The Queue: Dwarves!
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.
I am unreasonably excited about The Hobbit movies, especially after seeing the new photos of the cast in costume that have been coming out. Above are Oin and Gloin. Gloin is Gimli's dad, in case you can't see the resemblance.
Iaim asked:
Where did the 'Working as intended.' meme come from? I've been seeing it a lot recently in the comments...
It's a phrase with long history in the software industry, not just World of Warcraft. Generally, a user will come to the company with an issue with the software, something that seems to be wrong, and the developer may respond that the issue is not actually a bug, that it's actually working as intended. Blizzard doesn't generally use this phrase when dealing with customers directly, since boy howdy do players hate hearing it, but it still finds its way into conversation sometimes. I believe it's still in one of the preformatted emails you'll receive from GMs when reporting something that's, well, working as intended.
Henri Poincaré asked:
Inspired by today's Around Azeroth: what _are_ Murlocs anyway? Amphibians? I'd say "featherless bipeds" but I think that category is pretty crowded in WoW already. [Extra geek points for identifying the reference]
The murlocs we see running around Azeroth are amphibians. They don't live completely in the water, just around it, like frogs and toads.
Necromann asked:
When is the loot a mob drops determined? I got the raven lord yesterday and I was wondering if the drop was determined when I zoned in to the instance or when I delt the killing blow?
Loot is determined when a mob is spawned. If you're dealing with an instance, the loot is determined when the instance is created.
soup_of_the_day asked:
Whatever happened to the Titan artifact that the horde and alliance were supposed to be fighting over? (The one that was said to be in the expansion from the trailer.)
The titan artifact was the Halls of Origination. It's the device that Algalon would have activated, had we not beat him. And we nearly activated it ourselves in Uldum by bumbling around like idiots with a pop culture reference.
Panduh asked:
Is there any chance of Blizzard implementing a new Hero Class mid-expansion?
It'll never happen.
Badmedecine asked:
What is up with the 2-headed ogres? Most are one-headed but some others, mainly caster, are 2 headed. Has this been natural to ogres, or did the Legion influence them somehow when they recruited the Ogres?
Two-headed ogres are just a rare variety of ogre; they're known to be smarter and more dangerous than ogres with one head. They've existed since before the rise of the orcs, who helped propagate two-headed ogres further by using magical relics called Altars of Storms. Cho'gall used to only have one head prior to his exposure to an Altar.
AltMaster asked:
How do respawn timers work?
On the Cata release date you couldn't kill a Naga without a new Naga appearing immediately on top of its own body to tear you a new one. As time went by the Naga began to breed more slowly. Yet, still, I can kill all 14 Rustburg Villagers just by standing on the far right dock and killing the respawns, and I can't count the number of times Problim has respawned instantly on his own corpse.
But it doesn't happen EVERY time. It seems to me to be tied to the number of people in the zone, but I'm not sure.
In recently created content especially, respawns are tied to the number of people in a zone. The more people who'd need access to mobs, the more will spawn and the more frequently they'll respawn when killed. This happens most frequently in starting zones and current game content, like the five new zones in Cataclysm, but it doesn't happen everywhere and certainly didn't used to happen anywhere.
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!
