The Queue: Legendary

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!

I’ve always been fond of the Taunka. I’ll admit up-front, that’s probably due to nostalgia. They were the first Tauren off-shot we ever saw. They were intriguing, added a new layer to who/what the Tauren were, and had a familiar-yet-different feel to them. But they make me a little sad, too. Because for as cool as I thought they were, Blizzard didn’t carry them forward in any way. They were an early example of Blizzard leaving potential in the dust because it’s sooooo last expansion or whatever. Despite introducing super cool races and concepts in every expansion, Blizzard almost never integrates them into the world as a whole. Very few races have a lasting role in the story. After Legion, we’re never going to see the Highmountain again except for maybe a Brawler’s Guild boss or something.

I was young and naive and thought the introduction of the Taunka actually meant something for the gameworld. After so many expansions, I find it much harder to get invested in expansion-specific races, because I know they aren’t going to mean anything. They’ll be gone soon, and we’ll never hear from them again. That’s why I don’t care nearly as much about the Yaungol or the Highmountain. Or even the Jinyu of Pandaria or any such thing. They’ll be gone soon. It isn’t worth getting invested. They’re just pretty things to look at.

I’m going to quote Drakkenfyre on this, because I keep forgetting to look up how to do this and it’s a good reminder for me, too:

Got nailed by this again last night. My game messed up and reset my preferences file, which wiped out the command for it. Which I didn’t realize until I logged into SW, and sat on the loading screen.

SET worldPreloadNonCritical “0” as a new line in your config.wtf file will also do it before you start the game up.

Additionally, you’re supposedly also to rename your Cache folder CacheOld or anything else, and let the game rebuild it when it starts again.

In-game, you can also use the following command: /console worldPreloadNonCritical 0

We’ve had a content patch since this problem started being a problem, so I’m somewhat baffled we’re still resorting to modifying game files to fix it rather than Blizzard fixing it…but it is what it is, I guess!

Well, I don’t much care for the moose, so that isn’t on my agenda. However, our usual WoW stream this week is being replaced with a Heroes stream so we can get our crew the mounts… so yes, I suppose so!

It happens every few years. You can blame this thing or that thing, but the things being blamed right now didn’t exist when a bunch of high-end guilds died in Cataclysm or Pandaria or Warlords. Ultimately, this is just the latest round. Is there a specific game mechanic that can be blamed, or do these guilds just reach the point where they aren’t feeling it anymore? People grow up. They get tired. They don’t want to invest as much time into raiding. Maybe the officers/leaders were the ones who got tired, and the people who still want to raid will go elsewhere. It’s been happening for years. If raiding is still enjoyable for some, a new guild will replace the one that retired.

People have been predicting doomsday for WoW or WoW raiding every time one of these guild collapses takes places. Clearly that wasn’t the case, or else these guilds wouldn’t have been around to quit.

If people are hoping I’ll address the situation with Artifact Power and Legendaries…okay, sure. Ultimately, I think they’re good systems. Seriously, I do! Or they would be good systems if high-end raiding didn’t exist. Obviously, it does. Diablo’s loot and progression systems work because there, generally speaking, isn’t anything like that. People are okay with the thrill of the hunt in Diablo because the thrill of the hunt is the game, and in WoW, that would work fine were it not for Mythic raiding and, in particular, the world first race.

That said, Diablo has a narrow equivalent where people do get pissed off about grinding and RNG elements: the players who push the highest difficulty of Rifts. At the top-end difficulty, the element of RNG is the difference between progression and getting stonewalled. The core elements of the game become a hurdle. When the difficulty is pushed that high, the fabric of the game falls apart. You’ve turned the game into something it isn’t and you have to do all sorts of weird things to “fix” it. When Diablo is based on the hunt of the RNG, and the difficulty reaches a point where the developers need to eliminate RNG…aren’t the developers starting to fight against their own game at that point? Is that highest difficulty level contributing anything? It provides a goal and it keeps a small slice of your audience playing, but if it’s making people upset and unraveling the sweater that is your game, is it a good thing to have?

WoW is caught somewhere in the middle. What should it be, and to which type of player do you give content? Casual players, or players who simply aren’t hardcore raiders, are going to have no real problems with these new thrill-of-the-hunt elements. However, it’s going to absolutely ruin the high-end raiders. If you create content that caters to the World First playstyle, it’s wholly inaccessible to other types of players.

What’s the answer? I don’t know. I, personally, do honestly believe WoW would be better off without the high-difficulty World First style of raiding. The game mechanics involved drive people to harm themselves physically and mentally. But that’s my opinion as a retired raider who retired because it was harming me physically and mentally. Obviously, there are still people who love to raid at a high level, so I’m not going to suggest Blizzard actually eliminate it. But if it’s here to stay, when Blizzard needs to create content and activities for such a wide variety of people…someone’s gonna get burned. I don’t think there’s a way to fix that. This expansion, it’s the raiders who aren’t happy. Next expansion, it’ll be everyone else. That’s how it goes.