The Queue: With honor, redemption

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!

It isn’t possible to run out of digital copies of a game, but it’s possible to run out of CD-keys physical ways to give them out. I don’t know how they’re distributing these digital copies, but let’s say you get a CD-Key printed on your movie ticket when you buy one. Let’s say they’ve generated one billion CD-Keys. What happens when customer one-billion-and-one buys their ticket? There’s no CD-Key to give them. With no key, they can’t cash in on their free copy of World of Warcraft. They have nothing to enter into Battle.net which says look, I saw the movie, give me my free copy of the game.

In this hypothetical scenario where they’ve generated one billion CD-Keys, is it likely they’ll run out of them? No, not really. But it could happen, so stating “while supplies last” means they’re covered legally. It’s also a way of putting a soft expiration on the promotion; it ends when there are no more CD-Keys. They may have decided they’ll give out X number of them, and when they’re gone, no more free game. That guarantees no leftover, extraneous movie-specific CD-Keys.

Two years until it’s rotated out, yes. C’Thun decks are certainly powerful, but not unstoppable. Rush/face/aggro decks do a good job of dismantling C’Thun decks. And in these two years where Old Gods is in standard, there will be Adventures and another expansion which might shake things up. C’Thun being dominant right now could change dramatically based on whatever the next expansion turns out to be.

They exist and have recently undergone some targeted testing on the Legion alpha. All legendaries were available for purchase from a test vendor. A few of our class columnists took advantage of that to write a bit about them:

• Mage
• Warlock
• Holy/Disc Priest
• Hunter

I’m not sure anyone has spent enough time at max level to acquire these properly — or if it’s even possible yet.

Blizzard Watch is a blog. The Queue is a blog post. A blog is where you put blog posts. Blog posts are articles. An article isn’t a newspaper, but a newspaper contains articles. I would have no idea what newspaper you were talking about if you referred to it as “the sports section.” However, if you said I like reading the sports section in The Daily Planet then I’d know I should check out articles in The Daily Planet.

They’re a new-ish type of talent. Like any other kind of talent, they’re only chosen for that specific game. The idea behind them is you get a much smaller up-front bonus, it gradually grows in strength, and once you’ve done a sufficient number of X or Y, you get a larger bonus. It doesn’t permanently increase that hero’s power — it only increases it within that match. It isn’t something which carries over, that’s just how those talents work now.

This is probably a complicated one because it essentially boils down to opinion. The dragon metaphor, the incense offering, the entire opening of Dragons — this is all the commonly used imagery when a medium wants to be absolutely sure you know these guys are Japanese/Asian. They’re parts of the culture, so it can make some sense to use them — but the culture is more than dragons and incense. Brothers divided is also something you see quite regularly in mob/mafia stories. Hanzo’s obsession with honor, the swordsman slicing arrows in midair, and on and on — these are tried and true things you always see in this type of story.

Tropes aren’t inherently bad, and if you use broad enough strokes, tropes are the building blocks of most (if not all) stories. Something heavily reliant on tropes can still be fun and enjoyable, but they’re also paint-by-numbers if you don’t do anything fresh to with them — if you don’t offer anything new or surprising to put those building blocks to good use. Dragons was probably the most cliche short they’ve released thus far, but I still had a lot of fun watching it. But because I was already familiar with the building blocks of the story and Blizzard didn’t do anything fresh with those building blocks, I knew how everything would play out before I even watched it. Still, I enjoyed the crap out of it despite knowing exactly what would happen.