The Queue: Bug city

I’ve been running a lot of old raids for Raiding With Leashes lately. The nostalgia is strong. I still hate Ahn’Qiraj, but I’m a crazy person who actually enjoyed the old Silithus grind.

I’d say there are a couple of reasons for it. First, there was a lot of content that wasn’t finished when the game first launched, but had been deep in development. They could release those things fairly rapidly. The zone that is Silithus, for example, existed in-game at launch and you could go there. However, it was almost completely empty. Silithus was populated in a later patch, and then eventually populated even further with quests and its raid zones and so forth. Populating the zone wasn’t expansion content, it was finishing the base world.

Second, some of those patches were pretty basic features. It might be surprising to learn that battlegrounds weren’t in the game at launch. Warsong Gulch was implemented in patch 1.5. The game released in November 2004, but patch 1.5 was released in June 2005. “Major” patches in vanilla weren’t always enormous, either. They felt no compulsion to make every content patch have something for everyone. The patch that introduced battlegrounds and the honor system? That’s the whole patch right there. No new PVE content in that patch other than class balancing and bug fixes — which would, nowadays, be handled in hotfixes.

There were also content patches that included no playable content. One such patch introduced World of Warcraft’s built-in voice communication system. It was terrible. It’s still terrible. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who uses it. Not then, not now.

Voice chat patch aside, I do sometimes wonder which would be preferable — frequent bite-sized patches or this every-six-months-to-a-year mega patch thing. I do clearly recall players back then being upset when a particular patch had nothing for their playstyle, but players are also upset now when patches take an eternity. I think the rapid patches at least kept players engaged, even if not every patch applied to everyone.

Yes, I did! I’m super excited for her. She’s awesome. I raved about why she’s great in a previous edition of The Queue, so Blizzard made a good decision there.

After playing WoW since launch, I only learned you can shift-click to automatically take all of the items from a piece of mail in your mailbox a couple of weeks ago during the podcast pre-show. I was taking a billion items out of the mailbox manually and someone in chat told me about it. Absolutely blew my mind. Now, every time I’m shuffling auctions around, I wonder how much time I’ve wasted over ten years doing it item by item.

Blizzard Watch operates on Central time. Matticus streams at 8 p.m. Central. If you’ve missed any of our streams, we’ve begun archiving all of them on our new Youtube channel. Podcast recordings aren’t going up there, but Hearthstone streams will, our Thursday leveling bonanza will, and anything else we decide to do in the future certainly will, too. And any standalone video content we may decide to do, of course.

If you have a good spread of ability counters, your followers’ classes don’t matter. If you want to do it for funsies, though… why not?

I’m pretty sure durability exists as a method of taking gold out of the economy. It’s the cost of going on an adventure. It still does its job. I don’t think I’d care if it was taken out, though. It does its job — but it isn’t an exciting way to do it.

Think carefully about it before you do it. Guilds/raids live and die on their social structure just as much as their ability to kill bosses. If you’re only doing it so you can kill Blackhand or whatever, you might have a bad time. Make sure the two groups merging actually get along. Do some test runs first.