The Queue: WoW is the Matrix
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky (@adamholisky) will be your host today.
WoW is the Matrix. It's a system that's been rejected when everything is too perfect and needs to be flawed for people to like it ("The good ol' days of classic"). It's a system that is designed to provide false choice, the perception of living, and creates a desert of the real.
It is a system that is full of the simulacrum of the power structures, without substance, standing behind the image of a world. It is made not by the forms of reality, but by the shadows on the cave. We look at it not revealing truth, instead only seeing what we think is true. The truth of WoW?
It is in the hands of The Architect: Of Ghostcrawler, Cory Stockton, Dave Kosak, etc...
There is no spoon, and the Matrix WoW has you.
And yes, I might be laying on some literary gusto here -- but realize that WoW is by far the closest humanity has come to a universal virtual environment. I'm not talking singularity theory here, but an honest-to-god reality separate yet equal to our own. WoW skirts that line, and if you think about it, it's absolutely crazy.
Arkjanie asked:
Do you think Blizzard do anything about the population imbalances on servers? Maybe it would be a good idea to offer free transfers only to the dominant faction of a server to low population servers lacking numbers in that faction. It could potentially even the sides while simutaneously reducing the overall population, especially for crowded servers. The free transfers for everyone is only making people in my underpopulated faction want to leave, making the ratio even worse.
Virtual servers in patch 5.4 are going to take care of this. Essentially it's a gigantic server merge without the negative publicity (at least that's how I'm thinking of it in my cynical mind).
Pulledcheries asked:
I'm getting "internal auction error" when trying to post auctions. I can't put anything up at all. What gives?
I solve that by doing one of two things:
I wait a bit because the server hates itself, and me.
I disable all my addons and magically my game no longer hates me.
Usually it's just the server having a fit, and it's fixed soon when it unfits itself.
Schias asked:
The lazy cop-out answer for that GC question continually irks me. CLEARLY he was talking about ONE feature, and then he retracted to say they're all good. He had ONE in mind, and then something happened behind the scenes, maybe a meeting or something, and Blizzard didn't want the other features to look dull compared to GC's golden child. So let me rephrase the OP's question yet again: What ONE feature DO YOU (not do we, not our favorite, not your favorite) think GC was originally referring to for 5.4, and if you think it's yet to be announced, what do you think would be classified by GC as "game-changing?"
I keep hearing this... and I keep scratching my head. There's no indication I've heard from any on the record or off the record dealings with Blizzard to suggest that Ghostcrawler or anyone had a major unplanned feature that got pulled back. Moreso the reason to temper things down was that the community was getting way too hyped up that there was going to be a golden savior of WoW's precived ills rolling on in, and everything would be fine after it was released.
That's a hella dangerous expectation to have, and rightly so Blizzard started to manage it.
Alxvolt asked:
Does anyone know if Imperial Silk is necessary for the 5.4 raid gear? I'm gonna start making bags if it isn't, but I want to keep my stockpile if it is...
There's no Imperial Silk needed as far as I can see.
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!
