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The Queue: Wherein we learn new slang
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's (almost) daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. Today we're going to hit a bunch of quick, short questions, which means today's edition of The Queue might be a wee bit short compared to some of Allison's epics. Picture above completely unrelated to anything written below. It just looks pretty freaking sweet, doesn't it?ikandiman asked..."I have been trying to get the last Brewfest achievement for my Warlock, but every time I get smashed and jump off the elevator in Shattrath (with my Skyguard's Drape to slow fall) I never get the bloody Drunken Stupor achievement. Had no problem with my mage and paladin. What gives?"
Breakfast Topic: What do you think of region-specific pets?
European gamers are not happy bunnies. Blizzard implemented rolling restarts to remove whatever bug had allowed gamers to get themselves a Battle Bot pet. Yes, they stood before European WoW players and said: 'No you shall not have a Bot' leaving them feeling unloved and bereft. It does kind of make sense though given Mountain Dew is almost unheard of in Europe.This is that first time that I can recall when Blizzard have made a non-combat pet region-exclusive. However with the promise of a Jade Green Panda (most likely a gift to compensate all the millions of Chinese players who have been without WoW for weeks during the transition from The9 to NetEase) I don't think it will be the last. So, dear readers, what do you feel about region-specific pets? Do you think they're a great idea to reward gamers in a specific region? Not got a Battle Bot and a feeling a little neglected? Do you think Blizzard should just give every players the ability to get a pet rather than make it region/account specific?
Mountain Dew pets not for EU gamers
This was going to be a post about how EU gamers can still attain the Mountain Dew Battle-Bot pets even though the warning above says they're for US folks only, but never mind -- Blizzard's server alert says they are putting out a hotfix on the EU realms to remove any and all pets that made it through their guard. Some people could get the pets just by clicking through, and some people couldn't, but Blizzard says no -- the Mountain Dew promotion is apparently for US folks only, and anyone who has one on the EU realms won't for long. Players are understandably frustrated, though some of them are happy that if they can't have one, no one can. MVPs on the forums are saying that the pet is also available in Canada, even if the soda promotion isn't, but that may change as well.Pretty poor show. Sure, Mountain Dew's rules say US-only, but they definitely should have realized that there were plenty of EU players who would want in on the promotion. We doubt this is over -- it would certainly be a mark on their campaign that would engender a lot of ill will, and Blizzard will likely try to find some way to get the in-game pet up and running on the EU realms.
Breakfast Topic: Have you turned to the Dark Side (of Battle.Net)?
I'd been holding off on merging my World of Warcraft account with Battle.Net account for a while now. I really didn't see the point, even though I'm certain to buy Diablo 3 and StarCraft 2 when they come out... soon®. I also haven't been hearing too many good things about the service, although to be fair, log-in problems happen to all World of Warcraft accounts whether they've been merged or not. I didn't really think about it much until yesterday, when Battle-Bots became available over at the Mountain Dew Game Fuel site.It's a trap. I mean, this is Blizzard's not-so-subtle ploy to get everyone to merge their accounts into Battle.Net. And boy it's a really good one. The thing is, even scammers seem to think that Battle.Net is a good idea -- hacked accounts are immediately converted to Battle.Net to make it harder to recover -- so it might be better to beat them to the punch. I'm not too worried about account security since I've got an Authenticator, but Battle.Net has now become much more attractive to me now that there's a Battle-Bot bribe thrown into the mix. What do you think? Do you guys have Battle.Net accounts? Is the Battle-Bot worth it? Or is Battle.Net the spawn of the devil? %Poll-30983%
Mountain Dew Battle Bots now live
Mountain Dew Game Fuel, WoW-themed flavors of the popular beverage in red and blue (for the Horde and Alliance, respectively), is out in the wild, and at least one of our writers is already a big fan. To show how much they love you (or rather, to try to get you to buy their soda), Mountain Dew will give you a free in-game Battle Bot pet, just for clicking a button on their web site! The button is towards the lower-right, and it'll redirect you to log in to your Battle.net account. Don't worry, it's safe - you can tell by the Battle.net URL. He's a cute little guy. You can see a few screenshots I took in the gallery below. Apparently you get in-game fuel for your pet, again in red or blue, and when you fuel them up, they will fight opposite colors. If you give your pet blue fuel and the guy next to you gives it red, expect some robot-on-robot fighting action. I'm not sure if you have to get the appropriate fuel for your faction, since it seems you can only get one in-game item per day, and I already got my battle bot. I'll try it tomorrow and see how it goes. Edit: It looks like we've killed the Mountain Dew website. Keep trying though, it's bound to come back up sometime... Edit 2: The pet is mailed to all of your characters, so you don't have to decide which one gets it. %Gallery-65571%
Game Fuel pets for all. Sort of.
Worried about your chances of winning one of the battlebot pets from the Game Fuel promotion? Worry no more! Over the weekend, a Mountain Dew representative stated on their forums that everyone who registers and participates in the promotion will get one. The pet is not one of the items you need to win from the tokens we've been grinding RL dailies for. If you don't care about winning the Razer or AlienWare products, you can stop grinding your Badges of Dew.Pets codes have not been distributed yet, so don't panic if you haven't gotten one. Remember that these pets are only going into the game itself as of today, so even if they sent out the codes as soon as you registered, you wouldn't have been able to use it yet. Remember, this is unfortunately a US-only promotion. I can't condone people from other parts of the world trying to work around that, but... you're not going to see me trying to stop you, either. Enjoy your robot, (not really) everyone!
Mountain Dew Game Fuel site launches for reals
Update: This promotion seems to be US only. Sorry, rest of the world. Hopefully you guys will get something like this soon as well. China had a Coke promo, so maybe the EU/Oceania will get a turn sooner or later.The Mountain Dew Game Fuel site is officially live, and we're all free to earn lots and lots of tokens. You'll need to register first, so be prepared to hand over a fair amount of personal information. They want the usual things, like your name and birthdate and home address. If I had to guess, I would say they need all of that for contest reasons. You always need to ask those things so you don't run into any regional legal issues.Now, tokens. How do you get tokens? There's a full list of ways to earn them on the official site (that you need to be logged in to see,) but I can tell you this: Almost all of them involve clicking on some random links scattered around the internet. Watching videos on their site, clicking banners on Facebook, going to their Twitter page, all of that sort of thing. Time to start setting up a Mountain Dew bookmarks folder, folks.There's also an FAQ that confirms one of our suspicions: Yes, a WoW vanity pet is one of the potential prizes you can win. It doesn't state what it is, but we can all safely assume it's the battlebots we posted about previously. Among the potential prizes is a trip to BlizzCon as well, so if you can't afford the trip yourself, you ought to start hoarding tokens.
New in-game battle bots connected to Mountain Dew?
Yesterday MMO-Champion posted a few new finds in the patch files. Namely a series of "Battle-bots" which act as a mini-pet. There's not many details as to what exactly they are or what they do, but it does look like there are several abilities we'll be able to control.Here's where it gets interesting. One bot state is blue, and one bot state is red. These blue and red colors match up pretty darn close to the Mountain Dew product that's on the horizon. Take a look after the break for side-by-side comparisons.But wait, there's more.
