The Queue: Battle.net
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.
So we said that we would have a special edition of The Queue this past Saturday. It never happened. Why? Well, the intent was for it to be entertainment while we all sat in the queue for BlizzCon tickets. Yammer about BlizzCon, get excited, all of that sort of thing. Adam and I put ourselves in the ticket queue, were getting ready to push the post out, and then... ticket sales were over. It was kind of a pointless post at that point! So it never happened. We apologize for that.
The ticket sales went surprisingly smoothly. We're always going to find something to gripe about (holy crap why don't they have more tickets) but the whole thing didn't come tumbling down this year, and that's such a massive improvement over last year. It was a good thing.
Dusseldorf asked...
"Is there any benefit to converting my account to a Battle.net account? I see problems with Battle.net users logging in all the time, and was just wondering the point of converting."
The big advantage to using a Battle.net account is the fact that you can link your Blizzard games together, and download all of the games you've registered digitally whenever you need to do so. New computer? No problem, your 'copy' of the game is stored on Battle.net! This will come into play a lot more of people who pick up StarCraft II or Diablo III or whatever new games Blizzard puts out. It'll all be linked together via Battle.net. Kind of a web-based Blizzard-specific Steam in a way.
Everyone will need to convert to a Battle.net account eventually if I remember correctly, so it's really a decision of whether you want to be an early adopter or not. You'll need to adopt at some point, it's just a question of when.
Garinow asked...
"If Blizzard announces a new WoW expansion at the upcoming Blizzcon, based on previous expansion announcements, how much detail can we expect to receive about this new expansion?"
Not a lot. Do you remember the first trailer for Wrath of the Lich King? It was machinima with some voiceover from the Lich King, setting the stage for the expansion. We were going to Northrend, and there would be Death Knights. Then it flashed a bunch of white text listing some of the upcoming features, and that was the end of it. They discussed it at some of the panels, but the first real, concrete information didn't really come out until the alpha and beta testing phases of the expansion.
If they announce a new expansion, don't expect a deluge of information right off the bat. They'll set the tone for us, hint at some features, and they'll leave it at that.
elvendude asked....
"Is it possible for a Horde player to acquire a gryphon or an Alliance player to acquire a windrider?"
As far as I know... no. It isn't currently possible.
Valilor asked...
"Is there a definitive list of all the boss loot tables from Ulduar available? I've checked wowhead and some bosses don't have all the info.
Also, where does this info come from? Does Blizzard hand it out or is it only updated as people do the bosses and report back what dropped?"
Items are stored server-side in World of Warcraft, unlike most of the data that places like Wowhead get ahold of. What this means is that until an item drops, it might as well not exist. The information isn't part of your WoW client, the client pulls the information from the server. Until an item has been 'seen' on a realm, DB sites can't get ahold of the data, you can't link the items in trade for comedic effect, or any of that.
If an item isn't on Wowhead, it's because nobody running the Wowhead client has seen that item. That'll happen often with new raids, the items aren't going to appear on Wowhead until the bosses are being killed and the drops are being revealed. Blizzard doesn't hand out any of the information you see on database sites. All of that data is gathered by those using the DB site's client.
Final note: If any of you guys are using our Profiles portion of the site, feel free to follow me if you'd like! I'll try not to spam you too much.
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!
