The Queue: A little poison never hurt anyone

Welcome back to The Queue, our daily Q&A feature for all of Blizzard’s games! Have a question for the Blizzard Watch staff? Leave it in the comments!

Three weeks ago, we didn’t have a stream. Two weeks ago, there was an alpha livestream instead — which has its most “fun” highlight on YouTube. Last week’s isn’t in YouTube because… I forgot to push a button. Oops. It’s there now.

I know the leveling stream has been super sporadic lately, but it’s that time of year where getting 5 people with wildly different schedules gathered in one place for two hours at a time is a brutal task. BlizzCon obviously threw a wrench in things, then alphas/betas hit alongside Thanksgiving, and the next two weeks are Christmas and New Years. Throw in some holiday vacations or oddball family get-togethers and we end up with a scheduling nightmare. Hopefully, come January, all of these issues will evaporate and we can get back to doing everything on a more regular basis.

Let’s get to the root of this problem.

“brb bio”

Nope. We read all of it. We don’t respond to all of it, because often responding would take longer than actually fixing the problem or whatever.

Alpha is Beta under a different name. Really, it’s almost entirely irrelevant — what Blizzard used to call alpha, they now call beta. Or they call it a technical beta, or a technical alpha, or whatever. It’s just a name. It’s up. It’s live. I imagine it’s only going down because there will be nobody in the office to monitor its stability over Christmas and the New Year. It’ll be back afterwards.

The world map hasn’t been updated to include the Broken Isles yet.

Personally, I quite like how they do it. I’m not the most knowledgeable or hardcore Hearthstone player ever, but I do still enjoy playing it. I can pay for the adventure pack, play through it on normal (while still needing to puzzle out certain mechanics), and earn my cards. What I do with hard modes now is wait until other people have done it, then copy their decks/strategies — assuming I have the right cards in my collection.

In that sense, the normal difficulty is actually what feels rewarding to me. Trying to do the hard modes on my own is often more frustrating than rewarding — and not because there’s no actual reward at the end, but because I don’t find them fun. I’m not good enough at the game to do most of them on my own. I admit that. I don’t have the ability to put hours and hours into it to get that good at it, either. I’m a casual Hearthstone player at best. But I’m buying the adventure, so I want those cards.

Maybe a gold payout would be fine, but keep in mind you can buy the adventures with gold, too. You could easily buy the adventure for gold after someone has posted all of the strategies online and make your gold back just by copying them. Doesn’t seem right.

I’ve mentioned it on the site previously, but I’d love to see more superhero skins in the vein of Super Sonya. See the aforementioned Breakfast Topic for my ideas! (Giving Nova a Widowmaker skin instead of adding Widowmaker to Heroes is still something I’m pulling for.)

Not at all. I’m the total opposite. I’m willing to take a gamble on 98% success. It’s a gamble, but that’s only a 2% chance of failure. I’m not willing to take a gamble on 80%. That’s a 20% chance of failure. That’s a huge difference. The indicators would need to be so narrow (95-99% for example) that you might as well show the exact number.