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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsThe Queue: Memorial Day
by Alex Ziebart 
May 30th 2011 at 11:00AM
Today is Memorial Day. If you're an American and you know what it is, great. If you're an American and you don't know what it is, look it up. If you're not an American, you may continue to do whatever it is you do, unless you live in the U.K., in which case I demand you mail me Jaffa Cakes.
No, don't actually do that.
mik3st3r asked:
What is the story behind the dragons in the elemental planes? Most specifically, the stone drakes. Did they simply form from rock, or were they part of one of the dragonflights, and somehow got bound eternally to deepholm?
They're just stone elementals in the shape of a dragon. I think at some point, Blizzard realized that its lore structure for dragons is a bit ... adolescent? One of the first things kids do when they get creative is start color-coding things. I think every writer in the world has gone through a phase where they thought color-coding things was the most brilliant idea ever. Having "black dragons" and "red dragons" as specific species of dragon can work fine, but when you break sentient/sapient creatures down into rigid organizations based on color and make that your canon, it is not only rather childish, it is also extremely limiting. Also a little racist, if you want to put way too much thought into it.
I feel that at some point in World of Warcraft's lifespan, Blizzard realized that yes, those color-based barriers are foolish and they want to do a lot more with the idea of dragons than preestablished lore allowed. They said to hell with it and started making whatever drakes they felt like making. Nether drakes, Twilight drakes, proto-drakes, stone drakes ... the more drakes they add to the game, the less effort they put into trying to tie them to the preestablished dragon lore. I think we're better off that way, too. I like having these independent dragon variations. I like that much better than "My skin is green, therefore ..."
TL;DR: At some point, Blizzard realized dragons aren't the Power Rangers and stopped worrying about that dragonflight thing.
Tim West asked:
What time will the BlizzCon meet-up be? The Benefit Dinner is at 7:30pm – 11:30pm and my $500 requires me to be there.
Before I even start to answer this question I want to make a clarification so people don't start jumping to conclusions: We have not yet finalized plans for our BlizzCon meetup. We are not ready to announce a venue, so anything I say about event scheduling here is tentative at best. The only guarantee is that we will be doing something Thursday evening.
With that out of the way ... historically, our meetups have started between 6 and 8 p.m., and they last until whenever people leave or our venue shuts us down. This time around, we may need to implement a definite time for the end of the party, because we started receiving noise complaints as the clock approached midnight last year. While everybody going to BlizzCon is up partying that night, people visiting Disney and other attractions in that area are not.
Last year, I believe the final party attendees were flushed out around 12 a.m., and we did have a number of people who attended the benefit dinner manage to swing by our party for awhile. However, it looks like Blizzard's benefit dinner is running later this year than it did last year -- last year's ended at 10, not 11:30. You might be out of luck for attending the bulk of the WoW Insider party. However, the staff is all over the place that whole weekend -- if you're looking to meet someone in particular and we have them in California, chances are good we can hook you up with a handshake or a sweaty, sweaty hug at some point.
EidlonImp asked:
I'm going to surprise my baby tomorrow night by stuffing some dates with manchego and wrapping them in Bacon, but all we have in the house is turkey Bacon. That should still be good, right?
Does he/she like turkey bacon? The answer to that question will answer yours. Turkey bacon is very different from regular bacon, so if you don't know whether or not your baby likes it, you should probably take the extra trip for real bacon, if your goal is romance -- unless by "baby" you mean a literal baby and not your significant other, in which case you should probably reconsider feeding a baby stuffed dates.
Palamedes asked:
It seems for the past month or two, 6/7 days of the week the Queue is answering questions on the VP to JP conversion rate. Why is this?
...
Noyou asked:
Happy Memorial day! Brat vs Hamburger for your holiday feast? (no substitutions please) Also, favorite side dish for your outdoor grilling pleasure?
As I am a Polack from Wisconsin, I enjoy nothing more than getting my hands on a warm, juicy sausage and cradling it between two halves of a nice, fluffy bun. I'm a brat man, though I'm certainly not going to turn away a good hamburger if offered.
Also due to being from the Midwest, most of my side dish recommendations come in the form of noodle salads with either mayonnaise or Miracle Whip as a primary ingredient. My girlfriend is from the east coast and finds all such dishes vile, so I assume all of you not from the midwest would feel the same. I'll skip the noodle salads and go to my family's non-creamy side dish fallback:
Sour Cucumber Salad
3 cucumbers
1 onion
1 c. sugar
1 c. white vinegar
Peel and slice the cucumbers and the onion as thick or as thin as you'd like. Throw them in a bowl with everything else. Salt and pepper to taste. Marinate for an hour or two, stirring often. Hooray, you're done! If you want, you can add other vegetables to it -- wedged tomatoes, pepperoncinis, or sport peppers, for example.
Dang, sport peppers are a Midwest thing too, aren't they? All of you just need to relocate to the Milwaukee-Chicago region.
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: Analysis / Opinion, The Queue
Reader Comments (Page 3 of 10)
icepyro May 30th 2011 5:05PM
What surprises me the most is that anybody would let biscuits or jaffa cakes go stale, even in the name of science and/or legal reasons.
om nom nom.
Magma May 30th 2011 5:27PM
He is not amused. Making cakes out of his people. http://sg-operations.com/Images/Jaffa-Teal%27c.png
Reklisc May 31st 2011 12:20PM
@DeathPaladin
That was awesome, and my first laugh of the day. Thank you!
BP May 31st 2011 3:56PM
@Quill2006 Seems a lot of countries have their own take on Jaffa Cakes. Czech Republic has the same looking thing under the "Pim's" brand, but from what I tried, it didn't quite blow my mind. I'll have to get a bag of the real thing and commence an in-depth investigation of the Jaffa secret.
Rob May 30th 2011 11:08AM
What is your opinion about the next expac as far as difficulty goes. Frankly I loved the accessability of Wraith and my friends and I had a good time seeing the content. Cata is too hard/too long for us, and our guild has mostly split; I myself have stopped playing. If the next expansion is more like Wraith I would come back. If it is more like Cata I won't.
Amanda A. May 30th 2011 12:07PM
It actually seems like Cata will self-correct. The initial shock was bad; the year of tier 10 led a lot of players into laziness. But the stupid parts of the heroics have been fixed, the raids are getting a proper learning curve, and they're even fixing the problem with the heroics getting dull as you outgear them by tiering the heroics.
I don't mind a good, fair challenge. What I do mind is things that are both unforgiving and unfair. For example, Godfrey's cursed bullets have a 1s cast. Given a 300ms latency, that gives you .4s to see the cast and interrupt. And if your healer can't decurse, you want to interrupt it!
threesixteen May 30th 2011 1:29PM
i really dont understand this 'cata is difficult' thing that i've been seeing on the forums... is it more a case of 'difficult to run a raid team' rather than, 'the content is just hard'? to me the raids seem pretty simple actually. the mechanics are all obvious and 'execution' is really the only thing that people seem to have trouble with.
what's so hard exactly? maybe players need to realistically adjust their evaluation of 'difficult' with their level of expectation... is it that there are so many newer players signing up that don't have the level of experience with the classes and game mechanics maybe?
there are more addons and resource sites than ever before; there are videos on pretty much every raid boss and dungeon instance. there are guides and in-game clues for professions, quests and events...
specifically, what is so gosh darn hard?
Kriegle May 30th 2011 1:46PM
I also fail to see this supposed skull-crushing difficulty espoused by some people. Sometimes it seems like I'm playing a different game.
Can we all just stop for a second and realize, hey, WoW has been out for 7 years going on 8, maybe people are a little tired of the game by now, yes? Even if you haven't been playing for that long, chances are at minimum you will have been playing a couple years by now. Multiple years is a long time to do anything, and burnout is a natural part of the human experience. If you find yourself hating Cata, take a break and come back when you can buy tier gear with badges and roflstomp the early heroics and raids, and then if you're still feeling burned out you can be sure it's not the learning curve.
Hollow Leviathan May 30th 2011 3:16PM
I do understand where people are coming from when they said Cata is hard. I raided in every expansion, I only got to see MC in vanilla, Kara in BC, but went all the way from Naxx to ICC and killed the Lich King, I was 11/12 at 5% and it took me to 30% to kill the LK, but I was ok with that difficulty. However, I think Cata raids are too hard and have stopped raiding because it wasn't fun.
Skarn May 30th 2011 8:42PM
Funny, my experience is nearly identical to Leviathan's, yet my outlook is completely different. I've raided in every single expansion too. In Vanilla, I did MC, ZG and AQ20. For BC I ran Kara, Gruul, Magtheridon and Void Reaver. (Yeah, that's all I did of Tempest Keep.) Also in BC I was able to go back and do AQ40 and Naxx60 before Wrath release. Not cutting edge raiding, but fun! In Wrath I did just about everything. 10 and 25 man for all instances with hard modes done only on 10-man. I don't recall what level the buff was at when I killed the Lich King for the first time. At least 15%, quite possibly 30%.
As you can see, our experience is very similar. (Did you do any hard modes in Wrath, Leviathan?) Our opinions on the other hand are quite different. (Nothing wrong with that!) It is my honest, non-elitist, non-judgmental opinion that the current level of difficulty in Cataclysm raids is a good one. Most bosses have taken my raid about 2 nights to defeat, with Chimaeron, Cho'gall and Nefarian being the only ones to have taken longer.
I honestly think things are set-up very well. They're not super hard, they're not super easy. It's a good challenge, but very doable and good fun. I'm just...confused. I look at the Cata raids and see a great balance and I just can't seem to wrap my head around the constant talk that they are "insanely hard" and some such. I am genuinely puzzled. :(
Toggle May 31st 2011 3:44AM
The definition of terms like too hard and too easy vary greatly from person to person. What is too hard for one is too easy for another. There will never be a single game difficulty that satisfies everyone. These facts seem to get ignored in this argument.
Eskarel Jun 1st 2011 9:50AM
I've only started doing heroics fairly recently because of time constraints,dA but my biggest complaint with difficulty is the heavy RNG. Get the wrong class mix and you're in for pain to begin with and some of the fights are simply impossible if things don't go your way.
Wrath got cheesy but you never really felt like you couldn't win from the first zone or that you lost for no reason other than luck.
Bobury May 30th 2011 11:09AM
At first I saw that the Sour Cucumber Salad was bolded, so I thought it was a name for someone, and the recipe was a non-italic question. Then I came to my senses.
MusedMoose May 30th 2011 12:31PM
And now I'm kind of tempted to register "Sour Cucumber Salad" as a name here. And respond to peoples' questions with recipes.
Kurash May 30th 2011 12:48PM
I endorse that idea, Mused! Doo eet!
Sour Cucumber Salad May 30th 2011 1:31PM
Too late.
Elmo May 30th 2011 1:32PM
I wouldn't advice anyone to eat cucumber for a while, not since the situation in Germany.
I sure as hell ain't eating any.
kaminari May 30th 2011 1:38PM
not too late, you are not responding with recipes yet =P
Noyou May 30th 2011 1:51PM
I have had a variation of that salad but I think there was mayo in it too. Very tasty.
DavidRokon May 30th 2011 4:50PM
Elmo, well just don't buy any cucumbers from Spain then. Food borne illnesses, while uncommon, can happen just about anywhere if just one thing goes wrong somewhere along the chain. But the chances are slim of getting sick, and even less then being struck by lightning of being actually deadly.