The Queue: Miskatonic, my alma mater
by Michael Sacco 
Feb 5th 2011 at 12:00PM
67 Lovecraft works for $1.99 on my Kindle? I'll take it!
Voodie asked:
I had an extra account that was hacked a few months back. I recently received an email from Blizzard with an offer for a free authenticator to help protect the account from future attacks. There were no links to click, just a set of directions on how to get it; so I figured it was probably a legit offer and I gave it a shot. I went to the Blizzard store, logged in with the previously hacked account info, followed the directions from the email and sure enough, I have a new authenticator on the way. They even paid for the shipping.
Is this something that is commonly done or is it some sort of new program Blizzard is trying out?
It's some new thing! We've gotten reports from several people that hacked accounts (or at least certain hacked accounts) are being given free authenticators. It's great.
Powerringer asked:
Who is the artist for the Warcraft anniversary piece with all the faction leaders on it? I love the level of detail. Thanks!
That would be Wei Wang.
Azzure asked:
I have been wondering so I thought I should ask The Queue. What are those black spike things that come out of the ground in every Twilight Hammer camp as well as holding up the entrance to Bastion of Twilight? I haven't found out anything of what they are.
The spikes are pure elementium, pulled from the earth by Twilight's Hammer shaman. Hey, if we can make stuff out of it, so can they!
Panacea asked:
Any idea what the Cavern of Time instance for Cataclysm will be yet? I know they said at BlizzCon that there will be a CoT instance, but I don't think there's been any more news than that little tidbit. Commence wild speculation!
Yep, it's going to be a War of the Ancients raid. We don't know anything more yet.
Skarn asked:
Did you ever get to meet Greg (Street) before you left Blizzard?
Never had the pleasure, but if you don't mind me going on a slight tangent, a group of developers did come by the support offices for BC launch. Jeff Kaplan (aka Tigole) was there with the other devs, and I got to talk with him for a few minutes. This was when I was still a temp employee, so it was a really big deal to just be able to pick his brain for a while. What struck me then and still sticks with me now is just how excited he was to talk about World of Warcraft. Even after working overtime on BC for however many months, still balancing the live game, and dealing with all the pressures of WoW's popularity explosion, he was still just brimming with energy and excitement about the game.
That's why I'm not worried about Titan.
Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW Insider crew is here with The Queue, our daily Q&A column. Leave your questions in the comments, and we'll do our best to answer 'em!Filed under: The Queue
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 7)
Powatodapeople Feb 5th 2011 12:04PM
its really cool that the developers really enjoy the game they make. it shows
Necromann Feb 5th 2011 12:07PM
It would be a poor game if they did not like it.
Superthrust Feb 5th 2011 12:50PM
i thought tigole was gone...as in, gone gone, after that breakdown he had against some stupid trolls.
Nopunin10did Feb 5th 2011 12:58PM
I believe Tigole is on the new MMO project.
Hailene Feb 5th 2011 1:17PM
@Superthrust, I believe you're thinking of Tseric, not Tigole.
Twill Feb 5th 2011 1:42PM
The Queue:
Can you do a poll? I'm race-changing my Warlock. (Alliance)
Make everyone vote on the race and then I'll choose that one! Ohh and leave possible names in comments :D
Twill Feb 5th 2011 1:43PM
On that note,
is it okay to have my warlocks name be:
Soon™
?
Manadar Feb 5th 2011 4:09PM
Too bad they left the game in the hands of devs like GC that doesn't even seem to play it.
talkingmike Feb 5th 2011 5:55PM
I will never EVER understand why people really believe that GC doesn't play the game. Or that he hates a certain class (ask players from 10 different classes and they'll give you 10 different answers). Or that he isn't as informed as he possibly can be.
The dude lives and breathes the game; he's a designer not a businessman, so it's in his best interest that the game is as good as it can be.
Skarn Feb 5th 2011 7:26PM
Aye, it's sad. People like to scapegoat the guy who's name they know. :(
GC is only the Lead Systems Designer. While he is in charge of a lot of the nuts and bolts, he's not the ultimate top guy. For WoW, that'd be Tom Chilton, also known as Kalgan. He's still the Lead Game Designer. Right up there with him is J. Allen Brack, WoW's Game Director. Kalgan has been with the game for a very long time, pre-release. The game is, ultimately, still under the same supervision it's always been. Ghostcrawler is just the current face. People use to scream and rage against Kalgan and Tigole too. Such is the life of the public face of anything popular.
Chai Feb 5th 2011 10:19PM
@The Queue:
I haven't seen anything regarding this, but perhaps I've overlooked it. Any chance they will allow Goblins to be able to build the Mechano-Hog in 4.0.6
Omacron Feb 5th 2011 12:12PM
I often get the feeling from a lot of Blizz devs that they're basically kids who somehow lucked into running their own candy shop, and they're still in awe of the whole situation. They can recount numbers and statistics for hours, and then turn on a dime and say "but that boss encounter was totally radical!".
MusedMoose Feb 5th 2011 12:18PM
And that's probably a lot of why they make such good games. In any creative production, you get the best results when the people creating it love what they're doing - when it's not *just* a job for them.
DarkWalker Feb 5th 2011 1:16PM
There is one pitfall when developers are in love with their game, though: they might end up making a game they would like to play, instead of a game to please their player base.
Up to a point, I think this is what happened in Cataclysm - the devs tweaked the game to be the way they wanted it to be, and failed to take into account the large, not-so-skilled player base that ended up loving being able to run randoms and raid in WotLK without the effort of attaining great coordination or spending a lot of time in the gearing process. Thus, the number of complaints in the forums, and GC spending multiple blog posts talking about the issue.
Twill Feb 5th 2011 1:35PM
@ Dark.
As XT would say, "No No No No!!!!"
Everyone with a voice complained that WotLK was too hard. Everyone. Even my grandmother whose hand is a taco.
What they all forgot was that WotLK was still somewhat difficult pre-T11/12 (for doing Heroic 5-mans).
Cataclysm is a *little* harder, PLUS there is not the gear advantage.
Why is there so much wide-spread anger though? The Dungeon Finder. And its not because it is flawed or because it hates us. Its because its the first expansion to EVER exist when 5-mans are cutting-edge content (which has already ended).
Count to 10 million. Catacylsm Heroics will be cake and people will be complaining about AoE fests once again. ^.^
(Assuming 10 million seconds is about a month into 4.1)
Twill Feb 5th 2011 1:37PM
One more reason why Cata SEEMS to be more difficult--
We have been missing the 5% buff. When over-gearing something, that 5% scales fast. It made WotLK have the icing on the cake for easymode.
Artificial Feb 5th 2011 1:43PM
@DarkWalker: "...they might end up making a game they would like to play, instead of a game to please their player base."
The biggest pitfall comes from thinking the second is any different from the first. The moment they start second-guessing themselves and making a game they wouldn't like to play because they think it will please their base, the game is doomed.
If you think this is what's happened in Cataclysm, I have to agree. It's also why Cataclysm is the single most successful MMO expansion ever published by any company ever. And if you think they could have done anything to change the fact that a lot of people complain in the forums, you're dead wrong. All they'd change is who is complaining, and what they're complaining about.
DarkWalker Feb 5th 2011 3:18PM
@Twill:
I agree quite strongly that most of the perception of difficulty in Cata's random heroics was due to the fail LFD. But for unguilded casuals who only play them through the LFD - who, I believe, make up for the vast majority of players - the LFD's failings are as if they were part of the heroic dungeons themselves.
Plenty of players got from being able to faceroll heroics in 15 minutes in a LFD random group to failing them 4 times in 5, and even successful runs taking at least 45 minutes, and as often as not multiple hours. Not everyone liked this transition, no matter what the real causes were.
@Artificial:
A game can please both it's developers and the greater player base, true. I would risk saying most of the really good ones do it; if you look at the best Mario-branded games, for example, they are made in a way that allows even weak gamers to beat them, but with challenges that take real skill to beat. It's no coincidence that those Mario-branded games often stay in the weekly top 30 best selling games list for years at a time, and hold the best-selling titles in the platform, racing, and fighting genres.
But the risk of doing a game that only pleases the developers, and players with a similar mindset, is real. There is a site, called House of the Underdogs, about great games that didn't manage to get successful; quite a few of them ended up like that because the developers made a really great game, but one that endeared itself for like-minded players, and not the public at large.
I also don't see Cataclysm as such a huge success, specially if compared with WotLK.
True, Cata sold 15-20% more copies in the first day than WotLK, but by Cata's launch WoW had a 10% larger subscription base than at WotLK's launch, and this time pre-orders were much more readily available, digital download was available as an option for pre-orders, and players were given the chance to pre-load the expansion to be able to start playing the instant Cata went on sale, which should contribute to larger first-day sales.
True, Cata sold an impressive 4.7 million copies on it's first month, but 3.3M of those copies were sold on the first day, which means adding up the sales on the other 29-30 days it comes up to less than half it's first day sales. At this rate, I doubt even half of the active player base will have upgraded to Cataclysm before June/July.
True, Blizzard announced that the player base had surpassed 12 million players a month before Cata's launch, but two years before it surpassed 11 million players a week before WotLK, and then added another half million players less than two weeks after WotLK launched. Seems to me like Cata's launch was not able to draw nearly as many players to WoW as WotLK did.
In the end, in relative terms, Cata's launch seems to be the weakest expansion launch in WoW's story - although BC is out of the scale due to it's launch happening during a period of explosive growth for WoW, so this is not an entirely fair comparison.
loop_not_defined Feb 5th 2011 7:34PM
Pretty much what Twill said.
For most people, experiencing WotLK Heroics was doing 3.0 content in 3.3 gear. Many people who think Cataclysm is obscenely more difficult than WotLK are comparing 3.0 content in 3.3 gear to 4.0 content in 4.0 gear.
Every time I read a post on the official boards where someone is recounting their long and intricate history with WoW*, and then claims that Cata Heroics or Raids are the hardest WoW has ever been, the word "LIAR" immediately pops into my head. I'm not trying to be judgy or insulting...but as someone that has also experienced 6 years of WoW, I cannot fathom how a similar person could ever draw such a conclusion.
*It's interesting to note that these players *NEVER* post on this "highly experienced" character of theirs. I honestly hate Armoring people, and can understand why someone would post on an alt, but I just cannot ignore this strong correlation.
Eskarel Feb 6th 2011 2:01AM
@loop_not_defined
Cata dungeons are by no means the hardest dungeons WoW has ever had, realistically that probably goes to TBC, Vanilla was mostly tank and spank and the difficulty came from shitty class mechanics.
I also remember what wrath dungeons were like in the early days before you could coast through the tournament 5 man loot pinata a few times and be heroic ready.
My biggest issue with cata dungeons(and this applies both to heroic and non heroic) is that blizzard has, in a lot of cases, confused challenging with long. I don't mind wiping a few times, I do mind killing my way through 45 minutes worth of trash to get to the boss. I don't have a lot of time to play, I don't raid much anymore, but I really enjoyed the fact that in wrath, if I could get a group I could pretty much always guarantee completing the instance in less than half an hour.
Casuals do not, for the most part, have an issue with reasonable levels of difficulty. If it's clear what I'm supposed to do I'm happy to do it, CC, stay out of the fire, it's all good. Time on the other hand is an issue, if I've got to allocate 2-3 hours to a heroic, it's just not going to happen, even if said heroic is piss easy. It's why most of my newer alts don't have the WC achievement because running through there takes for bloody ever.