The Queue: Almost 7 years since release

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mathew McCurley (@gomatgo) will be your host for today.

I logged into Azeroth for the first time in May 2004. It is now November 2011. World of Warcraft has been part of my life in one way or another for more than seven years. This thing is still going strong. Who could have predicted that this is where the MMO genre was going, especially in the seven years since we first heard about instanced dungeons, no-fail crafting, hearthstones and rested experience? It's been a long time.

@tagegould on Twitter asked:

Do you think we'll be cursed with over-exaggerated accents for our panda men?

I just went back and rewatched the cutscenes and voice acting with Chen Stormstout from Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne, and while there are those tinges of overexaggeration in the pandaren accent, it's not as bad as it could have been. In fact, I love Chen and always have. Chen sounds like a normal guy who had the "Asian" filter moved to 20% on the slider. You know how the trolls could be really rasta but they just sort of sit at, like, 40% rasta?

I think there is a comfortable medium that could be achieved with the pandaren. I honestly don't think it will be bad at all. You can give pandaren a Chinese-inspired culture and feel without giving them an overexaggerated accent, as Blizzard has already shown it is capable of doing with night elves.

absintheaffliction asked:

How are the final heroic 5s tuned on the PTR? We know that Blizzard has realized that the Cata style heroics have not gone over all that well, and that the design is being reverted to a more relaxed Wrath style for MoP, but are they applying that to the 4.3 heroics? Or are they currently still tuned more like the rest of heroics have been in Cata?

When we first went into the new Hour of Twilight 5-man dungeons on the PTR, they were fairly well tuned and easy for a group of players who were decked out in some decent Firelands raiding gear, as you might expect. During the testing phase with our equipment and ilevels normalized, the instances were a bit harder. They weren't impossible, mind you, except for the extremely overtuned Azshara encounter in the Well of Eternity, but there is no way that the encounter is staying so difficult when the patch goes live.

Compared to the patch 4.1 Zul heroics, the new 5-mans are a breath of fresh air, not only because we've been running those two troll dungeons for a million months but because these new dungeons have a quicker pace to them.

The bottom line is that the new heroics have a better, more fine-tuned pace and hopefully, in the weeks since we've tested them, Blizzard has tuned up a few of the encounters that were just sort of ridiculous. I have faith.

Adam asked:

What I'm interested in re: the annual pass is how they're going to re-incentivize it 3, 6, 9, 12 months after Diablo 3 drops. The implied value at that point will be much lower after the shine has come off D3, so are they going to have to add new freebies to keep it interesting? Free SC2 Protoss episode? "Titan:-themed ingame pets? And if so, will they extend these benefits to continuing annual pass members?

The WoW Annual Pass is a grand experiment, much like the Guardian Cub, in stress testing the boundaries that players are willing to skirt or press up against. Blizzard is in a unique and advantageous position right now in that it can try out these different revenue streams relatively slowly and not go all in, as it were, on any one idea right out the gate.

The WoW Annual Pass is set up right now to be a fairly limited promotion for players to aid in subscriber retention over the next year. If it works out, we'll be sure to see more value-additive services and promotions like it that don't necessarily cost you more money but reward commitment. It's only logical to do so if the WoW Annual Pass is any type of successful.

Morgatho asked:

I signed up for the 12 month pass but I still wana get the CE edition for diablo, is there going to be any way to get it cheaper, more wow time, or am I just going to have 2 copies of D3?

When you add the Diablo III Collector's Edition key to your Battle.net account, it takes four months of game time away from your yearly WoW commitment. Buying the collector's edition doesn't hurt you in any way. Frankly, it's one of the smartest aspects of the promotion.