The Queue: Nameless

So after a weekend of laborious effort, my fourth book and first novel is up on Amazon. It was a long time coming — some of the characters from this book have been appearing in short stories and drafts I’ve been working on since 1994. It’s a bit of a love letter to Rhode Island, to the obsessions of my youth — comic books, Lovecraft, 80’s cartoons — and I’m hopeful at least some of you will enjoy it.

But amazingly enough, we’re not here to talk about me. I know, right? I guess we’ll have to talk about Blizzard and the games said company makes. Overwatch is almost out, guys.

I take breaks from gaming all the time. But I don’t see much point in quiting gaming any more than I would quit watching movies, reading books, or looking at paintings. I play games to relax, to release stress, to experience things in a vicarious manner, and to experience narrative in an entirely different way than other forms of story.

I mean, I’ve written three books while playing World of Warcraft and writing about Blizzard and its games since 2007 or so. Is gaming time consuminmg? Absolutely. But so are a lot of pastimes, and I choose the ones I want to participate in and how much time I want to devote to them. I’ve taken stock at times and said “I don’t want to invest three days a week in raiding” as an example, but that doesn’t mean I feel the need to quit gaming entirely.

I don’t understand why that would be more convenient. It’s simplicity itself to flip a toggle. Having ‘hard mode’ style fights has a lot to recommend it — the immersion of having your characters actually take action that moves the fight up in difficulty – but convenient it isn’t. I have lost count of the amount of times someone accidentally pulled Mimiron before we hit the red button and so we had to wipe and run back in just to get our attempt in.

No, it wouldn’t be more convenient. And I honestly feel like we’re at the point where it wouldn’t really work for most players. I personally liked doing fights like Yogg-0 but I get why it was removed. Doing Heartbreaker was just the biggest pain in the butt, y’all. It just wasn’t fun.

No, we’re not worse at raiding. For one thing, raiding is much more complicated now than it ever was back then, with bosses having several ways to challenge tanks and healers and keep DPS on their toes. Go back to Molten Core and realize that fights like Garr came down to ‘offtank or banish adds, kill boss’ — Modern WoW players would laugh most of the fights in Vanilla off stage for being too simplistic.

There were good raiders and crap raiders in Vanilla just as there are now and will always be. You could carry more bad players in Vanilla – if you had 20 good players in your raid, you could absorb 10 awful players and still come out on top with the 10 amazing raiders you were likely to have at the top of everything.

Raiders weren’t super awesome back then, and they’re not super terrible now.

The ability to craft unique legendary items, with random bonuses and abilities to keep you from just always crafting the best possible legendary for your spec.

Raids. Yes, large group content for Diablo IV. I’m talking up to 20 player assaults on truly foul bastions of forgotten antiquity.

Character customization. Hair color, length, skin color. Baldur’s Gate had this technology.

I am prepare to believe George Michael when he tells me he’s never going to dance again, even though I know he’ll be dancing again in the next video.

Yes. I’ve had it utterly fail to tell me I had characters (up to 4) on a server, had it tell me I had characters on servers I’d deleted all my characters on, and count 9 on servers I had 6 on. I have no idea why this is, but I’ve absolutely noticed it.

At least on a Warrior, I feel like tank DPS is way too low and survival abilities are anemic, and I’m not happy about it at all. You can solo as Prot, but it’s really not ideal. As much as I feel like Fury DPS is pretty low (doing the starting experience on a Warrior without Artifacts is painful) doing it as Protection is like trying to do a demolition derby in a broken down Pinto.

My Death Knight’s pretty strong, in comparison, but still doesn’t kill very fast. Overall I’m not loving tanking design on the Beta right now. It needs help.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. If you have four bucks to spare, consider buying a book. And thanks to everyone.