Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Editor-in-Chief Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

I'm going to be spending most of my day today putting together all of the giveaway posts for our annual 12 Days of Winter Veil event. We have a pretty good haul this year. I think FedEx and UPS are getting tired of delivering packages to my house by now.

@Kitsuno asked:

Does Alex think the LFR is good, or bad?

Good. Absolutely. If you asked me that question a few years ago, I would have said it's the dumbest thing Blizzard has ever added to the game ever and it's just catering to casuals, but nowadays? It's fine. It's cool. Let people see content on their own terms. I love it.

araquen asked:

Actually, I'm not sure if this was answered (though I would have to think it was), but what is the purpose of requiring Mail and Plate wearers to first gear Leather and Mail (respectively)? Why not just have the four armor types from the start?

I can see, in Vanilla, that the conversion would be something of an achievement, but nowadays you hit 40 so quickly it seems kind of silly to have the gear conversion.

I'm not sure anybody has addressed this before, and I'm also not sure anybody has bothered to ask. You're right, it doesn't seem to serve a purpose anymore. It's not the same milestone it used to be. But it also hasn't been much of a bother, either.

Why hasn't it changed? Itemization, probably. Cataclysm would have been a good time to tackle revamped low-level itemization and itemize plate for warriors and paladins, mail for hunters and shaman, and all of that sort of thing. Since this wasn't done, it'd probably be a huge pain in the butt to go back and redo quest rewards for levels 1 to 40 all over again.

Maybe Blizzard'll change it eventually. Right now, since it wasn't done in Cataclysm, changing it is probably more trouble than it's worth.

thebl4ckd0g asked:

If I run the Raid Finder, and I don't win anything at all - I still cannot roll on stuff again till the lockout resets next week correct?

Correct.

Wist asked:

Speaking from a RP standpoint, I can understand why the Darkmoon Faire would only crop up at certain times in certain places. After all, it takes time to travel across this big world of ours. Going from Elwynn to Mulgore to Shattrath and back....it takes alot of time.

BUT.

Now they have their own island. Their own permanent base. Now WE go to THEM. ...so what's with the periodic closing?

By artificially limiting their product and the event's availability, they significantly increase excitement and demand. Nobody wants to go to a carnival every day of their lives. If the carnival were around all of the time, you'd get bored of it, and eventually you'd just stop thinking about it. But if it's only around one week out of the month or even less than that? You gotta go while you can, or you'll miss out!

@andy_j0y asked:

Just noticed in Hour of Twilight, those aren't nameless shaman dying is it? It's half the named Earthen ring guys. /cry

Unfortunately, the shaman dying in Hour of Twilight are those named guys we've been questing with this whole expansion. It's sort of depressing, really. We hung out with them in Vashj'ir, Deepholm and Twilight Highlands, then they get murdered unceremoniously in Hour of Twilight. Nobody in the instance even mentions their dying. Pretty lame, if you ask me!

@WickedPissa81 asked:

If you could take your main toon on a RL vacation with you, where would you go?

My main character would hate me, so that would be a really awful vacation. I don't know, maybe New Zealand. I could visit the old sets of the numerous fantasy movies and television shows that have been filmed there. She could try to figure out why humanity has abandoned such wondrous cities and strongholds.

@Derevka asked:

Is the LFR the new WOTLK 10-Man meaning that its 'mandatory' for high-end guilds to run.

High-end raiding is a very strange environment. These raiders absolutely will see the Raid Finder as mandatory. It isn't, but they will approach it as if it is. The high-end raiding culture just has that perception -- if anything could possibly give them an edge, it's mandatory. There are no exceptions. The way those raiders see it, there is no room for doing anything less.

Take combat potions, for example. You can cheese potions by taking one before combat begins, getting partial benefit from its duration, and then drinking another one later. You're only supposed to get one potion per combat, but by gaming the system, you can get one and a half. Does it make a massive difference? No. Can you beat bosses without doing it? Yes. Do high-end raiders see that minor difference it does make and thus make the action mandatory despite its monetary cost? Yes.

Is the Raid Finder mandatory for high-end guilds? Yes, but only because they decide it is so. If they didn't do it, they would still be killing bosses. That culture is one of the things that sapped my love of raiding over the years. Going back to Kitsuno's question, being able to avoid that culture of everything is mandatory and simply have fun seeing bosses die is one of the reasons I'm in love with the Raid Finder right now.

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