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You can't talk to the enemy in the World of Warcraft. Shouting "KEK" when you're on your Alliance character doesn't read as "LOL" to the Horde players, no matter how many times you've heard that rumor. You can't Mind Control the enemy and then babble away in your own tongue (although that did work for one amazing, once-upon-a-time period in a long-ago patch). The truth is, trying to leapfrog the Alliance/Horde language barrier is a bannable offense; you're just not supposed to talk to the enemy.

That said, there is a way you can make your intentions known to players of the opposite faction: standard, pre-set emotes. The only emotes that work between factions are the ones that are already in place in the game. Creating your own emote by typing "/e yourmessage" only works for players of your own faction; for others, it translates to "X makes some strange gestures" – pretty antagonistic, really, no matter what you're actually intending to convey.

Some days, I just don't feel like playing my main character, so I hop onto an alt. Before long, I encounter some poor clothie of the opposite faction camping an elite quest mob hoping that someone else will show up and offer to group. Usually, the ground is speckled with skeletons.

Then the dance ensues. I salute, and the Mage waves. The Mage starts /saying things that I don't understand. I shrug. I wait for awhile, hoping that this will signal that I am willing to let the Mage go first. I'm hoping that my politeness infers that I will help.

Finally, I point at the Mage, then at the mob. Taking a leap of faith, the Mage tags it, and I run around behind to help, perhaps with a guildmate at my side.

After our parting farewells, I sit down to await a respawn. Personally, I think it would be much easier if I could say "I'm here to save the day!" or "I come in peace." Of course, there is some charm involved in finding a way to use our current emotes to communicate other messages, especially after Blizz added new ones in 2008.

How do you communicate to a player of the opposite faction messages that aren't directly built-in to emotes? Are you aching for a certain emote that would help you do this, or do you enjoy having to puzzle it out by piecing together existing ones?

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft.

The image I used for yesterday's The Queue raised some eyebrows, with a lot of people wondering what it was or where it was from. It's just one of a series of paintings throughout Dalaran of the various player races. There are some hanging in the inns, some in the shops, et cetera. My plan was to cycle through them all over the next week or so, and random selection gave me the incredibusty human female first. It might be interesting to note that I'm pretty sure that painting is a nod to Tifa Lockhart of Final Fantasy 7. It could also just be a regular ol' human female wearing the level 1 Warrior starting gear. Who knows?

Today you get the Female Blood Elf, and now let's get the Q&A started.

Plaguenog said...

Any chance they'll let me use Badges of Justice to buy new badges? Or possibly a reduction in prices for lvl 7o badge gear? I'm basically looking for any reason NOT to use as many of my lvl 70 badges for gems to Auction off.

We knew that Wrath was going to bring new emotes (and some of them were even suggested by players), and now Blizzard has posted the full list, complete with which emotes have animations and voices, and none or both. The /cower is the most hilarious one I've seen so far -- the Night Elf /cower is just terrific. And some of these are old and just not very well known -- /nosepick, I'm pretty sure, has been in there since the beginning, but I don't remember ever seeing anyone use it in game.

Unfortunately, they don't mark which are new and which aren't, but I believe /incoming is a new one. I've never tried out /sing or /ding. and /doh looks new to me as well. But odds are that there are at least a few you haven't tried yet, and we do know that lots of the animations are new for sure.

So get in there and try out some emoting -- if there's an especially funny one you find, let us know for sure.

Update: Commenter Jason M. nabbed this cache of the page from the Wayback machine so we can see what's old and new for sure. Thanks!

We have a few more questions about the passenger mounts today, but a lot of Mammoth-related questions are repeats of ones we've answered previously. So if you still have a question about them after today, I recommend checking the last few editions of Ask a Beta Tester to see if it's been answered already. Now, let's get started with Iceman's question...

Are the flying passenger mounts? Ground mounts are lovely and all, but once everyone takes to the skies will they become useless to everyone with cold weather flying?

I haven't seen any flying passenger mounts yet. Whether the passenger ground mounts are 'useless' or not with Cold Weather Flying is really up to the individual. You can still use it in the old world, you can still use the Mammoth's vendors. There are also places like Lake Wintergrasp where flying is turned off permanently so you don't 'cheat' and skip over all of the fighting to get from Point A to Point B. You and a bunch of your friends charging people down in a huge Mammoth is sweet.

If you don't care about any of that stuff though, yeah it could be seen as useless. It's an optional purchase, though. You don't need to spend the money if you don't want to do so.

Everyone knows that bears are actually pretty good fishermen, but for some reason Ferals have to shift back out of form and use a pole like everyone else. That may be changing, however. Andrige, the same person who bought us the new data-mined Hairstyles, has discovered the animations showcased in the above video, which point to the possibility of more life injected into the old Druid Feral forms.

One animation called EmoteEat shows the bear bracing a piece of food against the ground with his paw while tearing off a chunk with his teeth, while another is a fishing animation where the bear looks to be pawing at the water, waiting to slap out a fish. The other exciting thing in the video is the possibility of a closed mouth on my bear! Do you know how many flies he's caught with that constantly open mouth of his?

I logged onto my Druid on the Beta servers to check on the status of the animations. While you can now eat, drink and use potions in Feral forms on Beta, there are still no animations associated with the act (You simply sit down while eating). In addition, you can't fish at all in Feral forms (Trying to cast my line put me back in Night Elf form).

Unfortunately, the fact that these animations haven't been implemented yet does lead me to a bit of pessimistic thought: They simply be meant for bear mobs, and not for Feral bears at all. Blizzard's been adding a lot of cool little idle animations to mobs, such as mama beasts who flush out critters for their cubs to chase and eat, so this may simply be one more set. Still, since they exist, they could easily be added on to the Feral bear's animation list in a future patch even if they aren't originally meant for Ferals. Here's hoping we see them there!

Understandably, everyone is begging to know more about the Death Knight class. At WWI, the Blizzard developers discussed the class in depth at both the main Development panel as well as at the Q&A panel. So you don't have to go fishing everywhere to find what you want to know, here's a roundup of new information about Death Knights from WWI so far.

Starting Area

The Death Knight starting area will be an extended area in Northern Plaguelands. The developers feel strongly about keeping people interested in playing in the Old World so they are creating this new zone. I personally hate every zone that has the word "plague" associated with it. Admittedly, I didn't reach either of the current Plaguelands until after I'd upgraded to The Burning Crusade, which meant I really had no time for grinding there since Outland awaited alluringly. However, it will be interesting to see if they make changes to the existing Western and Eastern Plaguelands along with adding content to the North to make these areas more interesting to players -- be they Death Knights or not.

I know I've complained a bit about Warcraft's lack of character customization, but I must say that it seems like they've been slowly but surely taking steps to make things better on that front. There's the dance studio and the barber shop incoming, of course, but here's another leak that's popped up from the Alpha: New emotes!

I know it sounds silly, but having pre-made emotes can really add to the fun factor of playing your character. Add them in macros (but don't spam them, that's just annoying) or use them to register your enjoyment, surprise, shock, or disgust at the situation. There's some really good ones in here that I've been wanting for a while -- although, word to wise, Blizzard: Facepalming is generally done with one palm, not two. I know you've seen the facepalm ASCII on the General Forums, too. Also, I would like to thank you for allowing me to finally act as my hero, Phoenix Wright, through the magic of emotes.

I know it's just a minor thing, but still, I'm looking forward to having a bit more variety in playing with my character in the social part of the game. Now if we could only get outfits and player housing too...

[Via Deathknight.info]

I have mentioned before that I am a sucker for practical jokes. I fall for emote humor all the time. In EQ, I fell for the pickpocket joke. And the BG joke that is definitely a little mean has gotten me as well. So I am always happy to hear that I am not the only sucker around and tonight much of my guild fell for a little ninja loot humor.

Narayan is a Boomkin. So there is no way he should be looting the Seventh Ring of the Tirisfalen. Even if he were a Feral Druid, he still wouldn't need all of that shield stuff. But for a minute, most of the people in Tempest Keep seemed to forget that loot text is green and not orange. To say that the tank was a little miffed would be an understatement. But my guildies have a great sense of humor, so there will be no ensuing drama reported in Guildwatch.

Have you fallen for an emote practical joke? Or are you the emote joke perpetrator? What is your favorite /e humor?

Sorandra over on Livejournal has an interesting bug happening when she runs WoW in Vista-- her female draenei is showing a different skin in different situations. Out of water, she's got the face you see up on the left. But in water, a different face appears. It looks like her toon just really hates water.

Of course it's just a texture error (a known one, at that), most likely fixed by updating her video drivers. But it does kind of make you wonder a little bit why Blizzard doesn't bother implementing something like this for real, and making characters actually show facial animations. Sure, the mouths move, but we can't actually frown when we /frown or smile when we /smile. If it's this easy to change the face textures, it seems like it would be just as easy to show displeasure for real.

The only obstacle might be that they'd have to design different textures for each gender and race, which would take a bit of time (time probably best spent on the actual patches and expansions). Still, a little more emotion would be fun to have. If Blizzard ever gets around to doing a graphics overhaul (much like Dark Age of Camelot has done with one of their expansions), hopefully something like this will be on the list.

Impossibility over on the WoW Ladies Livejournal is, I'm sure she'll agree, a newbie. But she did just finish Deadmines (grats!), and she was surprised, after completing the instance, to see the message above. Her rogue ripped her off!

Now, as she soon learned, she didn't really get pickpocketed-- rogues can only pickpocket mobs, not players. But she did get emoted-- what happened was that the player typed "/e successfully steals.." and it appeared like that above. You can do all kinds of fun things with emotes, because although they always appear in orange (in the default UI), players, even experienced ones, can get them confused with all the other messages coming by. The most common trick is usually "/e rolls 99 (1 - 100)", which looks like you got a really nice roll (except for the color, of course, which makes the trick easy to spot in a big list of rolls). Another good one is "/e receives [Sword of Awesomeness]," or just shift-click whatever item you want it to look like you just looted something cool on your own.

A warning: Just like the old Piccolo, lots of players usually find this more annoying than funny, so use it at your own peril (and you should never use it to try and rip other players off-- alert players will know exactly what you're doing, and then you're in real trouble). But a little levity sometimes goes a long way, and it's a fun trick to use once in a while.

Blizzard is looking to expand the different emotes available within the game, and they're looking to the forums for suggestions. While you can always type out emotes if you want something especially custom, the pre-defined emotes are the only way to express yourself to the opposing faction. So, do you think the the game needs a /learn2play emote? Suggest it here.

It's those little things that make Azeroth a fun place to be -- and these days, it seems no MMO can get away without a /dance emote. The list of emotes you can perform ingame is quite long (hit the "Read" link for the official rundown), and you can even create your own using /me -- although opposing factions will only see indecipherable gestures if you use anything but pre-approved commands.

What's your favourite in-game emote? If you could add your own to the pre-approved list, what would it be?

If I'm questing in a contested zone and I really don't want to be bothered, I tend to fire off a macro at approaching Alliance players -- /hug, /kiss, /bow -- which is supposed to tell them that I'm feeling peaceful and want to make my offerings to the Earthmother rather than kill Alliance. Unfortunately, I end up getting ganked anyway, but c'est la vie. A more specific emote might help -- "Player is deeply absorbed in her given task and does not feel that today is a day for war" -- but people would likely gank me out of spite. I don't mind ganking, but there are some days when you only have an hour to play and you really want to get all those bear livers!