The Queue: They basically took my name off the site

Gone for a bit to have a kid and they practically took my name off the site! The nerve!

I’m not even the one s!@#posting on Twitter anymore! Ugh. Time to start a new Watch.

Maybe Turtle Watch, a site that just live streams baby turtles doing baby turtle things? Actually, wait…

So this is one of those questions where if you ask 12 different people you’re probably going to get 12 different answers. But with that said, you’re right in your thinking that there’s basically two schools of thought:

1. Let them die
2. Heal them

In the “let them die” camp are folks that think the best way to learn is failure, and in many aspects of life I actually agree. I learned a lot on Blizzard Watch by failing to run it properly at different points, and the same goes for my personal, work, and other failures. There’s a reason games have difficulty levels and health bars. It’s okay if they drop to zero, it’s part of the game.

In the “heal them” camp are people that think it’s your job to keep the group up and functioning no matter what. This can definitely be true in certain situations, such as mass AOE damage and unavoidable hits people are just going to take. It can also be a challenge for you, if you’re up for it at the particular time, to just see if you can keep that one really noob mage DPS from killing himself after every other spider pull. This tends to make you a better healer overall, especially in terms of your own situational awareness while keeping track of multiple health bars. But it takes a lot of concentration (at least for me), and I’m not always up for that.

Now, as with all of life, there are shades of gray in here, and this is where you’re going to get 12 different answers that I was talking about before. I’m generally of the mindset that I’ll be nice and tell folks to (very politely and very non-confrontationally) not do something a couple times, but then will let them learn it the hard way. I find this works about 75% of the time, and is easier to do when the tank isn’t under geared or the mechanics of the dungeon/raid are not difficult for me anymore. When it doesn’t work it usually fails in spectacular fashion. I’ve been told off, attempted to be kicked (only succeeded when it was guildies playing with each other and I didn’t notice), and called almost every name in the book — including several that I’m sure at my ripe old age of 35 I don’t know the meaning of. Meh. I was right, they were wrong.

And on that note, one other thing — as a healer you don’t have anything to prove once you’ve done the instance a few times with all the different types of tanks. If people are making you feel that way, you don’t need to listen to them. You’re good. Same goes for all the tanks in the world. Group dynamics cause problems more often than holding back healing will. So if things suck and people are being mean? Drop, take the hit, and just requeue, you’ll be in faster than others and you won’t have to deal with crappy people. Your day will be more fun, and that’s what playing a game is all about.

By now everyone knows that it’s been announced, and the post should already be up on our site (or will be shortly, I’m writing this in advance). But I still wanted to answer a little here because I’ve worked a fair bit in the management of classical music non-profits (ie: orchestras and operas). You may think these don’t count towards something like BlizzCon booking a band, however you’d be surprised at the number of mainstream musicians and bands that Want, with a capital W, to play with classical music groups.

Anyways, my resume aside, there’s a few reasons this could be announced late.

First, they might just be doing it for marketing hype and driving last minute sales. This is a perfectly valid and sound mass marketing strategy. Everyone reading Blizzard Watch isn’t going to be swayed (probably) on buying a Virtual Ticket based on the closing act, but remember that there are millions of other people out there, and these strategies do work when your primary demographic is saturated and you’re wanting to expand your market bubble. I’ve worked on similar strategies before, and first hand, it delivers results.

Second, there could have been some last minute changes we are not, and never will be, aware of. These things happen all the time, and if an artist isn’t 100% sure they’ll be able to make the booking in advance, there’ll be a few different plans in place which would get executed once a final decision is made (sometimes as short as a few weeks out, although usually it’s 90 days).

Finally, this is just typical Blizzard. They always slow drop things. Aka: soon™.

There’ll be a handful of people on the ground, but the rest will be tied to all the live streams making sure that we capture all the data — both during and after the individual panels. For instance, all those times some exec sits down on a couch and is asked questions? A few of the most interesting and provoking tidbits out of BlizzCon usually come up in those.

One of the major things we’ve found recently is that it’s better if we swarm the live streams than have more than a couple people with boots on the ground (and we have local folks or people that are otherwise going, so it works out nicely for everyone). That isn’t to say having a presence isn’t good or anything, it’s just much more cost-effective, and more importantly efficient, to cover with a larger home team than an away team.

Also Mitch is now a redshirt. ;)

I love this question. Thanks for asking!

I would like to see faction representation and the assorted rep gains via tabards launch with BFA. This isn’t to say that we won’t get something similar in the future (I know various options are being explored, they’ve said this a few times now), but I think it was a pretty solid miss to not anticipate the … total grind of faction rep, and how it was so tightly tied into the story.

Along the same lines, I can’t help but mention a second: I would have liked to see class- or racial-specific stories play out in BFA much like they did in Legion. I know, I know … this is a different expansion and would have been a ton of work; but it feels weird going from such an alt-friendly (alt-required?) experience to one where you have two major storylines (Alliance and Horde) without the need for many alts to get the full picture of the narrative. There’s a lot more to unpack here, so please, go nuts. Maybe I’ll get another post about this written up one night.

As far as what feature I’d have liked to have seen from BFA in other expansions? I think if the Island Expeditions were rolled out differently and with greater aplomb and had a chance to mature a bit as a feature, it would have worked very very well in all the expansions. I still have high hopes for this feature — seeing it get tweaked and grown more; so perhaps my wish will come true for the future.