The Queue: Character models, maintenance, 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.

Draenei ladies are wonderful.

SlapHappy asked:

Is it me or does anyone else feel that there is an over-emphasis on the new character models? I mean who really has their camera focus that fine to even tell the difference? Not trying to be contentious in anyway...just saying. All of that design effort could surely be spent in more beneficial ways.

I do. I look at my character all the time. What your character looks like is a big deal to many people in games like this. If it wasn't a big deal, and it wasn't meant to be a big deal, there would be no character creation at all. You wouldn't pick a gender, a race, a face, a hairstyle. But you do, because those things are considered important in a game like this one. And because it's an important part of the game, it's important that your character model isn't an outdated, low-res thing from 2003 while the surroundings are silky smooth creations from 2013.

Personally, I'd rather have updated character models than any other art assets that'd require equivalent amounts of time. Not being an artist, I don't know what that is. But the character model is far more important to me than armor, weapons, mounts, so forth. Those things are temporary accessories. My characters' models are there forever ... or until they're updated.

Neuromante asked:

I was wondering, since [yesterday was] tuesday, why is it that when there's maintenance in WoW all the games are down?. Is there a connection between, say, WoW and Hearthstone?

It's their maintenance day for all of Battle.net. All of their games share resources to some extent -- if not hardware, then the human beings that operate their servers and support.

JacquesMarkarian asked:

Do you feel that Krasus and Rhonin were killed off too abruptly? true they both died through heroic and selfless acts,but i just feel that they deserved more seeing how deeply they were involved in the warcraft books.

I think being book-characters made their deaths easier. Rhonin and Krasus are non-entities in the game. Sure, Rhonin is there in Dalaran, but he doesn't do much and you'd never know who he was or what he did unless you read the books. When deciding who will die in a novel, the best choices are the ones who've had their stories told in the novels. Novel characters have impact in the novels. Game characters have impact in the games. If you kill off characters that are primarily from the games in a book, the medium is all wrong and the audience isn't going to be very happy about that.

The sudden death of Marcus Jonathan hurts more than Rhonin because he was one of those background NPCs in WoW that came to mean a lot to people just by existing. He went down in a book.

itsdeeps asked:

do you guys include things at the beginning/end of the queue asking people not to talk about things just to troll one another, or is it a case of simply forgetting that every time you do all it does is invite people to discuss nothing but said topic?

It's an honest and desperate attempt to get people to talk about something else. Sometimes a specific topic hits critical mass of popularity in the comments and suddenly there are no questions, only hot debate about that one thing. The debate is fun and we love it but questions are The Queue's lifeblood. Days when debate is hot enough, the only questions that arise resemble this young man's query.

Again, that doesn't mean we don't want discussion in the comments. It's great. It's just that we can totally tell when The Queue has become The Race-Specific Garrison Buildings Forum. There were 661 comments on The Queue for yesterday as of writing this. What you see in today's Queue is the bulk of the questions asked -- though there were a few that I didn't know how to answer, largely things that relate to the alpha/beta of Warlords and I'd need to personally play to know.

I do want to be as clear as possible here: all of you talking about stuff is totally cool and I don't want this to be taken as whining. We have no real illusion that we can tell you not to talk about something unless it falls into needing-active-moderation territory. But for the sake of our own sanity, a little more diversity in nearly 700 comments would be great!

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!