. Combine crafted gear, archaeology items, and heirlooms? You’ve created a monster.

Blizzard doesn’t need to make the rest of the game harder to make professions compelling. Mandatory isn’t compelling. They make professions compelling by making the items created by those professions interesting and useful.