The Queue: Assault on the Pit edition

Today’s Apexis daily is Assault on the Pit — so for those of you waiting for this hard to get daily for your flying achievements, get out there and get it done!

And oh, yeah, we have answers to your questions below.

If you’ve grown tired of waiting for Apexis to show up for the Securing Draenor (Alliance) / Securing Draenor (Horde) achievements, then you’ll be glad to know that you can complete as many of them as you want a day by means of Scouting Missives for a cost of 200 resources each. So long as you have the resources to buy missives, you can keep doing the quests.

However, there’s one snag: The Pit daily is not available for purchase, so you’ll just have to wait for it to pop up on its own. However, for those of you who are waiting on that one daily, I’ve got good news — The Pit is today’s daily! So if that’s all you need to finish the achievement, make time to hop online and get it done. It can be tough one to solo (though I soloed it myself, mostly due to poor life choices on my part), but you should certainly be able to find groups working on it through the premade group finder. So get questing so you can get flying!

Playing with a spouse, a significant other, or even a good friend can be a great time… but it can also be fraught with peril. When I think about playing with my other half, this Penny Arcade comic inevitably comes to mind.

Let me preface by saying that I don’t usually play WoW with my better half. We simply have different gaming interests (read: I play more MMOs) and that always leads to either me being higher level or me playing an alt I don’t care much about. And, sure, even while doing that we can have fun, but I don’t think it’s exactly the most fun we could be having because I, at least, am not fully invested.

Therein lies the problem: if you have different interest levels in a game, one of you is either going to wind up getting ahead or get frustrated for having to wait around while the other levels. Neither of those things is fun. But that’s not to say you shouldn’t play together, either. An extremely social game like an MMO is, sometimes, less fun because of what the game is and more fun because of who you’re playing it with. There are plenty of days that I haven’t logged on for the game, but to hang out with my guildmates — and the game is just a medium to do that. (While also killing the occasional dragon.) With a fun group of players, it’s just fun to play.

However, there’s a caveat to that, too: you can’t force fun. If you’re just not into it — and as Warlords of Draenor winds down, I can certainly understand that — you’re probably not going to enjoy yourself and that can spread to the people you’re playing with. If you’re not enjoying the game, there’s a chance that neither of you will be, which is also not fun.

However, there’s no right or wrong answer here. There’s no guarantee that whatever you do you won’t have fun or she won’t have fun. But here are a few things I’d consider:

• Is there a game other than WoW that you’re both hyped about that you might enjoy playing instead? You’re likely to get more out of something you’re both interested in — and there’s a whole world of MMOs out there (including EverQuest‘s Progression Servers, which turn back the clock to the beginning of the game if you’re looking for nostalgia).
• Is there something you could do together in game that wouldn’t detract from her progression? You might level new alts together, try a different faction together, or set yourselves some other challenge that seems interesting or fun.
• Is now the right time to play? Like I said, Warlords of Draenor is winding down. It’s a good time to level alts and goof around, but the current game world does rather lack for excitement when everyone’s already hyped up about the upcoming Legion expansion. Think about whether it might be better to jump on board later, when there may be new content you’d both be interested in checking out.

It sounds like she doesn’t want you to play if you’re not having fun, and you don’t want her to miss out just because you’re not playing. So if you decide to give WoW a pass for now just tell her and make sure she knows she doesn’t have to hold back or wait for you to join her in game. (And Legion will have a level boost to make it easy to catch up with her later if you want to.)

You’ve really stuck a chord with me here, Drakkenfyre, because I love proving Adam wrong. Except… I think he might have a point here. Ugh.

One of the reasons Cataclysm remade the old world is because the old world kind of sucked. I know we’re all nostalgic for Vanilla WoW, but classic WoW quest design could be frustrating, to say the least. The quests needed an overhaul, and Cataclysm was a good excuse to do it. Now we’re a few years down the line and back in the same boat. The old world — and Outland and Northrend — are feeling pretty dusty. They’re packed full of broken and frustrating quests. And what better excuse than a large-scale invasion by the Burning Legion to remake these places?

Also, World of Warcraft is now a decade old — and our actions as heroes have had very little impact on much of the world. For all that we’ve flitted all over the map trying to help others, many parts of the world still lie in ruin, frozen in time no matter what we do. (As an example, will Stormwind ever be repaired?) I’d love an expansion where we don’t just wreck things: we rebuild them.

Much of Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria featured us destroying the world around us. We’ve left swaths of Azeroth in ruins, and when the Legion attacks it’s bound to make the situation even worse. That can be a dramatic story point, but such grim stories can be tiring to play through after a while – I can certainly say that I found Cataclysm to be utterly exhausting to play through. So when the Legion invades and burns our world to ash, instead of continuing to wreck things, let’s rebuild. Let’s show that our actions had an impact on the world. Let’s show that Azeroth can change and grow and evolve. Let’s rise from the ashes and rebuild our world.

Hey, maybe I do disagree with Adam after all. That makes me feel a lot better about this topic.

The short answer is that we’re easily distracted by shiny objects.

The longer (but not much longer) answer is that new content is just fun. It catches our imagination and draws us back in to the game. If you’ve taken a break, you want to log in and see what’s what’s new and catch up so you can get to playing it. Even an expansion announcement, for content that’s far off, can generate this kind of excitement — though with Legion still a ways out, it may not last long. But in the meanwhile, people who are excited by Legion may well be logging on to check out what’s happened to the game world since they last played.

That’s all for the Queue today — as always, be sure to leave your questions in the the comments, to be answered by the indomitable Matthew Rossi in tomorrow’s Queue.