The Queue: The missed opportunities of Draenor

Okay, I’m back. It’s been a heck of a week. So let’s get right into things, shall we?

At any rate, I’ll be doing the Queue all weekend, so strap in everybody.

In Dragon Age Inquisition Solas says to Vivienne “Enchanter, any pride demon you met would just walk away, shaking its head and laughing uncontrollably.”

Now compare that to a man who personally ensured the survival of magic on Azeroth, ate the power of a demonic artifact because a dead person he’d never met dared him to, and who willingly teamed up with the same Legion he’d been fighting in order to fight said dead guy later? I mean, I could go on and on with Illidan. The guy simply outranks a pride demon. Something on the scale of the Nightmare would be needed even to get into Illidan’s ballpark.

Well, by definition, if the issue here is that you’ve somehow accustomed yourself to this sort of behavior, it’s less that it isn’t toxic and more that you’ve altered your standards of behavior to account for it. This doesn’t make it less toxic, it just makes you more forgiving.

Personally I’m not a fan of LFR to the point where I won’t run it entirely because I have a very low threshold for this sort of behavior. I’m an adult, I have things to do, spending an hour in a group with people arguing back and forth and calling each other names simply holds no appeal to me.

Now, I’ve had LFR groups where none of this happens. But it only takes one to put me off playing for a while. That’s the problem with toxic behavior. It only takes a little to have a large effect on people. Let’s say I run LFR every day for a week, and on Thursday I get a group that’s got the BINGO card of bad behavior — people trolling by intentionally wiping the group, racist or gendered insults, long delays due to people dropping at inopportune times or refusing to either play or drop, back and forth screaming over strategy, endless wipes on bosses because people won’t execute even the simplified mechanics, you know the drill.

You don’t need a lot of that to put people off. Experiencing it once is enough for some folks to say yikes, I’m not doing that again. LFR’s 25 people magnify the problem to some extent because you have more chance to get bad reactions between people. In LFD, you have at most four other people besides yourself, but when it’s twenty four other people, you could get six, eight or even more disruptive players.

In other words, while the word toxic is a subjective judgement on LFR, that means it’s possible that it applies at least some of the time, and some of the time is too much for some players.

Keeping in mind that this isn’t set in stone yet, it’s based on a single Gamescom, but we’ve been told there will be a variety of upgrade mechanisms for the artifact. I suspect PvP, quests, and other avenues will be implemented. Still, I also suspect the strongest upgrades will be in dungeons and raids. I mean, right now most of my alts have solid 695 weapons, more than good enough for Tanaan, but not as good as raiding gear. (Well, about the same or better than LFR gear.) There will likely be similar systems for the artifacts.

I used the Fungal Whale as a header picture because they’re cool.

Dude, don’t even get me started on all the cool stuff they could have done. Where’s my Farahlon? There were giant Devilsaurs in Netherstorm’s bio domes, I wanted to see enormous dinosaurs and draenei seaports and just all kinds of cool stuff we never got.

Where do Outland’s rock flayers come from? There are rock flayers in Deepholm, are the ones on Outland some kind of elementals?

Now that K’ara has been redeemed, does she intend to take a more active role in Draenor? A naaru is nothing to sneeze at. Is she calling the other naaru to Draenor?

Seriously, does Grom get tried? I mean, neither the Alliance or Horde has any reason to like this guy. The Iron Horde killed a lot of Frostwolves, including Durotan’s brother, it’s not like he should be any more forgiving of Grom than anyone else. Why wouldn’t we try the dude? Aside from a sense of ‘been there, done that’ anyway?

Where are my devilsaurs?

We saw various fungal forests throughout Draenor – there are some in Shadowmoon Valley and Spires of Arak — but at no point did we really get to see much of anything on the Zangar Sea. Besides the Fungal Whales mentioned in the quetsion, what about that lighthouse we explored in Outland?

Just so much potential for exploration we never got around to.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. Tomorrow I’m going to talk about why I want World of Warcraft to go to Argus so very badly.