The Queue: A message from the past

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

I hope everyone is having a wonderful Monday afternoon. I know I am! Well, actually, I don't know that. I'm writing this Sunday night, and I don't have a time machine powerful enough to show me what's happening tomorrow afternoon. Ideally, though? I'm having a wonderful time. Ask me tomorrow (which is today), and maybe I'll have a different answer.

Ryael asked...

"I was watching the BlizzCon feed online and there was a short interview with a man that was advertising how you could purchase a sizeable poster with one of our characters on it. Any idea what site that was from?"

That interview was most likely talking about PrintWarcraft, which isn't fully open to the public yet. They had a booth set up at BlizzCon, but I don't think any of us on on staff realized it was anything beyond regular ol' Warcraft posters. When I first saw it I just sort of went, "Oh, those look like the wallpapers from the official site. That's neat." And then I kept walking.

That was incredibly dumb, because it probably would have been very cool to show people! It looks like it's going to be a cheaper alternative to FigurePrints, if you don't want to shell out over $100 for a statue. Of course, I'm notoriously bad with posters. Anytime I buy one, I'm accidentally ripping it off the wall within a day or two and screwing up all of the corners. I've started making trips to Target for cheap frames anytime I buy a poster so I don't ruin the thing. For me, it will probably just be cheaper to shell out for the FigurePrints.

impurezero asked...

"Was the problem of accidental mislootings really large enough to warrant the new two-hour trade rule?"

I know you supplied some examples of your experiences under the new rule, but I snipped them to prevent that whole "Alex's answer is shorter than the question, wtf!" thing. For anybody interested, here's the direct link to his full comment.

From what I understand, the answer is a colossal yes. I'm not a GM and I've never been a GM, but from the bits and pieces I've heard and put together, a significant number of GM issues come from three sources: Players mislooting items, players buying the wrong items with badges/tokens, and hacked accounts. All three are essentially user error. They're not really bugs that the developers can patch out later, and they're not really things you can tackle in advance. The 2-hour rule handles those first two, and trying to make authenticators as available as possible tries to take care of that last one.

People will make mistakes, and I guess WoW players make a lot of mistakes. The only real 'fix' for that is giving players some power to handle their own mistakes. Sure, some people will abuse it, but it will give players a better experience overall.

Tess asked...

"When do we get a new Warlock columnist? I kept hoping to see a lock perspective on BlizzCon, but no luck. Can you give us an estimated date of arrival?"

We're going through the last stages of looking through the many applications right now, and our choice will be hearing from us pretty soon. Not soon as in today, but soon as in really freaking soon. After that, it depends on how quickly they fill out the necessary paperwork and fax it in.

Moepunk asked...

"Will anyone from WoW.com be at PAX this year?"

Our network will have a small presence, but WoW.com itself will not. That's something we're going to try to push for next year, though. We definitely want to try to go to more conventions. It all depends on what sort of presence Blizzard has at PAX, so we'll be keeping an eye on that this year. You guys can help us with that, too. If you see any awesome WoW stuff at PAX, tell us about it! If this year has a lot of great WoW material, that makes it much more likely that we'll try to go next year. If there's nothing at all, then it's probably something we'll need to leave to Joystiq and/or Massively.

BladedDingo asked...

"Since Trolls and Worgen can be druids, will we be getting brand spanking new Druid forms for them?"

Yes.

spamofchaz asked...

"Is there any hope that Blizzard will move BlizzCon to other cities? I understand their HQ is in SoCal, but I think they'd get a great boost by having it in, say Chicago one year, New York the next, then Dallas, etc. and letting folks who can't get to the left coast."

It would be very cool, but I suspect it would be incredibly difficult for them. A hefty amount of the BlizzCon staff is made up of Blizzard employees. Support staff, QA staff, that whole thing. If they held the convention elsewhere, they would either need to fly all of those people out to that other city (which would be ludicrously expensive) or hire locals to man the convention which would make the thing a whole lot less personal. Less Blizzardy and less friendly to everyone that actually gets to go to the convention. If I had to guess, the only other workable options would be Austin, Texas or holding another Worldwide Invitational in/around Paris.

Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW.com 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!