The Queue: Business time

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 can’t say this is something I ever thought about for my WoW characters. And now I’m trying to visualize it without logging into the game and I have no idea which hand they hold what in. I guess, for me, I don’t care if they’re right- or left-handed. If I had to pick, though, I’d say they’re right-handed because that’s what I am.

It’s the World Quest event this week. The World Quest event is also known as the one week I spam every possible world quest on all of my max level alts to make sure they get those 5,000 bonus resources to fuel their mission table until the next time that event comes around.

If you’re in a guild in WoW, it’s possible one of your guildmates is also interested in the mount and you two could work together. Alternatively, Heroes of the Storm has an in-game general chat and there’s often people in it looking to do event quests. You could either ping one of them, or ask around yourself.

These are still conversations we’re having, so I don’t have a specific answer, but I can share my personal thoughts. Note: This is my opinion and not necessarily what we’ll do.

Personally, I’m not necessarily sure it needs to be replaced. Removed, yes, but maybe not replaced. I feel like people should contribute to our Patreon if they enjoy our content and have faith in our ability to do more of it. Putting a goal for X thousands of dollars for a singular recurring thing has a couple of problems:

• New Patrons might look at that next stretch goal and decide they aren’t interested in that specific item, then decide not to contribute, because they don’t want that specific thing.
• It removes our agility as a creative team. We might have an idea for an awesome little post/project, but we can’t do it because a giant lump of our budget has been put toward a huge thing we’ve already told people we’ll be doing.

When it comes to crowdfunding, I think things like stretch goals and all of that need to be considered on a project-by-project basis. Sometimes stretch goals work. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they only work to a certain level and then lose their usefulness.

For us, I can have someone do something really cool with $50 or $100. What that thing is might depend on what content Blizzard is releasing, what’s in the various games, current events, something people are asking about, something a member of our staff is really passionate about, whatever. That’s not the type of thing you can make a specific stretch goal for — and people expect stretch goals to be hundreds or thousands of dollars ahead of the previous one. Should I make an infinite number of stretch goals $50 higher than the last one with nonspecific labels such as “we will write something”?

Let’s use those class columns as an example. As we’ve discussed previously, publishing them on a weekly or bi-weekly basis didn’t work. The numbers didn’t add up. But we locked ourselves into doing them until patronage no longer paid for them. When we don’t have a stretch goal saying we absolutely will publish those columns, we can take whatever budget we placed into them and put it toward whatever we feel is cool and relevant. And, in the rare times those class columns were useful, like right before an expansion… we can pay someone to write guides and explanations as a one-time thing. That’s a better way to do it than, for example, continuing to run all of the class columns nonstop during that year of zero content at the end of Warlords of Draenor. But we told people we were going to do it, so we had to do it.

I would much rather people contribute to our Patreon if they trust us to keep making cool stuff, and trust us to put their contributions toward additional cool stuff. Small contributions all help. I don’t want to create a situation where the next stretch goal is $2,000 away and thus people feel like their $5 won’t do anything.

Again, though, that’s me. I’m not the only person involved in this discussion and I know people feel strongly that stretch goals are always the way to go. There are people who choose not to contribute because the next stretch goal is so far away, but there are also people who won’t contribute unless there’s a goal to reach. It’s a game of weighing the pros and cons of every scenario and anyone who claims there’s only one correct way to go is probably wrong.