Posts with tag voltron

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

Just gonna let this one speak for itself. Oh, and if you want to know what today's obligatory Reading-The-Queue-Music is, it's of Montreal.

lgnorman420 asked...

"So I've been wondering as my guild has been running through Ulduar about the various machine names one might encounter throughout the game. Mimiron's creation, the V0-L7R-0N combat system or the XT-002 Deconstructor are two examples. Also the mechanical chicken quests back from mid-40s to 50s leveling also come to mind. Do these number/letter codes have any significance or are they just random sequences to give them a machine sounding kind of name?"

I don't think there's any naming scheme across the board for robotic things in WoW. How they got their names differs from one to the next. For example, V0-L7R-0N is just a Voltron joke. I don't think XT-002 has any significance except that maybe (maybe) the 2 signifies that he's the second creation of Mimiron that you fight in Ulduar. The second line of defense or what have you. Someone smarter than I am should figure out what XT stands for. The robochickens are named after the zone you find them in.

It doesn't take Mind Vision to determine that I'm really, really excited for 3.1, and of all of its features, the Ulduar raid has me enthralled the most. I love new raids, and after all this time running Naxx, I'm ready to move on to a bigger and badder place. It doesn't hurt that everything I've heard about Ulduar sounds great! 14 bosses, hard modes, optional bosses, getting launched onto the back of a giant fire-breathing robot ... I honestly can't think of any negatives about the place. I guess it's just what I needed.

Of course, I haven't played it yet. But soon, very soon, the PTR will go live and I'll be able to bask in all of its brass-and-marble glory. And you won't be able to shut me up about it if you try. If you can't beat me, though, you should consider joining me there.

I'm aware, of course, that raiding's not for everyone, and that some people don't want encounters spoiled for them before they go live. So what about you guys? Are you looking forward to checking out Ulduar for yourself on the PTR? Gonna wait until it hits live WoW to try it out? Or do you just not care about Titantown too much?

THESE QUESTIONS AND MORE ANSWERED (BY YOU) IN THIS, THE BREAKFAST TOPIC.

Realm population problems don't affect me too much, thankfully -- my server has neither too many people nor too few, and the faction balance tilts in my favor. But some people complain that their servers are ghost worlds, with not much at the auction house and not many to group for quests and dungeons. The "Recommended" tag Blizzard is using to help out low-population realms sometimes just doesn't do the trick: people play there for a while, see that no one is home, then decide to go somewhere else.

So, while some people say the only way is to combine two low-pop realms into one, Drysc says that such mergers can only be a last resort:

There are a couple issues with merging realms though that we would need to take into heavy consideration if one were to be considered. As many of the lower population realms are PvP, faction balance has to be taken into careful consideration. Would a merge worsen, improve, or leave any faction balance unchanged? Would a merge move the population up too high, queuing or leading to queues for the realm after that point? Do we have realms of the same time zone and type that would merge well under these conditions? There also many logistical issues with merges which ultimately effect the end user, such as conflicting character and guild names. So, in the end, a merge would only be considered if all other possible options have been completely exhausted.

We're not just throwing recommended tags up on realms, and calling it a day. The recommended tag has done a lot of good for a lot of realms, but if we're seeing that they're no longer helping reach the type of population numbers we would like to see, then we would investigate alternate means. That's sort of where we're at now.

So, what is there to do besides merge realms? Drysc calls that the "million dollar question," which I figure means that Blizzard doesn't know for sure, though at least a couple ideas come to my mind: They could have some kind of incentive to players who join low-population realms (that's what the Army is doing, I hear), or perhaps all but force new players to start out there unless they have a referral from another player. Of course any solution to this problem is going to create still more problems of another sort. What do you think would work best?