The Queue: Burning love

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!

Sometimes I look back over old screenshots and can recall with absolute clarity what exactly was going on in that moment. This is not one of those screenshots. But hey, nothing says “I love you lots” more than “Your valentine is on that dragon over there, let’s go punch it,” right? And on a day that is apparently all about love, I’m going to go ahead and do what I love, which is of course answering your questions. Let’s get to it!

I’m not really someone that does a lot of coding, so I couldn’t say for certain. However, I’m assuming that the NPCs that speak to you in Dalaran and other areas of Northrend right now have some kind of trigger when you walk by that checks to see if you’re exalted reputation with their particular faction. If you are, they say things to you. If you aren’t, they don’t say anything. I imagine what they look for is whether or not you’ve got the achievement associated for that particular faction, because that’s something your character either is or isn’t flagged for. It’s a simple yes/no check kind of query, and a programmed response if that answer is yes. Again, I’m not a programmer, so I don’t know if this is actually how the thing works or not, I’m making a guess here.

If this is the case, then in order to call you by your title, the NPC would have to be able to detect which title you happen to have equipped at any given point in time. Since this is a value that changes on the whim of the player, rather than a fixed value the player just earns over time, I think it’d probably be a little more difficult. I don’t even know if there’s an assigned value to the titles you choose to display — achievements are one thing, you either have them or you don’t, titles that you swap at whim are something else entirely.

So…is it possible? The programmers at Blizzard are very clever, and given enough time, I’m pretty sure they could throw something like that together. But I think it’d be substantially harder than any NPC interaction we’ve seen to date.

Country/kingdom/city-state are all kind of used interchangeably, but it’s not defined by zones. The Kingdom of Lordaeron, for example, was spread out over what’s now Tirisfal Glades, the Western Plaguelands, and the Eastern Plaguelands. Alterac was larger than it appears in game. Keep in mind it’s also used pretty much when talking about the settled Human kingdoms — the Human race is really the only one that had several separate city-states, countries, kingdoms, whatever you might call them — scattered all over the Eastern Kingdoms. Right now, those original kingdoms are all pretty much gone. It’s just Gilneas and Stormwind. Gilneas City is the capital of Gilneas, the kingdom/country/city-state, which once stretched through Silverpine until the Greymane Wall was built.

I’m pretty sure we won’t know the answer to that until Legion is done and over with. I suppose if they wanted to, they could add some kind of Artifact skin section to the Wardrobe once the expansion was over — but honestly since Legion isn’t even out yet, it’s way too early to make any kind of call on that one.

In the alpha right now, herbs respawn fairly constantly just like they do on Azeroth. I don’t know how much of the new professions systems are actually implemented right now though, so that might change in the future — sorry I don’t have a definitive answer for you just yet! We are keeping track of professions though, and once they feel like they’re hammered out sufficiently, we’ll be writing about it.

I don’t mind the idea of yearly expansions at all. What I do mind is the year-long content drought where nothing significant is released. It means a lot of people leave the game in droves until there’s something new to bring them back again. It’s kind of a drag, particularly if you’re looking for people to do any kind of group content with. It also leaves you with very little reason to keep playing, and that’s…well, that’s the opposite of what a game should be doing. I don’t know if there’s a solution to that, but since Warlords is really the first time we’ve had an expansion theoretically designed to be shorter, I imagine they’re looking at what worked and what didn’t work, and addressing that in Legion. Legion might not be perfect either — we don’t know how it’s going to play out yet, obviously — but they can then look at that model and continue polishing from there.

I asked Mitch about this, as I don’t really play Heroes of the Storm myself, and he had the following to say:

“I actually haven’t run into this too much but my best understanding is that reporting auto-mutes that player but does NOT prevent you two from teaming in the future. I think that’s the system WoW uses as well, though I honestly haven’t reported or played with a small enough pool of players to know definitively. I haven’t encountered anyone THAT bad before, but I imagine when you report that player, Blizz will look into him/her and make sure s/he only gets grouped with other jerks in the future.“

That’s it for today’s Queue — if you have any questions you’d like to see answered, be sure to leave them in the comments below!