The Queue: No Frills

I have a blood bubble on my retina and it’s blocking a decent chunk of my vision, causing me intense head pain when I read things. This is, you can probably guess, less than ideal when writing The Queue. But we soldier on, because we must.

Let’s look at some questions.

The reason Blizzard doesn’t just put all this stuff in the game is threefold.

First, most players wouldn’t read it. People skip over quest text. People ask questions about things that are clearly explained in quests all the time, to the point where I (and I don’t work at Blizzard) find it absolutely maddening. I can only imagine how the quest team feels about it. If Blizzard went out of their way to have a repository of all the lore information we get in Chronicle somewhere in, say, Dalaran, the vast majority of players would never even go near it and every time a story hook involving that information came about, they’d complain that they had no idea what it was.

I’ve seen this happens hundreds of times. The Tribunal of Ages is in game, and I’ve run Halls of Stone many, many times, and every time I do, people complain about the RP. The Deathbringer Saurfang fight in ICC? People complain about the RP. People will simply refuse to digest the lore they’re given in game, be it a cinematic, a cutscene, in game books, you name it and people will refuse it.

Secondly, sometimes there’s simply no good place to put this stuff in game. A lot of the lore reveals we had in Warcraft III were actually in the game manual, not in the game itself. There’s only so much story you can pack into a game, much less backstory (and that’s what lore is when you get right down to it, backstory) and sometimes for narrative cohesion you simply have to streamline things. The tie-in media, be it novels, comic books, something like Chronicle or what have you, provides a way to put that story and backstory out there for the people who want it.

Thirdly, money. Some people (like myself) want the lore, and would read a big storehouse of it in Dalaran, and did read all the WC manuals, and do read the quest text and listen to stone faces in dungeons, and those people will spend cash on books and other tie in media. Blizzard is a for profit business. Why is there an Illidan novel coming out? Because we’ll pay for it, that’s why.

Since both are edited by the users, it’s very hard to answer this question definitively. I checked both last night and at least on one subject they did not appear to have been updated, but they could well become so as I’m typing this entry. If you’re bound and determined to avoid anything that’s in Chronicles then I’d say avoid them for a while.

Lacking the ability to constantly check both sites to see if they’ve been updated, as of 2 AM Mountain time they did not appear to be.

All it’s saying is that the Tauren has a series of myths. It doesn’t say one way or another if those myths are accurate. We’ll likely never know if the Earthmother is real, or just another name for (as a possibility) Therazane or Alexstrasza or Eonar or Freya. We just don’t know, and Chronicle very deliberately didn’t shed light on that. We know that Tauren were affected by the Well of Eternity, that the original Tauren were essentially the Yaungol and they moved north to become first the Tauren and then the Taunka.

As for An’she, he’s totally fake. (I’m kidding.) Essentially, Blizzard wants the option to not say anything about these guys for right now.

Now, I don’t play a Hunter, or care much about them as a class. (I’m interested in Survival, and I’ve done all three Hunter artifact quests on the Alpha, but that’s about it.) But I think this is a good move and I’d like to see it explored for some other classes. Seeing Fistweaving coming back for Monks in PvP makes me hopeful that perhaps we’ll see similar for other classes.

Could we get Gladiator back in some form for Protection Warriors? Could Frost DK’s get 2h weapons back? (And maybe those three Enhancement Shamans that still have Sulfuras in the bank and sigh every so often while looking at it would like 2h weapons back too.) There’s a lot of stuff that’s class defining and which I’d like to see at least explored.

That being said, I played Marks on the Alpha and man, Hunters without pets get their faces kicked in. So maybe the change is in part based around leveling. Making Lone Wolf a competitive DPS option but letting Marks Hunters level with a pet sounds like a good idea to me.

I went over to Duncan Jones’ twitter and found that, is that one new? It looked new to me. Look, I can barely see, cut me some slack.

That’s the Queue for today. Thanks to everyone for bearing with the old blind man.