The Queue: A Day at the Races
by Anne Stickney 
Aug 9th 2012 at 11:00AM
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Anne Stickney (@Shadesogrey) loves Harpo Marx with all her heart.
When Sacco posted a bit from Horse Feathers earlier this week, I was hoping someone would ask me to fill in for The Queue so I could post the above video from A Day at the Races. The Marx Brothers were a huge part of my childhood; my mother owned every film they'd put out, and we were always delighted to watch. The best part is that the films just get better as you get older and more cognizant of all the wordplay going on -- when we were little, we just liked watching Chico and Harpo acting silly.
Well, that and I loved watching Harpo play. It's really weird and strangely beautiful to watch him go from out-and-out silly to serenely playing the harp in the span of a minute and a half. Ridiculous amounts of talent, right there.
Alexey asked:
Why are pigs excluded from pet battles? I can understand humans and balloons, but pigs?
When Sacco posted a bit from Horse Feathers earlier this week, I was hoping someone would ask me to fill in for The Queue so I could post the above video from A Day at the Races. The Marx Brothers were a huge part of my childhood; my mother owned every film they'd put out, and we were always delighted to watch. The best part is that the films just get better as you get older and more cognizant of all the wordplay going on -- when we were little, we just liked watching Chico and Harpo acting silly.
Well, that and I loved watching Harpo play. It's really weird and strangely beautiful to watch him go from out-and-out silly to serenely playing the harp in the span of a minute and a half. Ridiculous amounts of talent, right there.
Alexey asked:
Why are pigs excluded from pet battles? I can understand humans and balloons, but pigs?
Good question -- I know I'd love to have Mr. Wiggles on my team. We don't know for certain, but Zarhym spoke up over on Twitter and said that while he didn't know specifics, he had heard that some pets were excluded due to lack of animations. While that doesn't exactly answer your question or let you know whether pigs will be battle-ready in the future, at least it's some kind of answer, right?
RichardIRL asked:
Not sure if this has been covered. Are they bringing Panderan hairstyles for the other races in the barbershop?
It hasn't been brought up, and as far as the beta is concerned, I don't believe there are any new hairstyles available. One of the things I've always been keenly morose over was the handling of the barbershop feature. It was a brilliant idea and allowed more customization, but it seems to have been forgotten and left to gather cobwebs while Blizzard moves on to other projects. I wish they'd get a team in there just to work on additional hairstyles for all of the races. I'd like more than the few available to choose from, that's for sure.
TonyMacFarlane noted:
This ship has probably sailed, but I gotta say it anyway, since I loved ToC so much: One of the things I really wish could have been implemented was somehow allowing spectators. It would have been so cool if your guild, or any other invites, could have zoned in to the bleachers and watched the raid group at work. How cool would it have been to have your guildies cheering you, or booing the other faction leader. I still think this is something that Blizz should look into, but it would have been so apros-pos in ToC.
Honestly, I'd love it if they'd add spectator mode to raids. Sure, it's not quite the same as raiding yourself, but you can see how other guilds handle things. While I don't know if it'd be wise or possible to allow spectators cross-server, it would still be neat to see even if it was just on a per-server basis. And as someone in a raid guild, I think it'd really help when bringing new people in if we could have them sit and watch our strats in play before bringing them in to run them. Sort of a hands-on introduction to how fights are done, you know?
JosephRichardson asked:
What are the chances of seeing another dungeon with a tribute run a la Dire Maul. I do think that having professions have a role in the dungeon mechanics added a little something to the game, and I wondered why it never showed up again.
Actually, it did -- sort of. The main idea of Dire Maul was that you could change the amount of loot at the end by avoiding bosses, thus earning additional loot or "tribute" from everyone that was still alive. Alternatively, you could get loot from every boss you killed. It kind of changed the difficulty of the encounter, in a way. We saw this again with a slightly different light in Obsidian Sanctum, where you could choose to kill one, two, or three Twilight Drakes -- or you could leave all three up and have them as part of the main encounter. The number of drakes you killed didn't necessarily affect the loot in a substantial way as much as it did the difficulty.
We saw it again with Ulduar. The Iron Council's loot table depended on who you killed last. Freya's loot depended on how many keepers you left up. Yogg Saron's loot was dependent on how many Watchers you allowed to help you out. It was a modified version of that original Dire Maul model, to be sure, but it harkened back to it, definitely.
As far as professions, I think you're talking about the quest for the Ogre Suit to sneak past the guards and get to the final boss in Dire Maul. I thought that was a neat idea, but it's a little impractical for today's dungeons and raids. What if the dungeon finder put you in a group that didn't have a leatherworker with the particular pattern required and the materials required to make the suits?
ThinkApocalypse asked:
What ever happened to the weekly raid quest thing they had in wrath? Why did they get rid of it? I actually liked it a it have me a chance to pug with people on my own server and learn and experience radius that people didn't always ruin anymore.
I don't know, but I wish they'd bring them back -- I liked the idea of weekly quests from the moment they first introduced them for heroics back in The Burning Crusade. They just never managed to make an appearance in Cataclysm, and I'm not entirely certain why.
I also miss the quests that players actually got in the raids themselves. Remember those weekly quests inside of ICC? Sometimes my guild would choose to do them; sometimes they'd skip them entirely. But it was a nice alternative to just flat-out killing bosses that added some additional flavor to the overall zone. I really liked that.
@GrandOldPodcast asked via Twitter:
Why do World of Warcraft fans take so much joy in the deaths and failings of other MMO's?
Please note that the following is just my opinion, since it's kind of a delicate subject to many players. I think that it's a combination of many things. First and foremost, it reflects the sheer number of times WoW players hear the phrase "WoW killer" any time a new MMO is announced. Either it's the game company itself trying to tout this image, or it's the players and beta testers. Regardless, they tend to go out of their way to bash WoW whenever possible in order to point out how much better their game happens to be and how the release of their game will be the end of WoW as we know it.
So here we have, what? How many? Let's see, Warhammer, Lord of the Rings, Guild Wars, Aion, Conan, Rift, Star Wars: The Old Republic, and likely countless others who have made this claim on one level or another. Where are these games now? Are they enjoying success? Yes. And I'm glad they are. Did they kill WoW? Not even close. And there is a small sense of vindication in the eyes of every WoW player who has had to listen to the litany of WoW-killing comments, each time they fail to do what they boasted they would do.
I think that what these companies fail to realize is that you cannot make a game and deliberately try to make something that will kill WoW. That's the wrong reason for making a game. What you should be doing is concentrating on making the best game you can possibly make, and let it stand on its own merit, without comparing it to WoW at all. Don't sit there and try to hype it up as being a WoW killer; just make it a really good game.
Oh, and I suspect if you tried a genre other than fantasy, it'd probably do a bit better. Don't try to compete with WoW or make a game like WoW. Just make a cool game that people want to play, one that doesn't really look like WoW at all. There you go.
P.S. I would quite like an MMO with pirates in space. Someone ought to get on that.
@Hasteur asked via Twitter:
Who would win in an epic throwdown: Ghostcrawler or Metzen?
I'm not touching that with a 10-foot pole, but I sure would like to see fan art of that fight.
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!
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