The Queue: Shouldn’t the Bronze Dragonflight sort this out?

Got questions? The Queue has answers! (Or at least we try to have answers.) I will, at least, have an answer (or an excuse) for the above header image in the questions below.

Let’s get to it.

I’m including this question entirely as an excuse to use this header image. I think there’s a pretty clear family resemblance between my character and Chromie, but she doesn’t seem amused by the implication.

But if the Bronze flight could use some help managing the many mortals who are mucking around with time these days, I’d be happy to volunteer to join the ranks of time-traveling dragons. I already look the part!

You’re on to something with the “new content smell.” When something’s brand new, it’s always exciting and crowded with people. But as time passes, it becomes less new, less exciting, and less crowded. It’s the circle of (MMO) life.

However, I do think there’s enough to keep people at it for more than a week, depending on their interests. There are flying achievements to work on (the reputations alone will take a couple of weeks, and there are rewards at reputation levels past what’s needed for flying, too), toys and transmogs to collect, and new battle pet challenges. For those alt-a-holics amongst us (or those considering switching mains), Tanaan is a good zone to catch up on ilvl and get into the latest raid. It’s not quite as easy as Timeless Isle’s bind-on-account gear drops, but, still, the gear is there and has the ilvl to send you straight to Hellfire Citadel LFR if that’s what you want.

Still, give it another week and I’m sure some players will start to feel it’s getting old. But for many players, I suspect getting through all Tanaan has to offer — if they’re interested in doing it — will take a bit more time. I’d give it a month before it starts to feel old to the average player — but people speeding through the content will abandon it sooner while it will be “new” even longer for casual players with more limited game time.

The Tanaan reputations are fast, especially if you compare them to some of WoW‘s classic reputation grinds. (Remember working on Argent Dawn back in the day?) The longest reputation grinds are for the faction-specific Hand of the Prophet and Vol’jin’s Headhunters factions, and they’ll only take 19 days at most if you do their dailies every day. It definitely ups the pace from Timeless Isle.

The introductory quests to your shipyard and Tanaan have felt very shoddy to me — like they built the game mechanics and had a large story arc ready… but then didn’t bother to think about the details. So you get the Alliance and the Horde, who’ve forgotten entirely how to make ships or shipyards, and must now recruit an orc to build one for them. (I know I keep bringing this point up. Maybe I’ll get over it eventually.)

On the Alliance side, players have to earn reputation with Hand of the Prophet, which makes more sense — this is a primarily Draenor-based group, and you have to prove your worth to them before they’ll give you blueprints. Presumably Vol’jin’s Headhunters are the same for balance reasons, even if their name certainly suggests that they’ve come with us from Azeroth.

Annoying? Sure. But it’s a designed mechanic for you to have to do a bit of legwork to unlock all of your shipyard functionality. I just wish the story had been put together a little better so that doing these things made sense both with the gameplay mechanics and with the story.

Honestly, I don’t think a free pack a week is something Blizzard’s going to sweat — especially since it’s just the classic card set, which at this point is rather old (and, perhaps, growing harder to convince people to pay for). For newer players, this classic card giveaway can act as a catchup mechanism to help you build up your card collection (much like the gear drops in Timeless Isle and Tanaan Jungle have done to up your ilvl in WoW). If you do Hearthstone‘s daily quests, which do involve a bit more effort, you can easily pick up several packs a week without paying a dime — plus, those packs can be of the new Goblins and Gnomes variety rather than just the original deck, so Tavern Brawl isn’t the only source of freebies.

Though Blizzard could certainly change this, the rewards don’t seem out of balance for the content. If anything, I could see them adding additional rewards (or perhaps brawl-specific dailies) for continuing to do Tavern Brawl beyond that first match. We’ll see what the future holds, but right now my Blizzard Magic-8 Ball is saying “working as intended.”

For those not caught up on the news, we’re talking about today’s interview with Cory Stockton on Mamytwink. As one of the people in the “patch 6.2 won’t be the last patch,” camp, I’m pretty surprised. After Seige of Orgrimmar and the content drought that followed, it’s hard to understand why Blizzard would want to follow this pattern again — and by everything in the interview, it sounds like they don’t want to. And yet they seem to be doing it anyway.

By BlizzCon, patch 6.2 is going to feel really, really old. Even if Blizzard announces a new expansion in November, and even if they launch the beta shortly after BlizzCon, it’s still going to be a long while before we see new live content for WoW if Hellfire Citadel and patch 6.2 are really the end game for Warlords. I’m going to continue to hope that they aren’t… but at this point that’s a very faint hope.

As always, leave your questions in the comments below and we’ll try to get to them in tomorrow’s Queue!