The Queue: In which we build, activate, fly, and accept

Just remember: a wizard is never early or late, he appears exactly at the time he intends to.

Magic missiles. Magic missiles. I’m out of mana.

Blizzard hasn’t given an indication they’re going to do this. Right now the system allows you to “catch up” (or start from scratch) with current-expansion material, but the “old world” stuff is just weird and broken when leveling.

I mentioned this in a previous Queue, but this leads to the feeling that the leveling system is flawed and confusing. Think if you were a new player trying to get into professions. You’re prompted to start early, and you do so. You progress as you level, you enjoy it, yay 16 slot bags. Then you get a ton of new things to build, but none of the materials are dropping anymore, and you need to be 10 levels higher to use them. How are you to know where to go for the other materials without Googling or spending gold on the AH (of which, people can make a killing on). The answer is you can’t.

I hope Blizzard fixes this soon.

When you start to add more elements to a user’s experience, you need start making it cleaner to allow those elements to surface. In today’s world this means flatter designs, more white space (or whatever background color), and more emphasis on what is essential vs not and only showing those essential elements. For instance, can things move to the menu bar? Do icons need the names under them, or are the brands distinctive enough to live without?

As Activision-Blizzard adds more stuff to the launcher the experts at Blizzard will be considering these things. And I’m not calling them experts to suck up to them — I’ve watched their user interface style change with the times as user experience becomes a more defined discipline. They’re at the point where Blizzard’s UI is generally out infront of where others in the industry are. Steam vs Battlenet Launcher for instance — two different products, yes, but which one shows a clearer path to elegant growth and change than a design that’s not going to change?

Answer: Blizzard.

There’s not, but as others noted, there are portals to all the major cities where you can find them.

I think that this is actually something that needs to be addressed. One of the more confusing things you can do to a user of anything, be it a game, website, or television, is to provide them with multiple points of entry into a key activity. For WoW you need to get your flying mount. At the time of introduction the location of the flight masters made sense, but now with the way the game has progressed to a non-linear and self-service storytelling mode, they don’t; and the quests to “unlock” flight don’t fit either in some cases.

The solution to this is rather simple, consolidate all the flight trainers into one location (or one set of locations rather, in each capital city). Players will always know where to go when starting the game, and us old time folks can lament the hidden flight trainer next to the inn in Borean Tundra.

Yes, that’s part of the new privacy requirements that come down from the GDPR. Passed in the EU, the GDPR dictates a lot of new and stronger privacy and data sharing protections for consumers. Overall it’s a good thing, and Blizzard Watch became fully compliant with it this weekend. That bar is part of it. You’ll need to click it once on every browser and then it’ll stay there (for now) as an option so you can revise your settings later.

I’m planning on giving Blizzard Watch a bit of a refresh in a few months, and at that point we’ll have something slightly different.