The Queue: The SimCity
Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky (@adamholisky) will be your host today.
I said in the last Queue I wouldn't do it, but then things kept getting worse. So let me take three paragraphs and expunge about SimCity, Maxis, and EA for a moment. Briefly, there are major problems with SimCity, namely that no one is able to play much, if at all. Severs have been crashing, the client locks up at unexpected times, and any work you do can be lost in an instant. Not a good situation for a game series that helped define video games in the 1990s.
But wait, you ask, isn't that just like what happened with Diablo 3? No, it's not, I say. With D3 we had a game that didn't work well out of the starting gates too, but at no point along the way did Blizzard and their community reps try to say otherwise. It was obvious, and they acknowledged as much and kept everyone informed. While we were all still pissed, at least we knew what was happening and what was being done.
On the other hand you have EA, who initially put up tweets saying SimCity was live, up and running. Only thing was at the time, no one (literally no one) could access it because Origin wasn't letting people download the game. Only eventually through their personal Twitter and Reddit accounts did Maxis personnel start to give us insight into the problems caused by Origin and EA. And finally after an insanely long delay did any official word come out of EA. Where Blizzard had a unified, quick, and professional response, EA has a fractured, bumbling, and an entirely untimely response to a problem that is threatening to tank the entire franchise of one of the few games that rivals World of Warcraft in its fan's devotion.
The only saving grace for EA is that I hear it's quite easy to get a refund for SimCity if you ask nicely.
Demonreach asked:
Has anyone done any kind of study to see it you actually get the same amount of loot using group loot as compared to the old method of individually looting? To me it definitively seems less
Drop rates are tracked through Wowhead and the likes, and there's never been any sort of global decrease, no matter the source/reason. What you're experiencing is just a false connection of events, they actually don't have any causality associated with them.
Demonreach also asked:
My new toon is going to be a Warlock, do we know yet what mob drops Sealed Tome of the Lost Legion yet? Besides being level 90 do I have to be pretty well geared to be able to complete this?
Regarding gearing, you don't need to be terribly well geared, but I wouldn't go in there in quest greens. I'd suspect that anyone in dungeon blues would be fine, and certainly in 5.0 LFR gear. You most certainly do not need to have 5.2 gear.
As far as the drop goes, it has a chance to drop from any mob on the Isle of Thunder. Rare mobs have, reportedly, a much higher drop rate. My guess, and I don't have much to back this up other than the historical nature of WoW, is that you'll get it eventually if you just work on the dailies out there, and maybe kill a rare mob or two. My main is a warlock too, and I'm not worried about picking it up eventually.
Sethpat asked:
There was some emphasis on an unknown feature being released with 5.2. I have yet to figure out what exactly it was that the Devs were so excited about. Has anyone else?
When Ghostcrawler made the hint, he never specified it was for patch 5.2, just MoP in general. That doesn't mean we're not going to see it in 5.3 or something, but it's obviously not now.
And keep in mind that Ghostcrawler made a pretty far reaching statement with that (I'm sure he'd agree). When such long-term statements are made, there's a lot of room for things to change. Don't be mad if we don't get a surprise feature, and if it the aforementioned feature somehow gets worked into REDACTED, the next expansion.
Cgulliver asked:
when will your mobile site be fixed so we can view comments again? It has been almost a month..fix it already
If I had any power to fix things it would have been done already. Unfortunately Alex and I don't have the ability, so we're made the request elsewhere. Hopefully soon! Believe me, I want it fixed more then you -- I'm rather tired of getting emails and tweets about it.
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!
