The Queue: Alphas, garrisons, pre-orders, and more

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

How about that alpha news, eh?

DespicableBrad asked:

With Blizzard changing the data format from MPQ to the new CASC format, will things like WoW Model Viewer still work, or will those programs need a funamental update in order to read the new data files? Given the amount of data mining happening, I'm guessing the formats are interchangeable...? If not, I'm curious: how are the data miners viewing the files and extracting graphics from it?

All of those programs will need to be reworked. For the most part, the tools dataminers were using previously are broken. The sites that are datamining right now have updated or rewritten their tools to do it. Generally, those sites consider their personal tools to be proprietary. They won't share them.

Heroes of the Storm's alpha provided some warning on that front. Heroes of the Storm uses CASC and some people guessed correctly that all other Blizzard games will use it going forward.

stephpaul7 asked:

I was asked by a friend ingame the other day whether we would receive another free 90 when WoD comes out aswell as the one supplied with the pre-order. I have no idea on this, I thought pre-order was it. Can you share any light?

You only get one free boost. The free one comes with the box, and if you pre-ordered, that's the one they gave you. You just got it early as part of the pre-order.

mrespman asked:

Has there been a confirmation that the legendary cloak/effect can be transmogged? This late in the expansion, since I don't really raid with a group or PvP anymore, I don't want to do the work only to have the cloak not serve a purpose.

As far as I know, nothing definitive has been said about the cloak in particularly. However, legendaries can't be used in transmog as a standing rule, so I doubt the cloak will be difference. The rule might change one day, though.

hnevard asked:

Where did Wrathion even get all of his riches from?

Wrathion is the heir of the Black Dragonflight. Black Dragons are notorious for wheedling their way into mortal societies and becoming bigshots within them. Considering Wrathion has put so much time and effort into killing off his relatives, he probably took their wealth as his own.

@agane2 asked:

would you say this recent influx of WoD news helps relieve some tension waiting? Or are we waiting for bigger stuff?

For those of us here at WoW Insider, it's a big help. For awhile there, we had very little World of Warcraft news to work with. While we'll always write about other Blizzard games and you'll still see that throughout the alpha and into the future, we had to lean on them more heavily than usual. Much of our time was spent going "Now what?" I imagine many players felt the same! I think there are a numbe of people out there that aren't going to get hyped about datamining and will only feel the relief when the alpha/beta is accessible, though.

@DaigotsuDavid asked:

Are garrisons going to have buildings based on the char's race or go with orc/human for Horde/Alliance respectively?

Last we heard, it's only orc/human. There are a lot of art assets involved in the garrison. From the last explanation from Blizzard, if they made unique assets for every race in the game, it would be the equivalent of developing art assets for an entire raid zone or more. We would lose something major in exchange for unique racial garrisons. I think it would be very cool to have those unique garrisons, but maybe not worth losing out on raids/dungeons, or delaying Warlords even more.

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!