The Queue: Me, myself and everybody else
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column in which the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.
Today's edition of The Queue is very us-centric. Since you guys asked many questions about the staff here at WoW.com yesterday, I decided to try and knock them all out at one time. So if you hate our staff and all that we stand for, you might not enjoy this post! However, I'd like to think you don't hate us and in fact love us. We love you, too.
Gossamer asked:
"It seems like nearly every article on WoW.com has a spoiler warning on it recently. This got me to thinking, how does the WoW.com staff feel about spoilers? Are there any surprises left for you? Is there anything you've kept from yourself so you can experience it on release day?"
It is impossible to keep ourselves from being spoiled, even if we wanted to do so. We make sure to put spoiler tags on critical lore moments in the story of an expansion to give all of you the choice of skipping it, but we typically don't get the option of skipping spoilers. Not only do we need to be in the know regarding major expansion events, we're also constantly exposed to other sources of spoilers -- other websites, the comments section on our site, the emails that come in our tip line and all of those other methods of communication we keep open between our readers and ourselves. We often know about major game events months in advance and it is rare that we go looking for that information. It comes to us.
We've intentionally not posted about really world-shattering spoilers before because we didn't want to ruin the surprise for everybody else. If it's in the game files, we consider it fair game because anybody with an MPQ reader can see what's in those files ... If it isn't in the game files, our editorial staff has very long, heated conversations about whether or not we should ruin the surprise. Generally, we decide to not say anything, even if it would benefit us (as far as traffic is concerned) to dump the spoiler. Of course, we can't convince the other sites to play by the same rules, so if they end up spoiling what we were trying to keep secret ... well, that's how it goes. And then there isn't much point to us staying quiet anymore after that.
The only way to avoid being horribly spoiled while working at WoW.com is to completely cut off communication. Don't read your email, don't come into our team's little newsroom, all of that sort of thing. If you do that, you're probably not doing your job effectively and then you'll have even bigger problems than being spoiled. We work in online media. Refusing to open your email is equivalent to going to your 9-to-5 and throwing all of your work out of a window instead of actually working.
Now, it isn't all bad. We're not abused bloggers being barraged with unwanted spoilers. Being spoiled doesn't actually ruin the game for us. The entire staff geeks out together when we get some truly delicious news or find something really cool in the game files. We don't spoil things because we're cruel people with black, black hearts trying to suck everybody's enjoyment out of the game. The news that gets posted fastest is the news that excites us the most.
Ted asked:
"Have we, will we or can we see the actual real-life faces of the WoW.com writers?"
Some of our writers (Matt Rossi, Mike Sacco) get their faces plastered on the site constantly. Others have their faces in our extremely outdated About the Bloggers series. If you're going to BlizzCon, you'll be able to see many of us in person.
So I guess the answer is either "sometimes" or "maybe."
Task asked a few questions:
"I posted a question awhile back regarding Alex Ziebart's surname and its supposed relation to the automotive company with the same name. I never did find out if it was family business or just coincidence."
I'm fairly sure I did answer this question, but it was probably in the comments and not The Queue itself. It's just coincidence, I don't have any relation to that company at all. If I do, it's extremely distant and any link might as well not exist.
"Will Ms. Harper be attending this year's BlizzCon as a farewell/get-together/super awesome party?"
Yes, Miss Liz is going to be at BlizzCon. She will even be at our BlizzCon meetup, which we're going to announce officially very soon!
Oh, and before I close this out, you can thank one of my raidmates for the header image on this article, though Deathy was not the original subject of Ms. Gnome's unending love.
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!
