Today's Queue is heavy on the WoW Insider and light on the WoW. Sorry about that.
benjamin asked:
What happened to the holy paladin column?
This has been asked frequently enough that I suppose I should address it. Be warned, this is going to be a little businessy.
When Chase stepped down as holy paladin columnist, we took a good look at the sort of traffic our class columns pull in. Some are more popular than others, but holy paladin was the bottom of the barrel. The columns that were little more than gear lists did great -- everybody likes lists -- but anything resembling editorial (in this context, editorial means full written paragraphs) was read by very few people.
WoW Insider is a paying gig, so we put money into everything we post on our site. To be able to continue operating the site, we need some return on the investment. We just weren't seeing it. I was willing to keep it going anyway as a service to its longtime readers if we had someone on staff willing to take it up. However, nobody on site seems to play one -- at least, not enough to write about it with any degree of authority. Then the question became: If editorial isn't working for this class, should we really hire someone to fill the role? To see a return on investment, we would be hiring someone to do nothing but post gear lists and stat priorities with very little original written word. That's just not what we're about, so I decided not to make a new hire.
Right now, rather than bloat our staff unnecessarily, we're really trying to provide more opportunities for our staffers who do really well. You've all seen a lot more Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney lately, plus a little more from some other staffers like Robin Torres, Megan O'Neill, Olivia Grace, and so on. Giving our strong, existing talent more opportunities is what we're pushing for right now.
That said, if someone on staff picks up a holy paladin over the course of Mists, they're welcome to write the column. If it comes back, it will be on a biweekly basis. That was our compromise with the spec-specific columns across the board. Protection and retribution, for example, are biweekly rather than weekly, as they used to be. You can only write so much about one particular spec before you start churning out fluff nobody will read, especially between patches and expansions. Biweekly schedules cut down on the fluff.
And since I'm already on the topic, I know that both shadow priests and enhancement/elemental shaman have seen little love lately. Dawn Moore will have a shadow column for you some time this week, and Josh Myers will be back with shaman content in early September. Late expansion burnout piled on top of uncontrollably busy summer schedules made a real mess of things.
Hopefully that was a satisfactory answer. We hate cutting out content we've been producing for years, but sometimes it's the best option for the health of the site. Bigger staff doesn't always mean better content.
Wow, that was a lot of words. To keep this Queue from being 100% business talk, let's hit this one:
cruteon asked:
With druids getting a fourth spec in MoP, do you think that at some point in the future that Blizzard would give some other races additional specs as well? I for one would love to see Mages get a Time Wizard spec or something along those lines.
I really don't think so. The problem with druids is the feral tree was simultaneously a DPS tree and a tanking tree. That caused all sorts of balance problems over the years. Imagine if every other tank spec had to be balanced around their DPS specs. That's just a mess. Splitting the two up let Blizzard give each spec the breathing room they need to do their individual jobs properly. Other classes simply do not have that problem; it's a uniquely druid concern.
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! Filed under: The Queue
Source: http://wow.joystiq.com/2012/08/20/the-queue-business-and-talent-specs/
bachmann bachmann iowa caucus results sickle cell trait michigan football michigan football sugar bowl
No comments:
Post a Comment