The Queue: Almost our celestial anniversary

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Today's Queue is brought to you by Mathew McCurley and the letter F.

Yay, I get to write The Queue today! With a patch 4.1 release candidate on the PTR, as well as the one-year anniversary (April 15) of the Celestial Steed, it seems that we should be expecting many things happening within the next few weeks in WoW. Oh, boy! We live in exciting times.

Sparkle pony, it was almost one year since I wrote about your majesty, your grace and starry beauty. How could anyone say no to the steed from the stars? Now, we have your successor, the winged guardian, a presumably Uldum-esque creature that soars through the cataclysmic skies with the strength of the desert it has been unearthed from. I hope part of the story involves Harrison Jones finding a secret factory under the Temple of Uldum, where 5 million winged guardians await, ready to be sold and taken home "off the lot," as it were.

walkerspace asked:

Dear Queue,

There seems to be an increase in bot activity (while I'm herbing; I want it all!). Is there anything Bizzard can do about it? Or, is the perceived activity simply more characters in the game fighting over the same limited resource?

Bots are a huge problem and make up a good portion of the gold farming/botting/hacking that goes on in WoW. It's very easy to run virtual players logged into hundreds of clients and let them do their automated thing rather than pay real, live people to farm gold. However, it is theoretically easier to detect botting because of the Warden, but there are workarounds to Blizzard's elusive anti-cheat. It's a game of escalation, sadly, and botters are just one of the many things Blizzard gets to deal with because of how popular World of Warcraft is.

There are plenty of things Blizzard can do about botting, but the real question is can it do anything effective? Updating Warden constantly helps to throw off the smaller gold-selling houses that rely on an older version of the Warden hacks and emulators, but it doesn't stop the big boys. The best way to stop botting is to stop buying gold and leveling services, as well as reporting obvious bots with the in-game report tools.

velutina asked:

Burning question here: what makes the elevator in Throne of Tides go up? After the first 2 pulls every PUG I'm in waits an indefinite amount of time, and then inexplicably the elevator goes up. Is it that everyone needs to be standing in the middle? Is it timer based? Is there a secret switch everyone else/no one else knows about?

That is one lazy giant jellyfish, I'll tell you what. Back in beta, there was a little goblin there next to some construction equipment and blockades boasting about how one day there would be an amazing elevator here, the likes of which had never been seen, but until that day he could just teleport you up to the top of the elevator shaft to the murloc/naga gauntlet. Well, that time has come and the amazing jellyfish elevator is in. Sadly, for all its majesty, it takes so damn long.

The reason the elevator takes a good long time is probably because the distance the elevator travels is fairly long. Having the elevator go up and down too quickly might force people to have to actually spend more time getting their entire group up to the second floor because of people missing the elevator and the jellyfish having to make too many return trips. Also, you get to see Ozumat.

raposo02790 asked:

Do you remember Diablo with it's auto generated dungeons? do you think it would be plausible to incorporate something like that into WoW's instances? Sometimes I feel like the rat in a maze looking for that piece of cheese (Pepper Jack please). It seems like it would be a great way to switch things up, that or varying it up between 2-4 maps per instance...

Randomized dungeons are a good idea and a bad idea at the same time. On the good side, random dungeons give the developers lots of fun and creative things that get dynamically added to the space they've created, allowing different groups of adventurers to have limitless different experiences. Randomized enemy groups and types force players to be on their toes and use skill and quick decision-making to get out alive, so to speak.

On the "meh" side of things, random dungeons are usually just randomized tile sets more than anything. The random factor is fun at first, but it's harder to control the flow of the dungeon and the difficulty because of the inherent randomness. Plus, all the dungeons end up looking and feeling the same because of the tile set that is used, and the only thing that is really random are the enemies and the path you take. I'd recommend checking out some wiki articles on Bill Roper's Hellgate: London. It tried the Diablo approach to random dungeons and was fairly successful in making random dungeons, but they all just felt like tile set swaps.

Mat McCurley asked:

Shouldn't Blizzard remove guild reputation caps or dramatically increase the weekly cap for players now that guilds have reached level 25 and no other reputation gains are capped in game? While I understand and respect the farming for guild achievements aspect of removing or increasing caps, I would really like my guild rewards faster and not feel like anything I do on my character up to the weekly guild rep cap is being wasted.

I agree.

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!