The Queue: Flight, Darkmoon CRZ, and more

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.

What's this? People actually asked questions in a Sunday Queue? Hooray, I have something to talk about!

Brian asked:

Blizzard stated that if they could redo wow they would have never implemented flying mounts, and awesome that they are, I agree with the. But the question is: what would the best alternative be? I was thinking special crawler mounts that move at 60% speed but could scale cliffs to a certain steepness. What do you think?

I think crawler mounts would cause the same problems, just to a lesser extent. The problem with flying mounts is they destroy the need to interact with the world -- that's why they get restricted in new areas. The layout of the terrain in most games is an important part of the experience, the way it's all designed helps control the flow of players through the content. If there's a canyon somewhere, they probably want to filter you through the canyon so you can see the zone from that perspective and actually get the feel of being in a canyon. With flying mounts, you can just zoom in and our and the entire world might as well be a perfectly flat plane.

I happen to agree that flying mounts were a terrible, terrible mistake, but it can't be undone at this point. Too many people have come to enjoy it to now take it away.

Ronald3 asked:

Why did stupid Blizzard make stupid DMF stupid CRZ?? It's stupid!! :)

Some are suspecting the CRZ on the Darkmoon Faire is bugged, because players from servers that aren't usually linked together for cross-realm play are all ending up on the island. Cenarion Circle, where I'm from, is seeing players at the Darkmoon Faire from realms we've never seen ourselves partnered with anywhere else. That said, it's possible that's intentional in that particularly location. The first couple of days of the Faire are always extremely busy, but the place empties out dramatically after that.

Benno asked:

When will we get some kind of chat / battle.net overlay? Losing b.tag and real ID conversations while switching characters seems silly.

I'd be willing to bet money that Blizzard is working on something like that. They've been pushing toward that sort of connectivity between their games for awhile now, though admittedly at a snail's pace. It's the next logical step, I think.

richie.09 asked:

If 5.4 comes out in August/September as speculated and the next expansion being most likely revealed at Blizzcon, does this mean we will have the Seige of Orgrimmar raid as the current raid for 9+ months like Dragon Soul? I don't think it's in Blizzards best interest to do that again...

I think it's too early to say. Blizzard failed spectacularly at their attempts to provide content more rapidly in previous expansions, but Mists of Pandaria has so far done well. If the developers have improved their workflow this time around, it's possible the expansion isn't too far out from patch 5.4. Remember, they do work on the next expansion while the current one is ongoing.

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!