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by Michael Sacco 
Oct 9th 2011 at 12:00PM
I've snuck in another music recommendation for this weekend. Don't tell anybody!
FatherTouk asked:
If you are at a rank in your guild that requires an authenticator, and you remove it from your account, do you automatically get demoted to a rank that doesn't require one?
You get automatically demoted upon logging into the game.
Matt Krotzer asked:
How much live coverage will WoW Insider be providing of BlizzCon?
A lot. We have a ton of people on the ground at BlizzCon, and we'll have live coverage for you throughout the weekend.
Revynn asked:
With BG's, Heroics and soon Raids being region wide instead of simply isolated to your own server, what are the chances that we'll ever see a region wide Auction House?
I feel like it's unlikely, personally; the Auction House is sort of the last bastion of server community we have left.
Morgatho asked:
Late night (or early morning) Q4tQ: is the new wow book a part of the lore of the game 100% like Twilight of the Aspects is?
Yes, the books are considered canon.
James asked:
Looking at the nifty images of our dragon-buddy Deathwing, specifically the ones of his decaying body within the Maelstrom, we can see one JFK sized hole in the middle of Deathwing's chest; methinks that hole be from Thrall busting straight through Deathwing's chest with the Dragon Soul, but I could be wrong. What do y'all think?
Thrall (and, by extension, the Dragon Soul) seems to be exactly the cause of Deathwing's chest wound. We'll have to see, though.
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 2 of 5)
thedoctor2031 Oct 9th 2011 12:45PM
umm, Drak that is what he was referring to. He was talking about how bad it would be if they had a cross-server auction house.
Drakkenfyre Oct 9th 2011 1:29PM
I wasn't disputing him, I was backing him up.
Andrew Oct 9th 2011 1:31PM
Yup, that was definitely what I was referring to. Though to be fair, Drak, not allowing cross-server trading is completely separate from combining AH's. There can be no cross-economy contamination and manipulation if there is only one economy. (Actually, for modeling and academic purposes I'd *love* to see an artificial economy of several million participants; it's just for practical purposes that the concept makes me want to cry.)
Drakkenfyre Oct 9th 2011 1:35PM
I understand there is a difference, but until the prices settled out, it would throw the entire AH into a spiral. The same guy who had a surplus of Ore would simply flood the AH with it, instead of having to sell it to someone in a dungeon. The person with the cheap gems could do even more damage since the entire population of a region would be affected.
As we both said, combined AH's would be a bad thing.
Bellajtok Oct 9th 2011 2:27PM
I kinda like the idea of a cross-server AH. But then, I do a lot of personal farming and I never have enough money. I feel like a cross-server AH would equalize itself by slowly resulting in a lower buyer:seller ratio than we have now and lower prices, and professions would see a lot more use for perks rather than money-making ability. As an engineer, I'm afraid I have to approve of other professions offering less money and mine becoming more awesome.
Bellajtok Oct 9th 2011 4:11PM
With that said, multi-server AH isn't coming anytime soon. All the other things like that(BGs, dungeons, raids) are all run on instance servers. No one wants to have to open an instance to get into the AH. It's also a very large amount of code and mechanical figure-out-ing.
The difference between the AH and the cross server options we have is that the AH has always been run in-server, while the others were already running instances, and only needed to pull people from multiple servers to work.
DarkWalker Oct 9th 2011 5:21PM
I would love to see combined AHs:
- One less reason to jump away from the smaller faction. Being in a small population realms, or in the smaller faction on an imbalanced realm, wouldn't be such a bad thing.
- A larger market means a more stable market, slower price fluctuations, a way harder time for players to try to corner the market, etc.
- Integrated economies means Blizzard would be able to drop the silly trade restrictions in cross-realm content.
The AH would need a better interface to handle it, though. Something that would allow players to comfortably browse the AH even with an increase of AH posts in the 100x range, when compared to already active realms/factions (though the increase would likely be way lower; the sheer increase in both posts and purchases would mean a fair part of the transaction volume increase would be absorbed by decreasing the average time until an auction sells). It can be done, and I think it would really help the game, but only if the UI is made good enough to handle it.
@Bellajtok:
The AH, just like the Chat, is already run on it's own dedicated servers. Anyone who ever saw an AH outage while the servers were, otherwise, fine can attest to this fact.
So, unless there is some quite dumb programming done in the AH code, they might be even easier to combine than dungeons/BGs/raids/etc.
Sally Bowls Oct 9th 2011 5:30PM
I think a battle group AH would on balance be a good thing.
1) WoW is shirnking. The last reason you need to close a server is you can't find stuff, especially things like primordial saronite/living embers. Cross-BG AH solves that.
2) Someone buying or selling 100 stacks of ore on a server with 300 active 85 players is far more disruptive than if there is 100,000 active players.
3) It would take the value out of camping by being a much more efficient market. WIth dozens of times the volume, the buyers and sellers would quickly find the market price. There is a price at which the supply and demand for whiptail or elementium ore meet. It will change over time, but it will quickly get there and move by a few silver a day (barring news/patches). Rather than something being 35g/stack at 4AM and 9PM and 64g/stack at noon.
WoW desperately needs Buy orders; some way to buy 24x7 the way you can sell. A cross-BG AH where you placed only sell orders, 200 max per day, neutral AH high commission, would help eve out servers without being too massive.
Schadenfreude Oct 9th 2011 11:09PM
As someone on a tiny server, I would love to see a cross-realm AH. Sometimes I go to an alt on one of the larger servers and just bring up the AH to look at all the STUFF. On my server, there are no buyers so no one bothers to list anything and eat the deposit cost because there are no buyers because there are no sellers because there are no buyers... you see where I'm going with this? And one person can buy up all the ore/gems/etc. in a second and control the market no problem. I can't sell a single glyph because the market is too small and the Glyph Cabal has enough time to get online and undercut.
A cross-realm AH would be the exact opposite. No one could corner the market when you have a million supply points. You'd be able to list anything-- SOMEONE out there wants that green for their RP set, their alt, whatever. No more searching for weird reagents for that old quest or rep grind, someone out there happens to be emptying out their bank and has it on for cheap. I'd actually be able to sell glyphs. It'd be awesome.
Tri Oct 10th 2011 9:39AM
Heck, they might as well just eliminate the entire concept of having these seperate servers and ... ugh no, I don't even want to think aout it ... :-/
FireMaster Oct 9th 2011 12:19PM
Is there any reason why Blizzard made Season 3 no longer available in the game while Seasons 1, 2 and 4 are still around?
I would like some of that gear for transmog =( (Yes, I know it's just and Tier 6 recolor, but I prefer some of those...)
dirtygringo Oct 9th 2011 2:11PM
Isnt it because the original naxx got removed? Or rather, moved to Northrend for Wotlk.
dirtygringo Oct 9th 2011 2:15PM
Ack. Reading fail. Thought you were talking about tier 3, not season 3.
loop_not_defined Oct 9th 2011 5:56PM
-As of 4.2.2, neither (Season 3) Merciless weapons OR armor are available.
-As of 4.3 PTR, Merciless weapons can be purchased from a vendor in Stormwind/Orgrimmar.
I'd say it's a safe bet Merciless armor will be added before 4.3 goes live, as well.
tri-edge Oct 9th 2011 12:20PM
if i remember correctly, i thought the dragon soul didnt work against deathwing because he did not put his power into it like the other aspects, thats why they did not use the dragon soul against him during the war of the anicents. If i am wrong (which is possible) why does it work now?
Dankie Oct 9th 2011 12:32PM
That's what I read too >.> Then again, if we *kill* Mannoroth in the Well of Eternity dungeon.... the Orcs won't be corrupted and green >.> This is going to take some major Timey-wimey mojo to sort out.
Honestly, blizzard needs to fact check their own stuff. I mean, the Queen Azshara was *black haired* and *blue eyed* ...... luckily in the latest PTR build they're remedied that (now she's her canon correct gold eyed white haired self).
Task Oct 9th 2011 12:34PM
In the book and stated here previously, it was able to be used against him because they stole a dragon scale from Deathwing himself, which in turn shattered the Demon Soul quite easily.
Imnick Oct 9th 2011 12:35PM
The very existence of the dragon soul is what is ripping Deathwing's body apart and what turned him from a dragon into some kind of melting lava abomination, those metal plates he's covered in aren't armour, they are literally holding his body together.
Rather than using the magic to destroy the dragon, Thrall uses the Demon Soul to destroy his ARMOUR, so bits of him start falling out the big hole. Us adventurers then climb up on his back and start ripping more plates off.
And because the demon soul's power is being used, it exacerbates his condition.
It's like we're removing his skin and all his organs are melting and falling out.
Neirin Oct 9th 2011 12:42PM
As I recall, because Deathwing created the Dragon Soul only he is capable of destroying it and only the Dragon Soul is capable of destroying him or some such. At least, the bubbling power of the Dragon Soul is what started ripping apart his body, prompting the adamantium plates.
Amaxe Oct 9th 2011 2:25PM
Hmm, probably shows how old I am (or maybe not), but all this talk about dragon soul and Deathwing makes me think of Lina Inverse and Dragon Slave.