The Queue: War and expansions

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!

Today’s bound to be a feisty one — we’re tackling potential expansion announcements and the Alliance/Horde faction war. Brace yourselves.

I have a bad habit of giving Blizzard the benefit of the doubt on this — I always trust they will, in fact, release an expansion more quickly or avoid 6+ (or 12+) month content droughts. However, I’m always wrong. Every single time, I’m wrong. I’ll continue to give them the benefit of the doubt, though, because one day I’ll be right. And when I’m right, I’ll gloat and I’ll gloat and then I’ll cry all over again at the next 6-12 month content drought.

With all of that in mind, here’s my wild and crazy prediction: a World of Warcraft expansion will be announced at August in Gamescom. Very little will be said — it’ll be a teaser with some basic information. Come BlizzCon in November, their WoW panels will be the place where they start revealing more information about that expansion, and hopefully announce a beta. Announcing the beta will restart the hype train and make the WoW panels actually useful. At BlizzCon last year, the WoW panels were all absolutely useless — Warlords of Draenor released less than a week after that convention and they had nothing to say we didn’t already know. After all of that discussion in November, and a beta starting shortly thereafter, the expansion might be ready for release in Spring. My hopeful hope places it in the range of late March through early May. Personally, I’d rather it be closer to March than May if Tanaan and Hellfire Citadel is truly all we have. It’s early July right now. May would be pushing it pretty darn close to a full year of this patch. If they can’t make a May release, we’re going to have problems.

I think it’s just RNG. My first week in Tanaan, I was starting to wonder if they were once per week from rare mobs because my RNG was so wonky. My first day there, it seemed like every rare I killed dropped a token. For days afterwards, I wasn’t getting any whatsoever. When the week rolled over, I was getting a bunch again, which added fuel to my theory. But then the next day, I got a few more, and it hasn’t been quite so streaky ever since. Some days I’ll get a few. Some days I’ll get a bunch. Some days I won’t get any.

RNG plays mind tricks sometimes.

Are… are you referring to Durotan’s codpiece? I don’t think his codpiece is a named character unto itself.

It makes me feel better. Even if I’m in LFG with some randos, it’s nice to see killing a boss had some value, even if it isn’t value to me. At the beginning of the expansion, when I saw no loot on a boss — and also didn’t see anybody else get loot — it felt like wasted time and lost some excitement. Loot is the biggest carrot on a stick in this game. Making loot blind, after it hadn’t been blind for ten years, took away that little bit of thrill. “Oh cool, X got a Y. I didn’t get Z and that sucks, but at least X got Y! Okay, next boss.”

Well, given even the Alliance needs to ask an Iron Horde shipwright how to build a harbor and ships… it might as well be canon the draenei don’t know how to build ships, and didn’t build their own harbor, either. They borrowed it, I guess. Or it built itself. It sprouted from the sea, fully-formed.

I’m going to use this question simply to state once again: the war between the Horde and the Alliance continues to be nonsense. Neither side can win. They have to hammer the same story beats over and over again. War! Peace! War! Peace! At this point, it feels like the whole thing carries on simply to justify PVP in World of Warcraft. If the factions hate each other, stop throwing around peace treaties and setting aside our differences for the “greater good” each expansion. At this point, the dueling factions have done more damage than any villain we’ve ever seen in-game. Frankly, the “greater good” would be buddying up with someone like the Burning Legion to knock the other guys out of the game. From the Alliance perspective, the Horde has been a greater, continuous threat than anything else we’ve faced — even while under a “peace treaty.” Banding together has been a flimsy explanation for years now and becomes increasingly so.

And if there’s going to be peace, actually make it peaceful. It’s nonsense to be fighting this long. Do you want PVP in the game? Keep PVP in the game. Just make PVP content. Handwave it. Say “this is the PVP content because people want to PVP” and leave it at that. Even now in Warlords, while we’re fighting off the Iron Horde and the Burning Legion, the Alliance has shipyard missions to fight the Horde. Why? What’s the point? Because Ashran? We have absolutely no reason to be fighting at all. How many times this expansion have we seen Durotan, Thrall, Draka, Khadgar, Yrel, and Maraad gathered in one place, as a concerted force? We have the Horde and the Alliance, Draenor’s Draenei and Orcs, all in one place, planning this takedown of the Iron Horde together — and we’re still raiding each other on the high seas. It’s dumb.

As this story has been told, the Alliance has no reason to trust the Horde whatsoever. But they keep writing stories where the Alliance does just that. They need to not trust them — or if the Alliance does trust them, this fakey-fake war stuff needs to go away.

I believe that horn is alerting the zone to an event starting. For example, when the Blood Moon rises in Zeth’gol, or when Terrorfist spawns and is headed toward Rangari Refuge. Some of them end so quickly you might hear the horn, but miss the event even happening — such as Cindral. The Cindral event begins with a few fire slimes spawning, players kill the handful of slimes, then Cindral himself spawns, and he’s dead in seconds at that point. The entire “event” might not even last a full minute, but the entire zone gets the horn anyway. The horn is useful if you’re nearby, but if you’re not, it’s unlikely you’ll get there in time to participate.

Either the devs forgot to place trees for Lumber Milling, or they still want players to go places other than Tanaan for some of these things. Tanaan Jungle is the latest piece of content, but I’m not sure they want it to completely invalidate the rest of the continent. However, I just tested using the Barn trap on a riverbeast in Tanaan Jungle. The riverbeast was trapped and the Stonefields showed up as they should, but I didn’t get anything to actually turn in for a work order. That’s weird — but might be a side effect of changing Fel Blood to Felblight relatively late in the patch’s development.

I’m not sure if we can find a satisfactory answer here without the developers saying something about it. The kneejerk reaction would be they forgot to do it, but it’s also entirely possible they decided you should still go to other zones for it. I know people love Nagrand for their lumber, but me? I go Talador. Sure, I often settle for small/medium trees, but parts of the zone are absolutely littered with them, so I don’t mind.