The Queue: Research like it's 1995
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.
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holtzmanneffect asked:
do you think the world will survive an entire day without Wikipedia? Some people on the Internet will have their first taste of a post-apocalyptic future tomorrow!
I didn't last very long. Thirty minutes in, I regressed to playing MindMaze.
Puntable asked:
Were there a lot of expectations that the previous expansions would happen sooner than they did? I'm not sure where this idea that MoP will be "soon" is coming from. Sure Blizzard recently said they *would like* to put expansions out faster, but they have been saying that since the release of the Burning Crusade. Is it all just a big pile of wishful thinking?
With every expansion (and some content patches), someone at Blizzard comments that the developers are trying to make releases more rapid -- less time between expansions, less time between content patches, and so on and so forth. Like you said, it never happens. I'm not getting my hopes up for a quick Mists of Pandaria release. We expected Cataclysm to arrive rapidly after patch 3.3, but we spent a full year raiding Icecrown Citadel.
After seven years of World of Warcraft, I'll believe a rapid release schedule when I see it. Blizzard's been trying to improve over the course of Cataclysm, but over World of Warcraft's entire lifetime, Blizzard has always been trending toward a slower release rate rather than a faster one, despite its stated goals. Blizzard's got great devs and I believe they are capable of speeding up their release schedule in a meaningful way, but they haven't managed it yet.
kaminari asked:
with account achievements in MoP, what does your magic 8 ball says about opening reputation stuff account wide once you unlock it with your first character?
R. asked:
How do you anticipate the raid finder working in the first tier of the new expansion? Run Heroics to gear for raid finder to gear for Normals?
The Raid Finder, I believe, is meant to be optional. You'll likely be able to go into normal difficulty raids with 5-man heroic gear and be able to progress without issue. The Raid Rinder will help, of course, but I don't think it will be mandatory.
@davegw asked:
Do you think they'll keep the same 10/25 man shared lockout system in Mists?
Yes.
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!
