The Queue: Casinos? In my WoW?

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.

If you've been reading The Queue for awhile, you'd know that Adam Holisky and I were taking turns writing this thing each day, but he's been sparse lately. Before we get started today, I just wanted to stop and let you guys know that he's okay, he's alive, but the flooding in his hometown of Fargo has gotten pretty ridiculous. He's been documenting the Fargo Flood on his personal blog the whole way through, so if you're interested, give it a gander.

If you have friends or family in the area, or simply want to lend a hand, Red Cross and the United Way have set up some resources for all of you to peruse as well. Keep the people of Fargo in your thoughts, folks. I'm sure having Blackhawks flying over your house loses its cool factor after awhile.

Jack Spicer asked...

"What's the best/easiest way to get starter gear for PvP at 80?"

One of the biggest pitfalls of PvP in Wrath, I've found, is not class imbalance or anything like that. It's how much crap you have to deal with to get a set of gear that'll give you the resilience you actually need to survive a toe-to-toe knock down, drag out fight. You pretty much need a bare minimum of 600 resilience, with 900 as the recommended baseline. That's... absurd.

So what's the easiest way of doing that? Use the mechanics in place that allow you to get PvP gear without PvPing for awhile. Vault of Archavon? Run it as often as you can. Wintergrasp? Again, go as often as you can, but stick to vehicle and cannons, somewhere that you can be effective despite your lack of gear.

There's the blue sets that you can get via tradeskills, but I've found they're not very worthwhile. Some of them are good filler pieces if you absolutely need more survivability, but I find that the resilience they offer doesn't make up for the utter lack of everything else on them.

If you want to sink even more non-PvP time into this, you can get so-so sets via Emblems from Heroics. They do not make breaking into PvP very easy unless you can live with dying every few seconds until you've gathered up 'enough' resilience. It's pretty irritating to get started.

Arivia asked...

"A question: Why does Blizzard hate me? Not my class, my spec, my gear, whether I Arena or don't Arena, my choice of starting zones, faction, race, my fetish for underaged Murlocs, huntardism, hairstyle, /played, or my usage of game cards over those newfangled magnetic strip things: why do they hate me, personally?"

It's probably because of your class, your spec, your gear, how often you arena, your choice in starting zones, your faction, your race, your deviance, your huntardism, your hairstyle, your /played, and your usage of game cards.

Sucks to be you, huh?

Tanisi asked...

"Will World of Warcraft ever implement an in-game alliance system between guilds? I have seen this done in Guild Wars and it worked very well. It would be nice if they added features to these guild alliances like their own chat channel, so you can coordinate events within the alliance."

I have no idea if WoW will ever do any of these things, but I wanted to plug this question because I absolutely want something like this. I love my guild, but my guild is only one portion of the social circle that fuels my raid group and, well... my overall game experience. I love these guys. We have four guilds (and some vagrants) that make up our 'guild alliance' and we like it that way, because each guild has its own environment. My guild is fairly rough and tumble, and not everyone likes that. That's fine! It's really cool that people can find somewhere that's comfortable for them, without needing to leave our overall community since it's a great collective.

It's unfortunate that there's no support for those sorts of things within the game mechanics, but we deal. We share a guild website, we share a custom channel, we share a Vent server. We get by, but it would still be nice to see official support for guild alliances.

blarg_master asked...

"What is Blizzard's stance on gambling in-game right now? I heard that they posted it was cool as long as it was not spam or a scam on the general forums. What's the shtick?"

I asked this question two or three times this past week to various GMs (accompanying other, legitimate tickets) to see what sort of answer I would get, and they've all been pretty dodgy about it. None of them seemed like they really wanted to say flat out that casinos were legal again, but they did say they weren't illegal. Take that as you will.

One thing that was made very clear is that if these casinos are being spammy, you absolutely can (and should) report them for spam. The casino itself seems to be okay now, but the GMs are just eager to chomp them back down via spamming or scamming rather than gambling.

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!