The Queue: Tracer hype

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!

For most classes, you pick which artifact you want before you even start the quest chain. For rogues, for example, you do the whole thing where you meet the council of assassin peeps, and then you get a choice between the three different artifacts. You choose one and then you do the quest chain for that artifact. You don’t get to do all of them before you pick. You pick and then you do the one. Later on, you can do the others. In the alpha right now (as in the most recent build), you can do the others immediately after you do the first — but I don’t know if it’ll stay that way.

This will get fixed. We missed it when reverting to the old theme and Adam is currently traveling. He’ll get it when he’s able. Gonna be honest: I loved our April Fool’s theme. I wish we could keep it. But we won’t.

I think it’s what’s required to make sure games actually end. In my experience, the standard length of a game in other MOBAs (such as Dota 2 and League of Legends) is somewhere around an hour — often longer. When a Heroes of the Storm match goes 30 minutes, it’s considered a marathon. Despite that, Heroes of the Storm still manages to have more comeback swings than other MOBAs. Comebacks are still difficult, but they’re possible. If death timers didn’t ramp up toward the end of a game, the only outcome would be long, drawn-out stalemates.

Long death timers just makes good play more important. Throwing your life away is a huge detriment to your team. You need to stay alive. If your team gets completely wiped at the end of the match and the opponents sack your core, it means your opponents played better than you did. Brutal, but it is what it is.

While I believe the Heroes of the Storm designers said they’d let Overwatch stand on its own for awhile before adding its characters to Heroes, I think adding Tracer so early is in line with how Blizzard approaches new game titles. Overwatch is the first brand new franchise for Blizzard in a long time, yes, but look at how they’ve handled expansions. They cross-promote new titles across all of their games. World of Warcraft gets new pets. Hearthstone gets new card backs. Diablo 3 adds new cosmetic items. People who pre-ordered Legacy of the Void got Artanis for free in Heroes of the Storm. All of their games tie into each other. It would actually be unusual, I think, for Overwatch to launch without that kind of cross-promo.

Given Tracer is something of a mascot for Overwatch, choosing her to join the Heroes lineup so early makes sense to me.

It’s a video game. It’s a hobby. It isn’t your romantic partner. You don’t have children with it. You don’t own a home with World of Warcraft. It doesn’t need your love.

Walk away for awhile. Play a different game. If you’re concerned about losing your friends in WoW, stay in contact through Battle.net or see if they’ll play something else with you on a Friday night. The best thing you can do to avoid burnout is walk away before it happens. Come back for Legion, or if you feel like playing sooner than that, come back whenever you’re ready.

You owe World of Warcraft nothing.