The Queue: Scooter is an awesome Muppet

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Anne Stickney (@Shadesogrey) may or may not be looking for the rainbow connection.

Look I'm not trying to be accusatory or anything, but I'm pretty sure if you don't like the Muppets you may want to see where your soul has wandered off to. The same goes for Fraggles.

I kind of want to see some Warcraft-themed Muppets now. I'm pretty sure an orc Muppet would be amazing.

VanessaProctor points out:

I don't think cross realm zones are a good feature in any way. Who wants more competition for mobs and resource nodes? I really wish they would get rid of it altogether. A poorly implemented, terrible idea.

Since a short answer didn't seem to appease people, let me tell you a little story and talk about this feature a little more, OK?

My character is on a nearly dead realm in the back end of nowhere. It was a very busy and active realm when I originally moved there in Burning Crusade, but it has since lost a giant chunk of its player population. And when I say giant, I mean giant. Cities other than Orgrimmar are completely deserted. Zones have a handful of people in them at a time, and our realm has maybe a handful of raiding guilds. I used to be able to wander out and about in any given city and find random chatty people and have conversations about gear or specs or mounts or whatever given thing was on their minds. I can't do that anymore really.

The only -- and I mean the only thing that has kept me on this realm is the fact that I really love my raiding guild, and I love the people in it. But there was literally nobody around. It was a giant, empty, non-social game. When patch 5.0.4 hit, suddenly I found myself in cities full of people again. Zones have tons of players to talk to. Are some of them rude? Of course they are. It is a given in a game that includes millions of players that you are going to run into rude people. But there are just as many that are pretty cool to talk to.

And the thing is, I would have never known these people existed without this feature.

What continually gets me down when people start talking about not wanting competition for nodes or farming or rares or just people that are jerks is that it seems, to me at least, that people are seeing this glass and automatically looking at it as half-empty. I'm a half-full kind of girl, and I like to see the best in everything. I find it makes life a lot easier, and I'm all the happier for it. It kind of depresses me that so many seem so willing to condemn something fresh off the bat, instead of looking for the positives and the potential, you know?

What I see with this feature is not a ton of new competition for stuff. I see a lot of potential for making a lot of new friends I never, ever would have met otherwise. I see, rather than a server community dying out, a new community emerging. And that community is huge. It's not just a community of players on a realm, it's a community of gamers that are all playing the game I love to play, no matter what server they are on.

Some of my favorite memories of this game are running around at BlizzCon and just reveling in the fact that I was surrounded by people that love this game as much as I do. I didn't care what server these people were on, I didn't really care whether they were Alliance or Horde. What I cared about was that there was a love for this game that was shared by so many, and it was really, really cool to be a part of that, even if it was only for a weekend.

With Cross-Realm zones, I get to experience a small piece of that in game every day. I don't play an MMO to play a solo game. I play it to make friends, talk to people, and just have fun. If I want to have fun by myself I'll go play Bastion or Skyrim any number of other single-player games. If I'm playing WoW, I want to meet people. It's what makes this game fun.

As for the more technical side of what Cross-Realm zones have to offer, today's roleplaying column will actually explain the mechanics in a little more detail, and point out some of those benefits people were wondering about.

CharlesEdwardson asked:

Q4TQ:Will I be able to queue for MoP dungeons as soon as the expansion goes live or will I have to first discover the dungeons before I can queue for them? Thank you!

The discovery feature has been scrapped from what I can see. As soon as you're a high enough level for the dungeon, you can go ahead and queue for it.

xChackOx asked:

I just received an email from "Newsletter@email.blizzard.com" with a promotion for 7 free days to "prepare for pandaria". Valid until Sept. 19. The message was not filtered out by gmail's spam filter, and checking the headers, the address looks valid. But I'm suspicious because I haven't read anywhere about this offer. The mail even included my account name, which is currently frozen.

Any ideas about the legitimacy of this mail? Has anyone else got it?

This is a legit email. However, as with all email offers, I suggest rather than clicking on any links in the email, you simply log in to Battle.net and check Account Management. Any legitimate offers you receive should be visible there.

BenSmith asked:

So, what are the actual rewards of pet battles? Is it just something fun to do, or are there actual benefits for your character that you can get from doing it? I'll do them either way I'm sure, but I haven't heard anything, so I was wondering.

It is purely for fun. There's no character benefits to doing it, other than the experience you get from taking quests to battle Pet Battle trainers, which can only be done once per account. Consider it a fun mini-game the scope of which we've never really seen in game before.

audbell1979 asked:

Two lore questions: 1. Has there been any indication of how many planets the Draenei hid on between Argus and Draenor? 2. Has it ever been confirmed who or what corrupted Sargeras since the accidental table-turning on the Eredar?

For your first question - nope! It can be assumed that there were many, mostly because they were planet hopping for quite some time before they actually settled on Draenor. But there's never been an exact number given.

As to your second question, from what I am aware there have been no other changes to the story beyond the change made in Burning Crusade. Sargeras corrupted the Eredar, not the other way around. But Sargeras was already fallen by that point in time. Sargeras wasn't really corrupted, however -- there wasn't anything that actively worked into his system in a physical fashion as far as we know.

It was more of an existential crisis of sorts. Sargeras, along with the rest of the Titans, was a creature of pure good. He could not fathom or comprehend evil as a concept. But he was faced with it day in and day out as part of his duties, and being faced with evil on a regular basis caused him to begin to question the nature of evil and chaos, and why it continued to persist despite the Titan's efforts to quash it.

That's a very dangerous line of questioning to follow, and in his internal debate, Sargeras went kind of crazy and assumed that since evil existed, that was the natural state of the universe. And because of this, what the Titans were doing was wrong, and everything he'd ever assumed about his duties was also wrong. Basically, he started thinking too hard and went kind of nuts.

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!