The Queue: I never could get the hang of Thursdays

Is it Thursday again? Apparently it’s Thursday again, which means it’s my turn to write the Queue again. I really never could get the hang of Thursdays.

So let’s skip the Thursday confusion and go on to your questions, where we talk BlizzCon, Ahn’Qiraj, bodyguards (and my one true love, Vivianne), and more.

Honestly, for me, the time leading up to BlizzCon isn’t particularly special. Finding news is harder (because, in large part, Blizzard is saving news for BlizzCon) and writing features is harder (because we’re all waiting to find out just what will happen next, and no one wants to write a feature that’s going to be outdated next week).

Of course, there’s planning to be done before BlizzCon. We have to figure out who’s going to the convention and who’s staying home to mind the fort (with a virtual ticket, of course). You might think staying home isn’t much of a job, but it’s actually one of the most important: the people who are at home and have a steady internet connection are responsible for keeping things organized while everyone on the ground is running around. However, this is typically sorted out well in advance.

There’s pre-planning for any events — this year we’re participating in Con Before the Storm — but that’s been handled by Alex and has blessedly not had any impact on my day to day (though I know it’s had a big impact on his; a ton of prep goes into these events). The only thing left to do, now that we have an official con schedule, is figure out just who’s going to be covering which panels… and that’s something we probably won’t do until just before the event. No matter how much schedule planning we do in advance, our plans often change on the fly — sometimes one of us will get tied up doing something we didn’t expect to be doing, meaning we’ll need someone else to cover. We’ve learned from experience that we need to be flexible, which has the side-effect of meaning there’s often only a pretty basic plan in place when we arrive.

In the end, the time leading up to BlizzCon is a lot like any other time. It’s during the con that we’re at our busiest (probably the busiest we’ll be all year).

I loved the story in Warlords… right until I hit level 100. The leveling experience and story journey was fantastic — I think the best Blizzard has ever done. The problem was that after you hit level 100, the story experience didn’t live up. This is often a problem with hitting max level, but it felt exacerbated by the fact that the leveling story was so good.

I’ve really enjoyed bodyguards in Warlords. The characters themselves have been fun to collect and adventure with. They’ve added a lot of flavor to the game and let you add extra utility to your character which was great if you were soloing, especially in higher level areas like Tanaan. The downside is that there seem to be a few bodyguards who are great and a lot of bodyguards that are… less great. My Windwalker Monk, for example, adventures with Leorajh, who adds support and healing. My Holy Paladin, on the other hand, never leaves her garrison without Vivianne (Vivianne, my love!). But other than my few bodyguards of choice? I could take them or leave them.

Blizzard’s very good at iterating on features — taking pieces of the game (or addons, or other games) and tweaking them to be a bit better and a bit better until they’re great. I’d love to see a new version of bodyguards in Legion, but we don’t yet know what it might be like.

But if I can’t bring Vivianne with me to fight the Burning Legion, I assure you I will be flipping some tables. Because Vivianne.

I admit, my initial answer for this was going to be immensely negative. I was in a server-first raiding guild during Ahn’Qiraj and the experience, for me, was not a good one. Because we were pushing raid content, our goal was to rush to open the gates and get to the raid as quickly as possible, which meant that any time we weren’t raiding that we could spend online we were expected to spend collecting resources for the war effort or helping our chosen player through the Scepter of the Shifting Sands quest.

It was terrible. It was the least entertaining time I’ve ever had in the past decade of playing World of Warcraft. It was less fun than Cataclysm, and don’t think I’m exaggerating there.

However, Alex, who is not always as cynical as I expect him to be, may have changed my mind on this one. The good thing about the Ahn’Qiraj war effort was that everyone could participate, no matter what level, to help participate in this server-wide event. And I imagine that could have been fun for players who weren’t in the situation I happened to be in at the time. I also imagine that with server merges it might be easier to do a large event like this without some servers lagging behind and getting locked out of new content.

So perhaps, yes, it might be fun to have a group effort to “build” our class halls and recruit our faction champions to the cause — though I would still worry that the less popular classes would wind up locked out of their class halls for longer than, say, Hunters.

That’s all for today, dearest readers. There were a ton of great questions in yesterday’s Queue and I know I didn’t get to all of them, but I did pass several on to my fellow writers, so they might pop up in a future Queue. As always, leave any questions you may have for us in the comments and check back tomorrow for Mr. Matthew Rossi’s turn at our daily Q&A.