The Queue: Pig-tailed bank teller
by Michael Sacco 
Oct 14th 2011 at 11:00AM
Sorry I'm late to the whole Bad Lip Reading bandwagon, but man, these videos are hilarious. They take an actual music video (or sometimes one video and a few pieces of another) and lip-read them, then create an entirely new song with those lip-read lyrics superimposed over the original video. This one is particularly hilarious and catchy.
Andrew R asked:
I'm looking to upgrade my phone to an android phone and save some money on my bills. One thought was making my phone a hotspot and using the 4G as my ISP. Could I run WoW without any major lags on a 4G network or do I need a true DSL/Broadband connection?
I raided on a mobile broadband card for quite a while. It was doable. I don't know about 4G, because that depends on highly on the carrier, but 3G definitely worked for me.
Bellajtok asked:
Do the other columns ever get jealous at how fast and how much the Queue gets commented on? It just doesn't seem fair.
Given that the very nature of The Queue is to generate comments (and ergo, questions), no, not really. Most columns do get a fair number of comments, and the same with news posts. We don't have the yardstick out.
Draol asked:
Why does everyone hate blood elves so much?
Is it really just the idiotic stereotype that 'only little kids play blood elves' or because of all the flamboyant jokes that get tossed around?
Or is it the perception that 'blizzard added a pretty race to the horde, HOW DARE THEY'?
Want a recipe for homophobia? Here you go:
- Grab a bowl.
- Crack, crack, crack an MMO into the bowl.
- Mix, mix, mix the Horde into the bowl.
- Add a race to the Horde with males that aren't classically "tough," have a variety of long hairstyles and attractive features, and make cute jokes that suggest they have interests that might be a bit more feminine than other zug-zug lok'tar rah-rah Warchief types.
- Pour in an audience that consists largely of young white males with skewed ideas of male sexuality.
- Bake at 350 degrees for seven years.
I'm not saying all Blood Elf detractors are homophobes, but it's certainly where a lot of the jeering comes from. Ever heard the joke "there are no male Blood Elves"? That's the sound of someone's sense of masculinity being challenged. Most of the races in WoW have hyper-masculine males with summer hams for forearms, but, by any other measure, male Blood Elves are very fit and muscular. They just have necks, which is apparently a big no-no for any manly Horde race.
Most people build walls, not bridges, when you question their world view. Now remember that none of those people are complaining about female Blood Elves, and you have a pretty good set of clues as to what's going on here. Me, sometimes I feel like I need a scrunchie, too.
Bscartlidge asked:
Is it just me or does it seem like Blizzard is purposely not showing us the Death Knight tier 13? I JUST WANNA SEE HOW COOL I'LL LOOK
Zarhym posted last night that the DK T13 set has gone through a redesign because the models based on its original concept just weren't up to snuff with the rest of the sets. Blizzard's working on a new one, and the designers hope to have it done and ready to show off next week.
Xsinthis asked:
Do you think Blizz will ever get around to updating the game engine properly? It's annoying to have a brand spanking new graphics card which only gets used 30% and have my quad core processor only max out on one core
Highly unlikely. The engine is pretty near 10 years old at this point and filled with what we call "spaghetti code." The basic engine isn't going anywhere; the best we can hope for is small graphics improvements like the ones we've been getting with each expansion.
Grovinofdarkhour asked:
When not in combat, I always put my worgen back in human form, and try to keep him in human form as much as possible. I only ever see him in worgen form during combat... and at the Character Screen. Is there anything stopping Blizz from displaying worgen on the Character Screen in whatever form they were in at last logoff?
Humans are boring and stupid and you rolled a Worgen, not a Human. Deal with it *shades.app*
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 15)
Kadzeroth Oct 14th 2011 11:06AM
I know I've run my 360 viewing Netflix on a Verizon 4Glte hotspot (my sister's phone while we were moving me into our apartment and my internet wasn't installed yet), and it ran with zero buffering. If you're in a 4G area, you should have zero problems.
Yuri Oct 14th 2011 11:45AM
I play using my Verizon Thunderbolt for tethering all the time, and the speeds and ping are great. I can't comment on 4G services from other providers other than to say their bandwidth is typically closer to 3G than anything else... and you'll probably lag.
mitch_b_666 Oct 14th 2011 11:56AM
The big issue you'll get is with the amount of data transmitted.
If you've got a montly cap, you're going to be tightly squeezed, one evening of raiding constituted almost a 1/4 of a Gb of data for me when my home internet went down the other day. If you're online a lot then you might run up quite a big data bill.
Another issue is overheating due to the constant use, so you'll want to keep the phone battery exposed if possible, on something metal to dissipate the heat.
icepyro Oct 14th 2011 12:02PM
throughput is not the issue with cell phone data and WoW, it's about the latency. 360 does have a small amount of buffer (I found this out as my roommate watched netflix on our 360 while I farmed on WoW - occassionally the lag would return to normal), and since it runs on throughput and not latency anyways, this is by no means a good measure.
Encrypting a data stream adds lag no matter which way you look at it. It's just a matter of how much and does this really kill WoW's performance. Apparently not according to this and yesterday's commenters. I wouldn't PvP this way, but PvE has more slack anyways.
lazymangaka Oct 14th 2011 12:16PM
Much like Sacco, I've ran pretty extensively on 3G before--and I didn't even have a card, just a tethering app for my Android phone--and it actually works surprisingly well depending on where you are and what the network load is like. 4G, I would assume, would work even better due to greatly increased bandwidth.
I would keep an eye on your data caps though. The steps that Blizzard has taken to reduce WoW's latency have increased its data footprint quite a bit, and it's a bit more of a bandwidth hog than you'd expect. If I hadn't been grandfathered in to Verizon's unlimited, I certainly would've had at least a few overage charges leveled at me.
Naberius Oct 14th 2011 12:29PM
I'm using 4G right now and got 54ms in Stormwind (Turalyon/EU).
When using 3G I've got around 100-120ms
Robert Oct 14th 2011 12:30PM
I on occasion go to play WoW at my brother's house, and his connection is laggy and spotty. When that happens we pull out my Verizon DROID Bionic and use 4g tethering to connect 3 computers to the internet and play wow through it. The lag is nearly nonexistent where I live with the 4g and while we don't raid, the battlegrounds and dungeons are seamless on this connection.
Just my $0.02
icepyro Oct 14th 2011 12:32PM
On cell networks, bandwidth makes little to no difference. The big killer is airtime. With WoW, you are essentially on a call all the time. A tower can only handle so many calls, even if it's bandwidth is ungodly. Bandwidth was increased for things like email and browsing so that they could get the content faster and "hang up" sooner so more calls can go through. The bandwidth at each site can more than handle the average load, although if more than average are streaming, I guess it would kill the bandwidth.
In fact, nobody really offers unlimited now because of streaming and tethering which keeps the call on the line continuously and thus they do what they do now for precisely these reasons. It's actually not about the extra money.
This is all based on a conversation with a cell tower technician as they were working on one of their towers which had went down after a bad storm.
Tygerwolfe Oct 14th 2011 12:52PM
Both my fiancee and I have simultaniously played WoW and streamed Netflix through her G2 T-Mobile 4G connection with surprisingly little lag on either. Netflix and WoW were both put at their lowest graphics settings for the experiment, though, so I don't know how it would work at higher graphics levels.
jwblair2 Oct 14th 2011 1:50PM
I tried to log on thru the tether app on my Droid the other day and WoW locked me out. I had to change my password later when I got home. However I used to run my pre Wrath dailies tethered thru a Bluetooth PAN on my old 1G Windows phone with only minimal lag issues. I wouldn't have raided on that connection but I would have considered running an Outlands 5 man normal mode dungeon. 4G connection should be fine for WoW. Some of Verizons connections are faster than my home wi-fi.
johnny.ramos1 Oct 14th 2011 2:18PM
Im in afghanistan, using satellite internet on wifi that my entire FOB is using. most of these morons are DLing youtube videos, sucking up all the bandwidth. my latency is 1800 (home) 5800 (world) not sure what the home and world mean. I can quest, i can farm, i can only do Tol Barad for PVP, BG stuff. instances are pretty much almost impossible. for me it depends on who is not using up the bandwidth. been playing WoW this way now for 1 month and only been able to finish 2 instance out of i dont know how many i tried. when the lag is so bad that you read the chat log and it says the boss is dead but on screen hes still fighting with 50% HP. its just best to leave then ruin everyone elses day for having a DPS who cant do anything.
basically, if i can at least do that with what i got here. I think you'd be pretty good on 4G
gôulet Oct 14th 2011 3:30PM
If you are on the typical $30 data plan for either AT&T or Verizon's 2GB data plan sure the 4G speeds will be great but you will destroy that 2GB before you know it. A constant flow of data in and out from a game like WoW will burn up your cap crazy fast unless you just plan on sitting in a city doing nothing the entire time.
Example: In the month of August I mostly just played WoW (most of my playtime is concentrated on 3 days a week to raid) and browsed the web, did very little downloading and streaming, and I used 18GB with my Comcast. Considering the cost of tethering is the same factoring in the data plan itself plus the tethering feature or let's say you get an aircard and the $50 5GB plan thats still 13GB over which is an extra $130. Not worth it when you compare the latency and potential fluctuations in a wireless connection.
Chance Oct 14th 2011 4:02PM
I used to run WoW solely through my 3g blackberry via wired tether. Now I play when at home more than out at starbucks, but when I do go out I will tether to my 4G HTC G2 phone. Some tips: most carriers have a soft cap to their "unlimited data" plans. The cap is usually around 5GB, which is plenty to run wow for a month with light play, but not if you are running raids 3 nights a week with all your addons going.
Sprint has a true unlimited data plan, the only company that but I am unsure if they charge an extra tethering fee. I'd do extensive research on whatever carrier you plan to use, I know att used to do some sneaky shit and charge you if you went over their soft cap.
Some helpful hints: addons like recount, world of logs, and other addons that retrieve and record data take up more bandwidth than you may think. Though your performance won't be affected by them while tethered you will reach your data cap quicker. If you don't get a true unlimited data plan I would suggest running addon free, or at the very least running with nothing but what you perceive as the bare essentials.
UI addons do not fall into this catagory, its mainly just combat logs which have to receive data from the server and then send it back to you. World of Logs is especially bad being that it will receive data, send it to you, and then send it back out onto the WoL website.
Using TMobile I never went over the 5GB soft Data cap playing about 20 hours a week while still running addons that collect and stream extra data, but I also didn't raid much while tethered. Id suggest getting a plan that will not charge you extra for going over the data cap if a carrier with true unlimmited is not viable for your price range and testing out to see how quickly you will hit your data cap.
Drakkenfyre Oct 14th 2011 5:30PM
Tygerwolfe, your graphics settings have NOTHING to do with bandwidth. Your computer renders your game, nothing is transferred between your computer and the servers other than data. It does not matter whether you are at max or minimum, it's still the same amount of bandwidth going in and out.
Netflix, yes, quality matters because it's streaming a video feed. But game quality does not matter.
The only time it matters is when a game offers you quality options on stuff like voice chat, which does use more or less bandwidth. Or if the game is streaming parts of itself.
Nathanyel Oct 14th 2011 11:07AM
I'd say the Worgen shape is their "true" shape now, though they can of course shift back to their original Human shape at will. However, login screen should be Worgen shape.
MattKrotzer Oct 14th 2011 11:21AM
I just wish they'd put a little inset that actually showed the human form, both on the login screen AND on the Armory.
Jamie Oct 14th 2011 11:40AM
Speaking of the Armory, did the web Armory completely stop with the 3D render and pose feature?
I know the iPhone app has it still, seems a shame this feature is missing since they had it before.
AudreyR Oct 14th 2011 12:00PM
If Worgen get to choose between two forms for their login screen, can I have Red Sonja as an alternative for my female orcs in the armory?
Noyou Oct 14th 2011 12:22PM
I agree with Sacco on this one. You rolled a Worgen, embrace it. I found myself being in human form most of the time. It finally got to the point where I didn't want to play my toon, deleted him, and after a week or two, rolled a night elf druid. I'm not sure why you wouldn't show up as worgen when you log out as one, after all if you have your fishing pole equipped when you log, it shows that. I will say that if they have to spend more than 5 minutes on it, it is superfluous at best.
Artificial Oct 14th 2011 12:26PM
If you can make yourself look like Red Sonja before you logout, sure, since all that's being asked for is that you look like on the login screen exactly like you looked when you logged out, and will look like as soon as you log back in.