Blue posts and other WoW news: Schrödinger's dragon and 11 other blue posts

Schrödinger's dragon.

When we were originally planning to tease Transmog and Void Storage, with the screenshot we posted to Facebook (http://bit.ly/ot06jY), our plan was to have a dead night elf near them with a dagger in its back. We ran short on time.

But yes. A murder most foul.

LFR gear is less powerful than standard gear, and the groups performing those raids don't have any kind of organized loot distribution system to ensure that raid members receive a 'fair share'.

Of course, between your Normal or Heroic raids, you can jump into an LFR to shore up the weak points in your gear load out.

If you re-read the article you'll note that Dave states it is a mistake that we thought of Thrall as "world character", and a hero all players would enjoy fighting alongside. He then goes on to say we're looking to correct that and have plenty of Alliance story progression set for Mists.

I'm confused as to what issues you're coming across. I see the differences in the images, and am confused by the chest piece. Can you not use http://www.wowhead.com/item=59295/sandrenes-invisible-vest ?

As far as the weapon enchant it's intended that they pass-through to the transmog'd item, we know that many people like having them show, but understand some don't. We don't have any current plans to research adding an option to disable them showing, but Transmog is in its infancy, and I foresee many changes and tweaks in the future as we all grow comfortable with the system.

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Ah, of course, my mistake. Ok, so you can't appear shirtless but want to appear shirtless. Yeah, those are good points of feedback but we're being pretty restrictive with what we want to initially allow for Transmog.

World of Warcraft has a maddening amount of content, and so because it's really tough to predict how people will actually use Transmog until we get it out on the live realms, we're being pretty conservative. We'd much prefer we be restrictive now and loosen the ol' belt, than "nerf fun" and have to take things away later. Of course that's our preference, so no promises either way. :)

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We are totally fine with that.

If we 'nerf fun' now but 'un-nerf fun' it in a few weeks or months, and it's un-nerfed until the end of time, is that the same as starting off with everything now and slowly removing things you enjoy over time? That seems fairly illogical, when looking at the long term plan of our approach, that is.

I realize right now you can't do what you want, but we're not developing a game that only exists right now.

:(

I'm sorry if that was implied anywhere or if that's what people believed to be the case.

Void Storage and the gold cost are there ... well one as a potential gold sink (although not a super great one), but mainly to give weight to the decision of depositing and removing the items you place in Void Storage because once they're deposited they are "in the void". You should be thinking about and considering when to place items into and remove items from Void Storage. We really didn't want it to become just a new bank system, but a separate long-term storage system for specific types of items.

The connection between the two systems was because with Transmogrification we would essentially be asking people to go get and hold on to a bunch of gear just to customize the way they look. To resolve that we nixxed the key ring which freed up some storage space on a character level, and implemented a way for people to then long-term store those items. A deep-freeze, if you will. It was never the intent to use Void Storage as a staging location you could Transmog from.

And again, I realize how it could have been confusing and do apologize if there was any expectation that these systems were intended to work together directly in any way.

There's a known issue causing the LFG servers to crash, which is kicking people out of queue. A hotfix is already in production and we expect will be implemented this evening.

There's also an issue that's causing long queue times, and again a hotfix is in progress.

Well, as major patches go, 4.3 was one of the smoothest in the history of the game.

Game features and service issues have nothing to do with graphics, or even really the age of a game, though. World of Warcraft is, I would bet, one of the most complex games currently out there (the most?) in the types and scope of game systems we have. It's also no spring chicken, and so as we shove more robot-guts into the thing it just gets more complex and all these little cogs have to continue to work in-tandem.

If we weren't constantly improving and evolving the game, I might agree with you, but there's no formula for how you implement a region-wide 25 person raid queuing system under load of millions of people and test all possibilities of its use before release. Right?

The items out in the world (Marshals, Grand Marshal's, High Warlord, etc) that use the level 60 PvP art are un-transmogrifiable (including the item level 115 stuff that shares the name from Burning Crusade).

In Area 52 a set of vendors has replaced the PvP Vendors who used to live there. Grex Brainboiler, Krixel Pinchwhistle, Tini Smalls, Kezzik the Striker, Big Zokk Torquewrench, and Leeni "Smiley" Smalls. These vendors sell new, transmogrifiable versions of the classic armor to players who have the Feat of Strength for Legionnaire/Knight-Captain or higher under the old PvP system.

There was a bug with the Feat of Strength granting access to these items, but was hotfixed within the last couple of minutes. If you meet the criteria log out and back in and you should be able to access the vendor.

The design intent with the Feat of Strength achievement requirement was specifically to limit these particular art styles to players who earned them through the OG (and relentlessly difficult) PvP honor system, while keeping the door open to reward them to more people in the future.

In a future patch the items sold by the Area 52 vendors will also be renamed 'Replica of' to be more consistent with the items sold by the Darkmoon Faire – they're currently exact duplicates of the original items that allow transmogrification, which is obviously a bit confusing.

Potentially related, since he's in the same area, Kezzik the Striker sells inaccessible Season 1 Gladiator's, Season 2 Merciless Gladiator's, and Season 3 Vengeful Gladiator's gear to all players, as the majority of that gear didn't have restrictions.

Void Storage provides you with extra space to store items you've used for Transmogrification, or items you might one day want to use for Transmogrification. The idea is to give players a different type of inventory space specifically designed for deep storage of gear.

Players have asked for more inventory space to store gear they love -- whether because it was difficult to obtain, or because the look is too good to throw away -- for mostly nostalgic reasons. Now, with Transmogrification added to the game, this is more of a necessity given that holding onto old gear sets isn't just for keepsake.

But, Void Storage isn't a secondary bank. It's meant for long-term storage of gear so you can hold onto the aesthetics you like, in the event you want to use them for Transmogrification in the future, without worrying about your bag and bank inventory.

That much extra storage space per character is actually a lot of additional data storage on our end. This is why enchants and gems are stripped from items placed in Void Storage, as it's much less data to recall when the extra storage space is only holding onto item IDs.

In any event, the idea wasn't just to give everyone a ton of extra storage space. We want there to be some sort of decision on the part of the player on whether or not to place eligible items in Void Storage. This is why there is a cost associated with each deposit. When all is said and done, you have 80 new slots of space to store the gear you're not using anymore, just in case you want to use any of it for Transmogrification in the future.

The Fall of Deathwing is not open just yet for the Raid Finder or Heroic. We plan to open this encounter up in approximately one week. We felt it was important to let more people get through the fights in normal difficulty, make videos, strat guides, update their mods, etc. before we let everyone take a crack at Deathwing. We'll keep you informed when this part of the raid opens up for Raid Finder. Keep in mind that it's required to complete the first half to be able to queue for the second, so don't hold back!

The Raid Finder is designed to allow players who don't often have the time to commit to a regular raiding schedule a chance at seeing the latest content. With that said, we don't want players who might fall into this category to skip the new five-player dungeons altogether for the Dragon Soul raid.

Raid Finder is below normal and Heroic modes in terms of rewards and difficulty, but the new tier of five-player dungeons should still be stepping stones into the raid.

It shouldn't take the average player "hundreds of hours" to gear up for the Raid Finder version of Dragon Soul, as the Dungeon Finder will quite quickly ramp up your power and gear score.

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Implementing the Raid Finder was actually quite a monumental technical feat. We want all future raids to be designed with this third difficulty incorporated, but it'd take quite a bit of time and resources to retrofit the feature into previous raids. In an ideal world that would've happened, but the patch would not have come out this year. And that wasn't an investment we felt would really be ideal in the grand scheme of things.