The Queue: The death of Tragedy

So I’ve been enjoying my Demon Hunter lately. Got her to 110 and found myself quickly loving dashing around and gliding at the absolute worst moments. It’s clearly the best way to pull bosses for your team in LFR.

Neat question.

Obviously Arthas comes to mind immediately. He wanted to do what was right and kept going down the wrong path. Illidan now appears in similar fashion; the Demon Hunter campaign followed by the Legion story shines a much softer light on his actions. None of these aspects excuse their behavior and the path that lead to those behaviors, but they certainly fit into the modern motif of a good person gone bad by their misguided best intentions.

However with all that said, I think there is only one truly tragic character: the hero. Us.

We endlessly fight a battle that we’re never going to win, and we know it. We keep going, killing more boars and taking candles as we’re told. As we go along doing this we’re told the fate of the world is on our shoulders, and that our actions are necessary to stop the wider threat from wiping out Azeroth or beyond.

On and on we go, battling against the Legion’s endless army. Fighting off Arthas or the Horde, both corrupted by the Legion. We are puppets in their game, and all we can do is go along with it. Peace has never been known to us in 15 years. And it will likely never be known; because as our own Horde we keep going back for more and new threats emerge every few years.

We are fools that will never reject the power structures we’re trapped in.

We are the tragic hero, destined to continue fighting in our own Valhalla.

King Lear has nothing on us.

We’re good! We’ve had an uptick in Patreon subscriptions, and our ad revenue remains steady. We’ve got enough to cover the cost of running the site, and that’s all we’re after.

Honestly none of us are doing this to get rich, and we won’t ever be; but it’s nice to see that after two and a half years things are still kicking. If you’d have asked me when we launched, I wouldn’t have expected we’d be here still. Happy to be wrong.*

*I wasn’t expecting it because I know how startups and business go. I’ve been there and seen things fail despite all the best talent in the world. Most companies fail in a year or two, rarely do they make it past three. I had set my own expectations for this when we launched — realistic, and not believing we’re going to change the world, etc… That being said, I now expect us to continue on as long as we (the key leadership) wish to continue. And we’ve already seen transitions in some of those key leadership positions that have worked out well, which to me says that the culture and model we have is sustainable in the long term. Kinda neat.

You mean give it up for a garrison?

Nope.

The garrison was a really good experiment at proving exactly what the WoW designers have said for years: that personal housing would only make the world feel empty. People wouldn’t see each other, they’d only see themselves in their home. And if you were out in the world, it’d be lessened because of all the people that were not.

I absolutely love what they’ve done with the class halls. There’s lots of people around, it feels like an active and moving environment, and there isn’t a static feeling to the place. That being said, I do think there could be more done with it: customization.

One of the better parts of the garrison was the ability to place a variety of buildings and get their bonuses, quests, etc… This was something that tweaked the playstyle and experience of each character and player just a little bit. The same thing could be done for the class halls — just phase certain elements in and out depending on what has been selected (I’m making this much simpler than it is, I’m sure). As a Paladin, what if I wanted a shrine to Bolvar that’d give me quests to help him maintain his control over the scourge? That’d be neat — and others could pick something else, like a cloth crafting station (Paladins wear cloth, right?).

I kid.

But no, I want to keep the class halls going. I hope they do in the next expansion in their own way.