The Queue: Was that a murloc?

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it’s time for another edition of The Queue, where we answer your Blizzard-centric questions… at least those not about the upcoming expansion announcement, because we just don’t know anything for certain. So let’s wait for the big day together, shall we?

In the meanwhile, on to your questions!

Like other commenters in this thread, I’m pretty sure any murlocs found on Draenor followed us from Azeroth. Why? Because they’re in our shipyard. (If you didn’t know, the ships Brgrggrgl Mark II and Mrgrggrgl Mark III both have a Murloc Crew.)

This means that not only did some well-meaning member of your faction bring murlocs to Draenor, they also decided it would be a good idea to give them command of one of your fleet. (Though perhaps the addition of murlocs also explains the distressing destruction rate of ships.) Who did this and why? We simply do not know. But I do think it’s safe to say that murlocs on Draenor are our fault… and that’s going to become problematic when they start terrorizing the coast line.

I also hope the next expansion isn’t a movie tie-in (or at least not a direct movie tie-in) for a couple of reasons:

Firstly, I’m already tired of time travel. In Warlords of Draenor we went back in time following Garrosh’s attempt to change his fate — but while he made some pretty big changes to orcish history, not much actually changed. Even without the influence of Gul’dan, Mannoroth, and the demon blood, the orcs were still driven to conquest and the overall story arc played much the same as it did originally… even though some of the details were different. While time travel can be a great storytelling element, here it just seems dull, even tedious. If we’re just going back in time to watch the same story play out in a subtly different way, that’s just not very exciting. Your own character doesn’t really have any impact on the story and there’s precious little surprise. Though I do think that Draneor’s quests and storytelling experience was the best we’ve ever seen in World of Warcraft, the story it was telling was did nothing to impress. If we have an expansion taking us back to the First War in order to retell the story without letting us have any meaningful interaction with it, like Warlords, that’s boring and I’d much rather do something else.

And, secondly, I just don’t think anything in the current storyline points that way. Typically the end of an expansion gives us clues as to what the next expansion will be… even if it doesn’t necessarily give them clearly. Right now, Hellfire Citadel suggests we’re heading towards more content featuring the Burning Legion.

Whether I’m right or wrong, we’ll find out for certain next week. In the meanwhile, I’m just going to repeat this mantra to myself as frequently as possible: please no time travel, please no time travel, please no time travel.

If patch 6.2 is, as Blizzard has said, to be the last patch of Warlords of Draenor and, also as Blizzard has said, they don’t want to leave players waiting a year between content patches (like with Siege of Orgrimmar at the end of Mists of Pandaria), then it really can’t be. If both of those things are true, and Blizzard really does want to avoid another patch that’s live for over a year, then the expansion needs to come out before the movie’s June 2016 release date.

Though my own preference would be to see another patch or two of Draenor content before we’re pushed into the next big thing, at this point that doesn’t seem likely. My money’s on an expansion by the end of the year, or, if not that, very early in 2016. If they wait until the movie’s release date without another patch, then 6.2 and Hellfire Citadel will be just shy of a solid year as the newest content on the live servers, and that’s just too long.

I’ve said this before, but I really hope mercenary mode is the start of something bigger. As someone who has friends playing both Horde and Alliance, I’d love to be able to run raids with everyone, regardless of faction affiliation. And it even makes a certain amount of sense: the enemy of my enemy is my friend, after all, and Alliance and Horde inevitably wind up trying to take down the same villains every raid and expansion. Why not pool our resources and work together to take down whatever the next raid boss is? Our faction leaders might not approve, but I’d certainly have fun doing it.

File this one as yet another question we can’t answer with any certainty. However, from how Blizzrad has implemented toys so far, it seems fairly piecemeal — they’e setting items as toys one at a time, as they see an item seems sufficiently toy-like. But after their initial pass through the game’s items, a few new ones have been added as toys… not as many as we’d like, but, still some. So it’s clear that Blizzard is still evaluating what should be a toy and tweaking the toy list.

But this doesn’t explain why all-new content would have such toy oversights — after all, the best way to decided whether or not an item should be a toy would be in development. But Blizzard seems, for some reason, interested in artificially limiting the number of toys we have access to, which is a shame and a nuisance since the majority of my bank space is taken up by toys that aren’t toys and transmog gear. (Both of which I’d love to get out of my bank and into a collection interface.)

Why does this have to be a thing, though? I don’t know, but it’s an annoyance I’d love to see Blizzard fix.

That’s all of our questions for today, but check back tomorrow for another edition of The Queue, where Mr. Matthew Rossi will be happy to answer your questions.