The Queue: The buffs, SoO with AQ, and linux

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.

This is my first Queue after being back from vacation. Did you all miss me?

Let's talk about not-cheese and not-how awesome San Francisco was.

TaxmanCDN asked:

Do you think these short, temporary buffs for valor and black prince rep & items to collect is a test to gauge interest? Is there a chance they could make one or both of the buffs permanent to bring people back to play until 6.0?

I certainly think they're gauging interest in the buffs, but I don't expect that they're going to make them permanent. I think they should, and I think they should continue to get more powerful the closer we get to the expansion -- but I'm not expecting it. Personally I'd have liked to see the buffs be in a series of buffs that roll out as reason to "finish off" all the content you weren't able to get to. That would attract players back, knowing that they didn't have to re-sub in a particular week, but could come back between now and the end of the expansion.

As I've said before, these buffs just leave a bad taste in my mouth. It's not that they're bad ideas, they're not, they just need a little more polish on them. They could be extremely useful in getting players back, if only the execution of them was modified a bit.

Ska asked:

What percentage of players who raided SoO do you think saw the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj event live? I doubt it's higher than 5%.

We don't know for certain, and I think that Blizzard is the only one who can answer with any sort of legitimacy. However, I think that 5% is too small. While a lot of players are new-er than Classic, there's a lot of players who have been around that long too. Not all of them have been playing the entire time, but they come back now and then. Moreover if you're talking about people who have raided SoO in normal and heroic mode, that number would be much larger. I know out of a guild I was recently in, the number of people that raided the old content when it was current was very high -- maybe 25 out of 30 people. I suspect that a lot of other people's stories would be the same.

But really, this is all just conjecture. Blizzard would know the answer, and I doubt they'd share it with us.

JD asked:

Has anyone made a serious effort at running the new WoW Client on Linux? I have heard several different stories related to WINE implementation of the PC client. Ane relevant links would be appreciated.

Fun fact: I prefer Ubuntu/Debian over Fedora. After all, how can I justify using KDE when I can choose Gnome ... :-) Thanks in advance! /salute

WoW will run through Wine on Linux. It's not pretty and doesn't always run the best, but it works. I've used it a while ago to do some auction house work on development computers when that's all that I've had around. I'd not expect to raid and mess around with that stuff though -- besides the graphics getting a bit much for the engine (at least a few years ago when I was doing it), the simple twitchy nature of WoW when its running on wine isn't ideal for those quick response moments.

Now I'm sure everyone will chime in and say "Wine is great! Use it! Better than Windows ME!" But if you're going to do anything serious, just dual boot. It's so easy these days it's not worth the hassle.

Sidenote: You can also check out CrossOver, it's a commercial application that handles DirectX/OpenGL much better. I know people have had success with it, however I haven't tried it myself.

And KDE's new platinum theme is pretty nifty. I'd check it out.

For links, check out the Wine homepage, the Ubuntu Wine page, and the Ubuntu WoW page.

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