The Queue: Steak frights

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mike Sacco will be your host today.

The WoW Insider east coast crew (and friends) had a pre-PAX East dinner at dbar in Dorchester last night, and Mat McCurley discovered the hard way that "steak frites" is pronounced neither "steak free-tayz" or "steak frights." Suffice to say that Mat will never live it down, but we also all learned a valuable lesson: that steak fright is a serious condition that affects thousands of men and women nationwide. Please consider a generous donation to the National Coalition for Ending Adult-Onset Steak Fright.

Kandorei asked:

I just got a new laptop and was reinstalling WoW onto it when a screen popped up showing what was being downloaded (The area maps). All of a sudden, Emerald Dream popped up for a good minute before Kalimdor started loading itself. What does this mean? Can we expect Emerald Dream ever?

WoW shipped with some Emerald Dream doodads and maps, and I believe it was Tom Chilton who stated early in WoW's life that the Emerald Dream was intended to be endgame content for the vanilla game. It just never materialized. If you want to see more of the Emerald Dream in game, though, you may be in luck -- there's a music track titled "The Rift of Aln," which is an area in the Emerald Dream. Specifically, it's the area to which Malfurion and pals banished the Emerald Nightmare. A hint of things to come? We'll see.

Umbralwrath asked:

Are heirloom cloaks broken? My husband pointed out that the armor value on them was abysmally low, and until about 81, the stats weren't all that great either. I always heard the stats on them were supposed to be *roughly* equivalent of a blue item at the same level. I looked on the forums and it seems others have noticed this as well, but there did not appear to be an official Blue response.

You're right in that there's no official blue response to the issue, but honestly, the low stats may be intended. Any negative effect on your overall stats from the cloak would be far outweighed by the experience bonus in terms of net time played. Besides, the other heirlooms are so impossibly good for the most part that I'm not really sure I even need badass stats on my cloak to go with them.

Cambro asked:

OK, legitimate question, and I really hope this one goes through as the last FOUR comments did not.

When is WoW Insider going to get a new comment system, one that doesn't suck? I like the articles on the site and would read it even without the comments, but the comments are an integral part of the experience. So why is the comment system here STILL so terrible? I know that I read here several months ago, prior to Cataclysm, that a new comment system was in the works, likely based on the one Joystiq uses. I don't care as long as it works, and what we have here is frequently flaky and not user friendly at all.

So, do we have a target date? :)

No target date, but yes, WoW Insider is in line to get a makeover like Joystiq and Massively before us. With it comes an at least slightly improved comment system. Plus, the layout looks pretty darn nice, in my opinion.

Someone will inevitably ask:

Aren't you mad at Adam for making you wade through 27 pages of comments to find three of them that aren't part of some huge debate?

Oh, yes, but I'm lulling him into a false sense of security. Then, when he feels safest, I will strike. I will take this stack of printed pages of comments from Tuesday and Thursday Queues I've been assembling for months, and I will hit him in the face with them.

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!