The Queue: You will die, we promise
by Michael Sacco 
Feb 12th 2012 at 12:00PM
It's pretty nice of Blizzard to make sure you know that its game will kill you.
Coffee asked:
With the arrival of account-wide achievements, do you think Blizzard will add something where our achievement points have some in game effect? For example, special vendors that will only sell to you if you have greater than 3000 achievement points, another vendor that will sell different items if you have over 5000, etc...
Like I said on the podcast recently, I've learned never to say never about anything Blizzard could possibly do in relation to WoW, but the devs have stated several times that they never intended for achievement points to be a real currency. So, I doubt it, but with account-wide achievements and other systems changes coming with MoP, we'll just have to wait and see.
Foxfire asked:
You have featured 'mogging guides for the Stormwind and Oggrimar guards. Will WoW Insider show some love for the Mages and give us a guide for the Mages of Dalaran?
I'll pass the suggestion along to Anne.
Bijou asked:
I've been away from the game for about a year, but I started up again this week when a friend from work wanted to try it out. I'm a Level 85 Paladin and I am rusty as heck! The game feels so much different than I remember it. There seem to be lots of quests in Orgrimmar now for me to pick up but I don't know where to start or what order to do them. What should I be focusing on? Randoms? The Zul'Gurub stuff? The Thrall quest line? I'm overwhelmed. Any help would be great!
Do the Thrall quest line for the experience and the free cloak at the end. Then, focus on doing the three new Dragon Soul heroics. The DS heroics give you the best bang for your buck when it comes to time spent and rewards received. When you've geared up with those, you can try your hand at the new Raid Finder system that'll let you get a shot at downing Deathwing and getting some high-end gear at a reasonable difficulty level.
Vanillabean asked:
So with achievements going account wide, does that mean because I got Champion of the Naaru and Hand of A'dal on Horde toons I no longer play (I am Alliance)... I should be able to use those titles on my shiny new toons??
Ostensibly, yes. That's what they're going for. Titles, mounts, reward items, all that kind of thing would be available to all of your characters after getting the achievement on one character.
Chris Maclellan asked:
I continue to hoard all Pyrite Ore, in the hopes that I will be able to prospect Cata-epic gems one day ... am I delusional?
Unfortunately, yes. This late in the expansion, it's highly, highly unlikely that this change will happen. It probably would've happened with 4.3, if it was going to at all.
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 6)
Swifteye Feb 12th 2012 12:08PM
@Bijou,
You MUST do the Zul'Gurub lead-in quests from the board to get THE most adorable baby panther pet! You can dump the questline after that, and for f***'s sake, don't actually subject yourself to the horrors of ZG itself, but please, think of the kitties!!
Blayze Feb 12th 2012 12:15PM
You have to do ZG once. An old friend needs rescuing...
quelaenvyn Feb 12th 2012 12:33PM
There also a Frog if you didn't get back in the old ZG
Tinker Feb 12th 2012 12:55PM
@Swifteye,
By the time you get the baby panther, you've already finished the whole chain.
@Blayze,
I believe that you have to finish the NSTV quest chain first.
Jaq Feb 12th 2012 1:01PM
If you don't finish the chain, STV is in a different phase until you do. I believe that includes Booty Bay as well, but don't quote me. As there are like four quests left at that point, you might as well just finish it.
I have never quested in the new STV. When Mandokir shows up with the baby raptor staring pleadingly at me, I FEEL SUCH GUILT. -_-
Hob Feb 12th 2012 3:23PM
@Tinker
There two quest chains... getting the cub, and finding the emissary. The Panther Cub chain directs you to Bambala, where you discover dead trolls and serpents all over. You eventually go to warn the Nesingwary expidition, they have a lost hunter, there's a panther involved, you get the cub, blah blah blah. Once you've got the pet, you can drop all of the Bwemba quests. Otherwise, you keep heading south in Stranglethorn until you find the emissary.
jazz.panther Feb 13th 2012 10:36AM
@quelaenvyn
I think you mean Mojo from ZA. It's all about the froggy-style. ;)
Blayze Feb 12th 2012 12:16PM
What's up with the comment system *now*? It's started ignoring my comments--or at least not actually displaying them--until I post a second one.
Artificial Feb 12th 2012 12:48PM
It's called caching. It's been that way for years on this site -- it can take five minutes or so for comments to appear, as the site continues to feed you a previously generated version of the page from before your comment was added.
David Whyld Feb 12th 2012 12:19PM
Re account-wide achievements: how does this work for reputation achievements? My main has the Exalted title and has 50 reps at exalted. Does this mean all my alts will get the same title? What happens to their rep with all the various factions - do they automatically hit exalted or do they only get the title?
Twill Feb 12th 2012 1:11PM
Blizzard isn't sure yet.
Ata Feb 12th 2012 1:11PM
We don't know yet!
Seriously.
All Blizzard has said is that they are working on making achievements account wide. They've given no indication as to anything further, no sign of restrictions, no signs of bonuses, no hint if there'll be a level restriction or some other sort of requirement to wear certain titles.
So sit tight and we'll hopefully get info in March when the Mists press event is.
Jebediah54 Feb 12th 2012 6:47PM
As far as I know Blizz hasn't come out and sad that EVERY achievement in the game would be shared across the account, and I'm not sure about the title situation either. All that we've heard is that account-wide achievements will be in Mists, but I'm sure we'll hear more come March and later.
Josh Feb 13th 2012 7:01AM
Q4tQ
I'm trying to get a consensus on how SWTOR is doing (selfishly hoping my guildies who left for it will come back.) The forums there seem pretty much like the wow forums with cries of the game dying and all. Are there any data to support either EA's claim that everything is fantastic or the troll's that the end is neigh?
Twill Feb 12th 2012 12:59PM
It's passed the 1.7 million subscriber level.
I'd say it's fine, better than RIFT, but nowhere near as big as WoW.
Will it grow? I'm sure. How much? Yet to be seen. I'd estimate it reaches 4 million. I haven't played the game, but it seems to be just as good as WoW in a lot of levels, and it garners people that are into space rather than castles.
Jaq Feb 12th 2012 1:08PM
SWTOR reported 1.7 million subscribers after its first month, but bear in mind, that first month is the customary free month, so people are waiting to see how many people actually kept playing. What I hear from people I know who play the game is that it suffers from the usual launch MMO complaints: the end game isn't fun, there are a lot of bugs that made it through beta, etc.
Amazingly, my favorite complaint is that SWTOR lacks a LFD. Why, I thought that was HATED. :p
Pretty much it's a wait and see. It's an initial success, but come back in six months and see how it's doing.
Amaxe Feb 12th 2012 2:25PM
SWTOR community is a lot like the WoW community. There are helpful informative people and there are a lot of jerks too. So like the WoW forums, you need to take what is said with a grain of salt.
It has problems to be worked out to be sure (I have connection issues which may prevent me from continuing). But since I didn't get into WoW until near the end of Vanilla (I hit 60 about 2-3 weeks before TBC came out), I couldn't say how the TOR problems compare with the WoW startup and how each handled it.
The Dewd Feb 12th 2012 3:27PM
In talking to someone I know who is playing (and, obviously, following TOR news), there were approximately 2M games of TOR sold with 1.7M still playing now. So it sounds like they only lost 300k (or so) after the free month ran out. I'd guess they probably lost more than that but also gained new subscribers as well. Plus some folks will be lured back with free weeks or free weekends - which I assume they'll probably do for ex-subscribers at some point - unless they get "big enough" that, like WoW, they don't have to "resort" to such things.
Pyromelter Feb 12th 2012 3:39PM
You'll have to wait for ea's 1st quarter financial results to know for sure. Regarding lfd, no one hates it; rather there are old skool types that will hate on it, like grandpa complaining about kids who don't have to walk to school (meanwhile grandpa never walks anywhere and drives all over the place). An mmo without lfd just isn't going to cut it.
Regarding swtor long-term, understand this: the health of a modern mmo is determined completely by it's endgame. I believe blizz figured this out with bc, where they made every 5man with a heroic version, interesting and rewarding daily quests, options for open world pvp, raid quests, as well as making raiding more accessible. And then they expanded those ideas further in wrath. Then, in cata, they moved away from that a bit, and the result is a loss in almost 2 million subs.
I don't play swtor, but my understanding is that there is very little to do at end-game. No lfd, very little in terms of raid content, etc. By all accounts the gameplay itself is cool. So it's just a matter of content. Bioware must put more raid content in, and an lfd, or they are going to bleed subscribers way faster than wow. If they can't, there's a good chance you're guildies will return. If they do get that extra pve content in there, you might not see them again in wow.
arkhan Feb 12th 2012 5:57PM
"Regarding lfd, no one hates it; rather there are old skool types that will hate on it, like grandpa complaining about kids who don't have to walk to school (meanwhile grandpa never walks anywhere and drives all over the place). An mmo without lfd just isn't going to cut it."
Condescend much? I wouldn't say hate, but a lot of people resent the way in which it was implemented and have valid concerns about it killing a good part of the server community feeling. Was it fun having to spam trade chat for an hour to get a group together for a run? Maybe not, but I wouldn't call LFD an improvement, because it accomplishes a completely different thing.
If all you care about is getting in, getting your points/loot as fast as possible and getting out, without ever having to see the people you were running with again you are probably just fine with the current version of LFD. But if you play this game to meet cool new people that you might play with again in the future, yeah, you're shit out of luck, because seeing someone from your server in a LFD run happens maybe 1 out of 5 times.
And this is since they changed it to somehow prioritize putting people from the same servers together. And good luck finding a group in trade nowadays for dungeon runs, between LFD in general and the goddamn bribe bag for tanks and healers that only lets you queue solo you probably would have found a group sooner in early Wrath.
Now we are all comfortable little worker bees, efficiently grinding our VPs with strangers. Unless you are in an active guild WoW is pretty much a single-player game these days, because those people in LFD and LFR might as well be bots.