The Queue: Son of Q

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Michael Gray will be your host today.

While Adam yesterday (rightfully) pointed out the necessity of the occasional Star Trek reference in this feature, he failed to point out its natural outgrowth. While there is always Q Continuum, there must also be the Son of Q. He goes by q, in the lower case. That leads to some funny sounding dialogue like "I will always be your soulmate, little-case-q." Or something more awkward like "I am the great and powerful little-case-q." But that's okay. For the continuum, it's all third person references. Which leads me to . . .

Transit asked . . .

"At he beginning of Forge of Souls (Horde version) Lady Sylvanas says; "The Dark Lady watches over you. Make haste!"

Who is the Dark Lady?

She could be talking about herself in the 3rd person, but I don't think so. It seems she is talking about a particular entity. I also noticed the "Dark Lady" in the phrase is capitalized, which I think is also significant."

I had actually wondered the same thing, once. I briefly believed that maybe this was some kind of generic dialogue, and maybe Blizzard didn't update it to be spoken by Sylvanas. Now, however, I have learned the error of my ways.

Sylvanas is The Dark Lady. She's just referring to herself in third person, as you pointed out. It might seem a little up-on-herself, but it's more that she's being regal and queenly. Imagine King Wrynn urging Alliance soldiers forward, shouting at them "Go! Your King commands it!" You wouldn't think anything particularly odd about that phrase. In this case, it just looks a little funny because The Dark Lady isn't a title we're accustomed to seeing elsewhere.

Wubble69 asked . . .

"Can you clarify the current status as to the reliability of the 3rd party Addon called Recount?

I've personally taken to running the app purely as self-defense since the PUG tool came out. With the new instant-kick changes coming to the tool I can see this unofficial app not made by Blizzard move into a new level of ruining the game I pay my money to enjoy."

We're not Recount, so it'd be hard for us to really clarify much about someone who's not us. However, I can share my personal experience.

At a recent party with a bunch of friends, we all agreed to switch over to using the same damage meter. We'd go without one if we could, but we wanted to have something around. The reason is that Recount seemed to give us "multiple versions of the truth." My Recount results were usually in pretty close proximity to our Rogue's, for example, but it always seemed off from our ranged DPS. I couldn't reliably tell you why that would be, but I've never felt like damage meters were 100% accurate.

You mentioned that you were largely interested in damage meters as a defense from getting kicked in PUGs. I think that's probably more the issue that needs addressed. While damage meters are just a fact of life in game, we don't often see them as very helpful things. I'm a firm subscriber to Christian Belt's Why I hate DPS meters and totally applaud Ghostcrawler's statement that "balancing around recount stats is like using a thermometer to predict the weather."

Damage meters have almost become a mini-game inside the larger game of WoW. Sadly, it's a game that seems to detract from many groups. I wish I knew what to do about it, but I don't.

sup asked something I'm uniquely qualified to answer . . .

"Why has WoW Moviewatch stopped featuring machinima with storyline and now features only music videos?"

Well, we haven't stopped featuring any movie types at all. There's really only two dynamics here. First, what (relatively new) movies are out there to be featured. Lately, there's been mostly music videos out there. Secondly, it's a matter of whether I see the movie. If someone has more storyline-based features that I could check out, totally hit me up at gray@wow.com. I'd be happy to review them and share with the audience.

Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW.com 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!