The Queue: Beggars, mounters, and dungeon runners

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.

Nice questions in the Queue today. And I must say, it's a nice day out over all.

I just love it when it's 90 and humid.

Hint: I'm being sarcastic... very sarcastic.

Jeff "The Dude" LaBowski asked:

Why isn't begging for gold in WoW a ban worthy offense? Other than duel spam or guild invite spam, it's gotta be the most annoying thing.

First and foremost, if someone is spamming chat with junk, then it is a disciplinary offense. It won't result in a ban right away, but eventually they'll get there and go away.

Secondly, I encourage the use of the ignore function. These people will pop up all the time, banable offense or not -- best just to ignore them and move on.

Finally, I think that it's okay that it's not an auto-ban. WoW is, at its heart, a game about a story set in an old universe of knights and lore. Back in the days of our knights, there were beggars out in the streets (sadly there still are, too). Why wouldn't they exist in WoW? So some players decide to spend their days doing that, there's NPCs that are doing that too. The players are just deciding to support the NPCs' mission of begging and being annoying. Best just to ignore them all, just like I ignore everything Bud does.

Fraser asked:

So i made a hunter the other day, shes lvl 42 and has 143 gold with nothing from any of my alts, all earned from questing and vendoring. Dont you think the kids have it to good for gold these days? 9 years I couldnt even afford my lvl 40 mount, I feel like im a millionaire

I actually don't think that gold means as much as you think it means. While you're right that the gold is a heck of a lot more than we used to have 10 years ago, it doesn't go nearly as far as it should. What are you going to get out of all that? Your riding skills and a mount, and maybe a few backpacks. That'll be it. Everything else of substance is going to be too expensive for you on the auction house.

I remember players at 60 that didn't even have their first mount yet, let alone epic riding. Ten years ago that was ok from a gameplay perspective. Today? You can't be taken seriously as a game if you're going to force that kind of slow travel onto players. So yes, there's more gold, but the standards have changed so much that it's been necessitated, but only to bring people up to the bare minimum of modern playability.

Ska asked:

I remember hearing a few months ago that Blizzard had a way to make classic dungeons challenging at max level by scaling down the player's stats. Whatever happened to that idea? I haven't seen it in the official previews.

This was originally a bug or a feature test that made it into the codebase. We haven't heard anything beyond that, and I wouldn't expect to either. Blizzard certainly could develop the technology out more to allow for low-level dungeon runs at max level, and reward them appropriately with some sort of system, but for now we're not going to see it.

At some point Blizzard will need to tackle this and make it a reality. WoW has too deep of an archive of historical content to just let rot, and I feel that in some regards it already has. Granted heroic revamps takes care of things every expansion to a dungeon or two -- but when was the last time you were back in heroic Deadmines? I haven't done the BC and Wrath dungeons forever. Maybe I'll do them this weekend, come to think of it.

Anyways, my point being, Blizzard should fix this. I think they realize the problem they have, and while downgrading won't happen soon, I'm not going to be surprised when something is announced.

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!