The Queue: Screeee-BANG

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’s Independence Day here in the United States, and given most of our staff lives in the States, do forgive us for having a lighter-than-usual content schedule today. Taking a holiday once in awhile is okay, right? … Right?

Honestly? Because that’s what users search for. When someone wants information on when a game is releasing, they’ll search “release date.” Maybe that’s on Google, maybe that’s directly on the website, it doesn’t really matter — that’s what the audience looks for. If you want your audience to find the information they’re looking for, you have to speak their language. “Release date” will bring them to the information, and in the post’s body, you can provide the specifics.

If you don’t use those words — if you avoid speaking your user’s language — they can’t find the information they want anymore. And having been up to my eyeballs in website and search analytics for most of my adult life … those two words can be the difference between your entire audience (and then some) finding that information or nearly nobody finding it at all. Hilariously, it often happens that users will send flabbergasted emails asking why you haven’t covered something you have, in fact, covered — but you didn’t use the obvious keywords in the headline, so they never saw it. Taking those things into consideration is important!

People don’t think they can “get away with it” or whatever. There’s nothing to “get away with” except … helping people find what they want.

Yep, this annoys the crap out of me. I was one of those people who almost never used addons because I thought WoW’s UI was really solid. Legion is stripping it down and it’s seriously irritating. Not needing to use addons for WoW has been a high point of the game for me. If people want to modify it, they can — but for my purposes, I didn’t need to mess with it at all. Come Legion, I’ll need to dive back into the hellscape that is finding, downloading, and maintaining a suite of addons. I don’t want to spend my patch days fixing addons, but I guess that’s what the future holds.

I seriously don’t understand their logic behind stripping down WoW’s UI options. They want to make it more accessible for newbies? Fine. Put options behind an Advanced tab.

Honor and Conquest points become gold. Currently on the beta/PTR, Valor is not being converted to gold, but I suspect it should be. I’m not sure it has a use in Legion. Not yet, anyway.

Yes, the pre-patch will include the invasion event. The invasions are the pre-expansion event, so it would be weird if the patch before the expansion didn’t include them.

The pre-patch includes the invasion, class changes, demon hunters (enabled at some unknown point prior to launch), the wardrobe, the updated UI, and all of the new systems changes. Basically, all Legion content is included in this patch, but you can’t actually access the Broken Isles and the level 100+ questing content until launch day.

This isn’t a question, but I want to address it anyway. For context, the context for this is the discussion of Heroes of the Storm maps used in professional play, and some of them being less popular than others.

Pros can be pro on any map, but not all of the maps lend themselves to matches which are both fun and competitive. When you’re in a competitive environment — particularly one where you’re playing against other people for money — you would ideally like to clash with your opponents. The maps pro players enjoy are the ones where there’s push and pull — where there are ample opportunities to fight, to ambush, to set up big plays, and do amazing things. However, some maps are set up in such a way as to discourage that kind of play. For example, look at Garden of Terror: There are two locations where seeds spawn. There are two teams. What tends to happen is one team goes north, one team goes south, and there’s a huge stretch of time where fighting each other isn’t the effective thing to do. You could ambush the other team … but it’s probably more effective to not do that.

Teams want to compete directly against one another. They don’t want a PVE DPS race. They love maps where the objectives encourage fighting over them. They don’t like maps which reduce the possibility of direct conflict at any given moment.

The Civilization games are among my favorites and Civ 5 is no exception. Endless Legend is a game I absolutely loved for the worldbuilding, but I had a difficult time understanding the complexities of some of the mechanics. Basebuilding was fun, but actually trying to compete with people, whether they be AI or humans? I couldn’t hack it. It’s possible I was just bad at it — but I still enjoyed it despite being so bad at it.

On the flipside, Crusader Kings II turned out to be far more boring than I thought it would be. It seemed like a game I’d love, and the crazy stories people told me about the game were great, but I got stuck in and found it to be tedious at best.

I know nothing about Stellaris, but I’ve heard good things. Then again, I also heard good things about Crusader Kings, so…

Transmogrification is cosmetic only. Always has been, and still is. If a weapon has a fireball proc, you don’t get that fireball proc if you use that weapon’s appearance on a Big Ugly Stick. The same applies for tabards. Appearance only.