The Queue: Weapon transmog, Nightborne unlock, Ultra WoW, and coding

Welcome to the Monday Queue! And for it to be a true Monday, when this post published itself today there was a bug some place and all the content was lost. So… welcome to what is really the second version of a Monday Queue!

My educated guess is that Blizzard is going to remove, or be very very lax on the transmog restrictions of legendary weapon skins once BfA releases (or whatever happens to them towards the end of the expansion out in Silthus). I think the system is going to be frustratingly pointless if it exists as it does now, or there are minor tweaks it will become frustratingly complex. The only real option I can see is to allow a full on “you can transmog your weapon into any Legion legendary weapon skin you have” rule.

Now with that said … what Blizzard come out with something that is frustratingly complex and forces us to be locked into certain weapons for the entirety of BfA due to their stats and the need for maximization.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I actually don’t mind the complexity that these unlocks are going to have. They will definitely be something that people will need to work towards and face some challenges on, but so far I’m not seeing anything that’s crazy or unobtainable. This includes the Nightborne requiring the Insurrection campaign. It’s a bit annoying for sure, but it’s very doable — Wowhead has a good guide. With as far as gear has progressed now, getting through this shouldn’t be an issue as well.

The part that most people don’t like is that it requires a LFR kill. I think that’s something that Blizzard could easily remove with the release of Patch 8.0 when old-tier raid content becomes hit or miss when looking to find them. Of course the other thing that could be done is Blizzard opening up a random LFR and including all previous LFRs scaled to the level of the player … but I doubt that’s in the cards, despite my dreams.

My good feelings towards this probably stems from the way that I was brought up with WoW. Back in Classic, having an UBRS key meant you were badass and got into groups (or had them form around you) relatively easily. Back BC the Kara key and subsequent raid unlocks were a thing of pride. You put it on your guild resume, you had it in your bag, you did something that set yourself apart from the millions upon millions of other players. That same kind of feeling is what I think the racial unlocks are going to do, and I’m really looking forward to that.

Even if everyone gets them eventually, it’s still going to be great to have something where you have to put some serious effort into obtaining it, versus just bopping around to different world quests.

I agree with this entirely. The options for some of the excess just seem … excessive. What I’m holding out hope for is that these represent a step in the direction of a complete retexture of WoW. The game engine has advanced substantially since it was released, however some of the older content and armor looks incredibly dated. Have you ever looked at the tress in classic zones? Ouch.

My hope is that sometime in the future Blizzard releases a “4k upgrade” (I use that in quotes for a reason, because it’s a marketing gimmick more than anything, but it means better textures and finer fidelity on all the graphics). I’d hope that this upgrade would span all the elements in the game and make WoW look something akin to modern Assassin’s Creed or Witcher. Of course WoW has a timeless style as it doesn’t try to emulate reality, but still, when a tree’s leaf is just a two-dimensional object with a 16bit texture on it… yeah, it takes away some of the immersion.

I know that I am grossly oversimplifying things and this is project that Blizzard has said multiple times they don’t have as a priority; however they said the same thing about flying in Azeroth — right up until they announced it. Thus I remain hopeful.

So I think I should be able to help you out here. In addition to Blizzard Watch, I’m a Senior Product Director and was previously a Senior Software Engineer. In my spare time I play around with game development, electronics, and operating system development.

First thing first — what language or industry are you going to be developing in? Depending on the answer there could be vastly different places to start. If you’re in a web industry or would be making applications for browsers, calc is good to understand and keep in the back of your head, but it’s not a necessity. If you’re in a more industrial or scientific sector, then it may be more important, however I’ve found that linear algebra tends to be the skillset that gets used the most (versus just QQ’d about when talking about optimizations and esoteric dogma that have little practical applications in the current reality of software engineering).

Once you have that answered, go search for jobs and find out what people are looking for on resumes, and then focus your skill building on that. For hard skills, I’d recommend looking around YouTube, edex, MIT open courseware, and generally searching on reddit for resources. If it’s programming skills that you need to develop, hit up Lynda or Safari Books Online. Honestly. It’s about $35 for each of those, but you get access to a VAST array of books and video tutorials that are better than 99% of the stuff that’s taught in college.

On that subject, let me also get on a soap box and say that what’s coming out of university level computer science courses rarely prepares you for real world development. I’ve worked with post grad students who don’t know how to revert a git commit on production; whereas the self taught intern straight from highschool makes quick work of it. Which is more valuable in the real work? Hint: it’s the one that knows how to revert a bad commit and fix it while keeping her cool. That kind of thing to keep in the back of your mind should help guide you on your education journey.

Finally, and I can’t stress this enough, I have and will hire people without direct experience in a field; but I need to see a portfolio on github or contributions to an open source project so I know that you can work in a coding team environment. That doesn’t mean pair programming or whatever, but that you know how to use the tools everyone in the industry uses (or at least know one and are familiar enough with the concepts to pick up whatever variant we use), and that you can assimilate into a team effectively.

Bonus point final note — study up on agile software development. Know what a scrum is and how to give an update. Know how agile’s SDLC works vs waterfall’s SDLC. Know what kanban means. Project management skills, especially being able to keep your own time project managed, is almost just as important as whatever technical skills you have (to nearly every good company out there).

P/S: I only use calc in some electronics stuff I do and my OS development side projects. Everything else is logic based thinking and arithmetic, and depending on where you went to school that may or may not have been part of calc; but  it’s important to know across the board.