The Queue: Bashiok is pretty pink

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.

So artist extraordinaire @Noxychu was busy doing BlizzCon badge art for some folks yesterday, and @Bashiok was getting his done. Only he had to run away to a Big Important Meeting at Blizzard HQ. Fortunately for him @CM_Crithto was available to take over and provide some editorial direction on the creation of Bashiok's badge.

I think the result speaks for itself; Noxychu and Crihto clearly make an amazing team, and should do Zarhym's badge next. You can watch Noxychu work over on her stream, when she's got it up. You can also check out Bashiok's finished badge.

P/S: Might I suggest an ascot for Zarhym? Every floating skull needs one.

SparkyShocker asked:

Why isn't phasing being used to implement the changes to the vale, so that the vale is normal for people not as far in the storyline (so they don't have to take out the Eternally Vale acheivement) and so that they can revert the destruction...assuming the Vale can be saved.

That's a great question, and one that I think would be interesting for Ghostcrawler or someone to answer. I suspect that it has to do with phasing the entire zone, something that would then just be akin to creating a new zone. While that's certainly doable (I mean obviously, given we get new zones all the time), it's probably not really technically wise since the zones would entirely sit on top of each other.

There's also something to be said about the concept of story units. Generally you want to move the story forward in a game in large areas, and not piece-wise create a world. In an MMO this is especially important since the world itself is part of the shared experience. When your friend sees something entirely different than you, it can be a major deterrent to social play, which is what WoW is all about.

Further consider what would happen if someone needed help with a quest and you were in the wrong version of the Vale, and had to spend many many hours to get to the same one as your friend. I don't know about you, but for me there'd be a large chance I'd just say screw it and stop.

Nonetheless, let's ask GC about this sometime. I'd like to know Blizzard's exact reasoning, even though I suspect it's a combination of the above.

Scott asked:

So, industry and media folks have been getting previews of EQNext for a few weeks now.

Project TITAN was pulled back and sent to redesign a few weeks ago.

Coincidence?

Yes, it's coincidence. I've been hearing rumblings about Titan being "reset" for a long while. I have that term in quotes because it wasn't reset like most people think. It's not like Blizzard took everything they've done and just threw it out.

I don't think I'm out of line either by saying that Titan hasn't been the smoothest project coming out of Irvine. Ever since I started here six years ago I've heard details about it, and it always seems to have something stopping it from showing up at BlizzCon.

Blizzard is doing something with it. What exactly I don't know (for real, we don't have the details), but I suspect that we'll find out something in 2014.

Erik4 asked:

So proving grounds is kind of doing this already, but a while ago I was thinking of ways to make class trainers closer to being as relevant as they once were. I came up with each trainer having a daily for you (ugh, I know, dailies) that was specific to your class and spec. It would familiarize you with your mechanics, play style and what not. They would have a few that you could go through, but only one that you can do each day. What do you think?

I have nothing to add to this brilliant idea, other than please do this Blizzard.

K. Thx. Bai.

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