The Queue: Rodeo

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mike Sacco will be your host today.

I got Titanfall last night. I don't even really like shooter games, but here I am, hooting and hollering, riding giant robots and shooting their innards out while double-jumping and wall-running. I am having a blast. Go figure.

JackJesson asked:

My current preoccupation is, is it Hearthstone as in 'earth', or Hearthstone as in 'Arthas'?

This isn't actually one of my questions, what I would like to know is, does it even matter at all? (Seems it does to me right?) is there a specific way to pronounce these things anyway? Or, as I'm starting to think, is it possible that me, trying to render a proper noun with my British accent as a West Coast American working for blizz would say it, just going to ruin the structure of the words and the poetry of the environment? in the same way that no one would expect me to pronounce Moscow asin a 'grazing, milk making, Mulgore resident.

It rhymes with Darth Stone. There is usually a specific way to pronounce the names of fictional places/people/items; the creator undoubtedly has it in mind when crafting them. As to whether or not you use their pronunciation, well, that's up to you. The creator of the GIF recently explained that it's pronounced with a soft G, but you have people really adamantly against it who still pronounce it with a hard G. Death of the author and all that.

wstomlin asked:

Is Heroes of the Storm going to allow open chat?

I assumed that Blizzard would do what they did with Hearthstone and just limit player communication to pre-defined statements ("good game", "push middle", etc) and that was how they would partially handle the toxic MOBA environment.

I was talking about this on Twitter today. Right now (as far as I can tell from my time in alpha) your chat is limited to your party (RealID/BattleTag friends) and your game allies. You can't talk to the other team or anyone in it. Hearthstone doesn't really require complex orders; MOBAs sometimes can, even ones as simple as HotS.

akionite asked:

Do you think Blizzard should offer a profession boosting service now?

Nah. They're already adding catch-up mechanisms for professions; I don't think a profession boost is necessary at all. Not like the one-time character boost mechanic is for the long-term health of the game.

JordanPhillips asked:

with the temporary and illusory nature of gear in WoW, do you think it is time for the devs to reevaluate the kind of carrots they dangle in front of our nose to motivate play? For example, I find myself utterly unmotivated to grind up new PVE/PVP gear when I know it will be replaced by WoD questing greens in less than a year. On the other hand I have no shortcoming in motivation to grind up Arch items, because toys, transmog items, and mounts are timeless in their fun.

And this isn't burnout; I enjoy the game substantially more now than I did in TBC. It's just with every expansion I find the endless gear treadmill to be less and less compelling. Grinding up auxiliary currencies to purchase gear from a nameless faceless storyless NPC vendor is not why I got into RPG's of any form, especially when said gear becomes outdated (in terms of stats) so rapidly at any point in an expansion.

Does anyone else feel this way?

What you're feeling really is burnout, and it happens to most everybody after playing MMOs for long enough. WoW has been around for ten years and the basic advancement formula hasn't really changed: you get gear to kill monsters to get incrementally better gear. The scenery may change, but the fundamentals don't.

I love WoW, and I frequently get bored and tired of it. I've been playing since 2004. How could I not get bored of it? And when I do, I stop playing. For a few weeks, or a few months, I just stop playing. I know WoW will be there if I get the itch, but I 've also come to terms with the fact that itching, like most things, is temporary.

With WoW's age and its status as the last bastion of subscription-based MMOs (Wildstar will go free-to-play within a year no matter how good it is), it's unlikely to receive any fundamental "core loop" overhauls. When WoW stops making money, well, we'll see what happens then.

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!