I’m with you, hopefully it’s the latter and not the former because it seems almost over-vigilant on Blizzard’s part, but I can also understand it in a way. Your explanation is a super fun and wholesome take on it though, Dwarves fighting alongside Orcs realizing it wasn’t ‘kek’ the whole time strikes a funny chord for me.
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Side note: Finally watched the most recent episode of HotD… Aemond really said ‘Lor’themar Theron’ when he hit puberty, huh? Viserys also a contender for the new Lich King, damn.
Overall though, spicy meatball of an episode. I could feel the tension through my TV screen.
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The Deaths of Chromie quest chain has 4 different armor sets as rewards. None of them show up in the collection panel until collected. You will need to do the quest chain on characters with four different armor types to get them all. I’ve had the plate one for a while, and I just got the Cloth one yesterday.
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Sorry for spamming the lounge, but I wanted to add something else. I think an often-overlooked source of goldmaking are the Nat Pagle pets from the Garrison, the Sea Calf and the Land Shark. They each sell for quite a lot of gold on the Auction House. I just had a Sea Calf sell for 50k gold. It was up for about two weeks, give or take.
Edit: I actually set it to 30k yesterday, down from 50k, and it sold quickly.
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I do think it’s Blizz overcorrecting but that’d be cool world building.
A lot of these fixes just sort of puzzle me. Like in the Sludgefields Warden Stillwater no longer confuses Johnny Awesome for a woman named Jenny. Now I’m not going to judge on how you feel about that joke, but it was a joke. Now he just seems to have a genuine romantic attraction that to me at least comes off like Netflix briefly flagging Dahmer with the LGBTQ+ label. And hey nobody said all representation has to be positive but making one of the Horde’s only openly gay men be a depraved psychopath even by RAS’s subterranean standards is maybe not the best idea.
On the linguistics angle I do wish they’d do more with it. But language seems almost non-canon. All the characters communicate without issue whenever they need to.
Like there’s a great bit in Shadow’s Rising where Shaw knows Zandali and is trying to make small talk with his Zandalari guards just to ease the boredom.
It’s a great character moment as it shows Shaw is actually pretty worldly and seems to have a genuine interest in other cultures. Where the world a better place he might just be an anthropologist but it isn’t so he weaponizes that talent in his spymaster career.
And it’s a really cool moment. But it only exists in that vaccum. Because otherwise language and in particular the time and effort it takes to learn one is never addressed.
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Just another daily dose of wishing people a great day 
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I am though appreciative in the no win scenario Blizz finds itself in. As WoW exists simultaneously as a modern game and one old enough to vote come November 23rd of this year. It’s also always had a comedic edge, and comedy of all art forms is the quickest to age and age poorly at that.
Seriously going through Cata content I occasionally find myself really confused because it’s referencing like a 12 year old meme that quite obviously didn’t stand the test of time.
So you’re in this weird position where the game can’t really be taken as a time capsule as it’s being advertised as a new product for modern audiences. But so much older stuff is borderline impossible to fix without redoing the whole questline or zone. And as WoW is really the first game of this scale to exist in this bizarre unstuck in time place, they have to figure it out on the fly.
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Personally, I’m OK with the changes. None of these issues bothered me enough to need them changed, but they did bother me.
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The mark of a good writer is someone who knows how to incorporate language into their world building. Your example in Shadows Rising is the same reason why Shadows Of The Horde is my favorite WoW novel. Tyrathen Khort and Voljin are able to connect better because he knows Zandali and gives a great explanation on how he knows it. Christie Golden doesn’t do that sort of thing. I don’t think she’s ever incorporated language difference in her writing.
Let’s take the Sylvanas novel as an example. When Nathanos and Sylvanas meet they immediately talk to each other with perfect linguistic understanding. But what language are they speaking in? What does one of the characters think about the other talking in their primary language? That’s not explored there at all.
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It’s a fairly unique situation. I’m generally against in particular retroactive censorship as it’s generally used to sweep problematic stuff under the rug. I give Warner Bros crap all the time but I respect the integrity of still having older, offensive films and cartoons avalible. Because I feel they still can have tremendous historical and anthropological value even if the art itself is crap. As opposed to say Disney where I’m pretty sure you get black bagged by a man in a Donald Duck costume if you start asking about Song Of The South near Splashmountain.
But WoW’s situation as both product and art is in this weird Billy Pilgrim situation makes me more sympathetic. And the only solution I can puzzle is using expansions to update older content while offering the old versions in their Classic form, sealed behind glass for posterity’s sake.
But that isn’t going to have enough of a profit to effort ratio. So we get these janky edits that at least are funny as they manage to be problematic in new and exciting ways. It’s like watching a man put out a garbage fire by dumping raw sewage on it. Haven’t really solved the issue as we’ve replaced it.
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WB’s disclaimer before the old stuff is a really good solution, but yeah, it doesn’t really apply here – you want the world to feel seamless. And while WoW is far from seamless, some pasteovers are usually an improvement.
That said, I am not particularly fussed about archival stuff. We are literally incapable of recording everything we make indefinitely; the size of what we make scales as fast as the storage we have. When we can preserve history, I’m for it, but I accept it won’t always last.
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True but I do feel the idea to preserve history for it’s own sake is a fairly new development historically speaking, and video games in particular have the “Ozymandias” worse than most other art mediums. As there was a tendency to advance to the newest hardware ASAP in a way that never effected anything else. It’s not like painters had to quit the second they invented photography.
And it’s particularly frustrating as we already did this with film. There’s a lot of early films lost to time. Some to stuff like world wars, but most because once they stopped bringing audiences in they were tossed out. No effort was made to preserve them. And man contrary to popular belief history does not repeat often, but it sure does rhyme a lot.
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I disconnected for reasons related to (probably) being in rural Alaska where wind exists, internet came back immediatly, I decided to hop back on but on a different toon…
Yeta, my tauren shaman, is still waiting by the PvP vendor. Makes me kind of wish I could have my toons all be hanging out somewhere.
Probably Rachet or Booty Bay. I may complain about goblins, but they know how to put together a fun neutral town, I tell you what.
…Except Ratchet isn’t neutral anymore, is it? Was it ever? Man. Maybe I should level in the overworld again instead of just throwing myself into the FIGHT BOX for 60 levels straight.
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Award for the best name tho.
I am maybe bias because I do quite love Goblins, but playing back Classic made me REALLY appreciate Booty Bay and how immersive it felt to get there, especially braving the perils of Southern STV without a mount on a PvP server. GOBLINS TAKE ME HOOOOME!
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Just your favorite panda wishing everyone a wonderful day 
That is just because there are no other frequent panda posters. Almost makes you the favorite by default.
Hanashi used to post. They were always positive and friendly. They would be my favorite panda poster if they still posted.
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I remember Hanashi. Such a sweet person. Hope they’re doing okay.
There used to be a few panda posters that I liked/followed on here.
Speaking of pandaren. There was a ledge just outside of the Blue Recluse, and we unofficially named it The Panda Lounge because there used to be 5-10 of us sitting there at any given moment 
Speaking of which…there is a nice ledge in Orgrimmar, at the Wyverns Tail tavern that I could turn into something similar
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I’d forgotten a similar thrill in getting to the Badlands in Classic. Having to creep through enemy territory is pretty tense. Particularly as you’ve to go through those Dwarven tunnels where there’s nowhere to hide so your goose is cooked if you run into a higher level.
That’s another bit of Classic WPvP that seems to have gone the way of the dodo; using the environment to hide. I’m not sure if the designs different or if the faster pace of modern WoW just makes it less viable. But I definitely noticed myself using large trees or structures to go unnoticed more often in Classic.
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Ratchet is neutral, always has been. The place did have a Horde preference though.
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If you have a “preference” in any major conflict between two parties. You are not -really- Neutral.