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The Queue: Holiday recovery

The Queue Holiday recovery

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.

The (virtual) WoW Insider office was eerily quiet the last few days. We gave just about everybody the holidays off, so please forgive us for missing The Queue yesterday. Judging by the grand total of 4 comments asked on Christmas Eve, most of you weren't too interested in it during the holiday, anyway.

flesh1mp asked:

Where exactly is the inside of the Terrace of Endless Spring located? If you look on the map where the entrance to the instance is and go directly west into the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, it doesn't match up at all. Other outdoor instances and raids have matched up with the game world quite nicely. Does that mean that Terrace is in its own pocket dimension that can only be reached from the entrance to the area?



While Blizzard has put some effort into making dungeons have a real, tangible presence in the game, raid zones should be politely ignored. They're massive, and ensuring all of its real estate is visible in-game would make a mess of the landscape.

There's a trope in fiction, mostly animation but other media as well, called Hammerspace. It refers to the imaginary place where characters in the work get items you were never visibly aware they had -- particularly comically large items, like a massive warhammer. Sometimes it's used for humor, such as in comedy anime where the protagonist suddenly gets hit over the head with a warhammer by the female lead for saying something stupid. Where the heck did that hammer come from? It came from Hammerspace, a place that doesn't exist, but stores anything and everything.

Hammerspace can be applied to our inventory in RPGs. How the heck do we hold hundreds and hundreds of items? How do we put a mount in our backpack? How can you put 20+ swords in one bag? Hammerspace.

Apply that trope to raids. How do you fit this giant raid zone in this relatively small structure? Hammerspace. You're supposed to ignore it for the sake of enjoyment.

MetalMagus asked:

is there anywhere to determine what's the highest mountain in-game? Is it Mt. Neverest, Mt. Hyjal, or the Temple of Storms?

The highest mountain in World of Warcraft used to be in Storm Peaks, but Mount Neverest in Kun-Lai Summit takes the prize now.

@DiscoPriest asked:

What did you get for Christmas?

A martini set with some mixer for dirty martinis (complete with garlic-stuffed olives) and a bag of Brach's Milk Chocolate Stars, which were a childhood favorite of mine. The chocolates, not the martinis. My girlfriend bought me a Pandaren Monk off of the Blizzard store, because she was tired of hearing me whine about not having any decent humanoids in pet battles.

Thank you for asking!

@Xqmano asked:

Are all creatures in wow based on mythologies from our world? I haven't found any "real-world" murlocs, for instance.

Most fantasy, not just Warcraft, is rooted in real-world myth. If you're one of the people who think J.R.R. Tolkien created the stock fantasy races, you'd be wrong. Popularized them again, maybe -- but all of those races were used in earlier works, going back to their roots in Nordic and Celtic mythology. Those mythologies went beyond using gods to explain the functions of the world. They were, effectively, fantasy stories with rulers, kingdoms, and hidden worlds beyond our own.

An exact duplicate of the murlocs may not exist in the real world, but aquatic creatures with mur/mer prefix in their names are plentiful. The most well-known of them would be the mermaids and mermen, humanoid sea creatures. Murlocs are a regression of that concept, pushing them further away from humans and closer to fish. Kind of like that episode of Futurama. You know the one.

There's also the "morlocks" that H.G. Wells created for his novel The Time Machine. Morlocks are primitive, subterranean creatures. They aren't the same thing as murlocs, but morlocks have been used in countless media since their creation in 1895, and in modern media they've deviated from the source material to the point of being unrecognizable. Murlocs, I imagine, are somewhere between mermaids and morlocks.

That said, fantasy things do not always have a specific root in mythology. You can make an anthropomorphic race of any animal (or plant or element, etc.) ever and that isn't necessarily rooted in myth. It's humanizing the inhuman. If I created, for example, a chocolate elemental ... that isn't rooted in myth. It's just applying fantastic qualities to something otherwise mundane -- that's fantasy.

@Revynn asked:

I'm sans-WoW for a few more days. Any iOS game recommendations? Bonus points for ones that don't require an internet connection.

While I play iOS games, I'm not very savvy when it comes to things like that. My iPhone time-wasters are Call of Atlantis and Luxor. I'm pretty sure they're both knock-offs of something else, but I'll be damned if I know what the originators of the concepts are. All I know is the games are fun.