The Queue: Cash money

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!

You can’t zoom out the camera any further than it starts in Heroes of the Storm. The Field of View is where it is because that’s roughly how for your in-game character has vision. If you could zoom it out further, you’d probably just see a fog of war situation. Being able to interpret what’s happening within your default vision is considered part of the strategy/skill element of the game.

You can zoom in closer to your character with the scroll wheel and get pretty darn close, but not World of Warcraft close. You will almost certainly get your butt kicked if you try to play that zoomed in, however. Like the field of view, the game is designed with a particular camera angle in mind. Heroes of the Storm is a very different genre than WoW and being able to see what’s happening behind you, even if it isn’t happening to you, is pretty important. Think of Heroes as less of an RPG and more of a strategy game. You need that view of the battlefield immediately around you just as much as you need a view of your own character. If the camera was zoomed in behind you, you’d have a very bad time.

However, there are two camera options: One keeps the camera centered on your character, the other leaves the camera entirely in your hands. I believe, by default, the game leaves the camera in your hands. You pan across the map by moving your cursor to the edges of the screen or clicking on the minimap. If you push the L key, it will lock the camera to your character. When you have the camera free-moving, you can push space bar to quickly center the camera on your character again.

To change your keybinds, click the cogwheel icon in the bottom right of the main menu and click the Hotkeys option.

By default, you mount up with the Z key. However, certain heroes do not use mounts and might have other movement abilities bound to Z instead. For example, Falstad can fly across the map to a point of your choosing with Z, Brightwing can teleport to an ally with Z, or Dehaka can burrow to bushes or smoke (which obscure the enemy’s vision of you) on the map with Z. Lunara can’t use a mount because she’s a Dryad and that would be weird. She has a higher movement speed than other characters by default. Most characters do use mounts, though.

If this is your first time playing Heroes, make sure you do the tutorial and a Training match or two. Uther will explain a lot of these concepts as you go along.

I think Legion has a fair number of new mounts, just not as many as Warlords of Draenor. Warlords of Draenor had piles and piles of new mounts, but most of them were palette swaps which resulted in feedback that while there were many mounts to get, none of them were interesting. A lot of them were, essentially: here’s another wolf, here’s another boar, they run really funny, but you won’t mind because you get another mount in your collection, right?

While I don’t have the numbers in front of me right now or anything, I feel like Legion is around where other expansions are rather than being a spamfest. Though there does seem to be a lack of mounts tied to reputations.

The Argent Dawn was my favorite for ages. I wouldn’t go as far as saying I identify with them, but they were definitely a favorite and I enjoyed questing with them. They were the guys who looked at everybody’s nonsense, saw it wasn’t working out, and split off to do it on their own. They didn’t have a “you’re with us or you’re against us” POV that many factions in WoW did. They’d work with whoever was trying to do the right thing, even if the other guys’ reasons were wrong. Back in vanilla, they didn’t hyper-focus on any specific foe. Argent Dawn questgivers back then fought the Scourge in some places, the Burning Legion in others, and even agents of the Old Gods in low level questing. When the Burning Legion busted through the Dark Portal prior to Burning Crusade, the Argent Dawn were among the first to show up to fight even though it wasn’t specifically their job.

The Argent Dawn had ideals, but weren’t zealots. They were protectors, guardians, not driven by hate. They were what I always viewed as what it was to be a Paladin.

Then Tirion Fordring came along, merged some orgs that had no business being merged, and effectively killed the organization while shrinking its scope and purpose. I was not happy about that. I’m still not happy about that.

It sounds like your new hunter is pretty low level, right? Some transmog gear, particular tier sets and PVP sets, have a level restriction. A level 10 character, for example, is not able to transmog into a high-end raiding tier set. You need to reach the level required to equip the set to use it as your transmog.

This isn’t a question, but I saw a lot of pricing speculation, so I thought I’d throw in my 2 cents as someone who was buying Tokens for gold just before the freefall started. The entire day the B.Net balance change went live, I couldn’t get a token for the life of me. Demand was super high. I didn’t get any the first day. The following morning, though, I tried again. They were still hard to get, but I could manage to snag one every 30 minutes or so. Slowly, as morning became afternoon, getting a token became easier and easier. Around the point tokens hit 110,000 gold, I could buy as many as I wanted. I wasn’t getting the sold out error message anymore. For me, that was a sign prices would start to drop soon, because supply and demand had evened out. I stopped buying, because by buying when they were easy to get, I was keeping demand high. That’s something I, as a buyer, didn’t want.

About an hour later, the nosedive kicked off. I’m not implying it’s my fault — I’m just saying, as an observer, the rise and fall appeared to happen completely organically. At the 110,000 gold mark, either people buying with gold had gotten what they wanted or people buying with cash decided that much gold was worth the purchase. Or both. Demand dominated supply, increasing the value, until supply outpaced demand, making it nosedive again. 110,000 gold seems like great value for the person paying $20. It’s not as compelling to the person paying with gold. If the people holding the good don’t want to spend that much, the people holding the cash aren’t going to get that much.

I do know people enjoy their conspiracies about Blizzard tampering with prices, but by all indications, as someone who was knee-deep in that market and now has a few hundred dollars in their B.Net balance, it played out organically. Now that tokens are down to 60k, maybe I’ll pick up a few more. And maybe others will do the same, and maybe that means prices will rise a little again. We’ll see.