The Queue: Queues, Sorting, and Santa

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.

Today's queue is a bit late. I blame my packages not getting here when I was told they would, so I had to punt and go shopping in the real world today.

It was terrible. Way too long of queue lines.

Rustin asked:

could you ever see blizz putting in an alt queue finder? Like queue toon A for a raid while I switch to toon B to do some questing at lower lvls. More often than not I feel like I'm just sitting around waiting when I could be working on my alt army.

I like that idea a lot, and while I think it's possible Blizzard might arrange something like that in the future, I think it's just there: in the future. The technology to switch toons like that would really be quite impressive and difficult. Moreso, it'd cause a lot of addon headache -- the basic paradigm for the API would have to be re-written (addons can do a lot of stuff on load, and if there's just a character switch that doesn't reset the UI and cause a whole load again, then there'd be major issues). There's also issues with just that simple load time that can take quite a bit and cause queue timeouts.

So while the idea is awesome, I wouldn't hold my breath for it. There's a lot of technical and gameplay issues Blizzard would have to overcome first. But hey, there's flying in Azeroth and none in the new expansion, so anything's possible!

Merkavar asked:

With blizzs bag sorting, anyone else want to be able to select multiple options. so say you want equipment and trade goods in a bag, select the two options instead of having to have separate bags for each.

Blizzard tends to leave off some stuff from their UIs -- things like multiple options can get a bit confusing from an interface perspective. Now it might not be confusing to us, but consider the person that just started or isn't familiar with sorting technology in Excel or Google Docs. That person would have to stop and think about the UI, how to use it at a very basic level, and that's not something that modern UI design trends towards. These days it's all about simplicity -- you should be able to look at something and use it immediately without thinking. Blizzard goes for that to the extreme with WoW's UI design. Personally I think that's great -- it opens up the game to a lot more people.

Those that do want more advanced things, and I count myself firmly in that category, are able to turn to addons. There's tons they can do and change, so there's little reason for Blizzard to complicate things when optional tweaks are available so easily.

Mimipaw asked:

Has anyone else been suspecting Khadgar might be Santa? I mean, my parents explained (many decades ago) that Santa could be in numerous places at once. That's how he was in all the malls. Khadgar hops a boat in one direction on my Horde toons; he goes to a different zone entirely if I'm Alliance. He shows up in many zones. I see similarities here..

He's either jolly old Saint Nic' or he's the devil in disguise. Or he's just a mage who's story has evolved over the course of WoW and we're just seeing him appear multiple times throughout that story, so while it appears he's actually in many places at once, we're just progressing through the story.

But nah... he's Santa.

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!