The Queue: Morning presents

Did you get what you want this morning?

If I had a Christmas list, I’d go something like this:

• A Nintendo Switch
• Any of the books on my Amazon wish list
• A good and strong workbench for my new garage
• An oscilloscope
• A vice to use on my new workbench in my new garage
• Coffee

With the exception of books and coffee, at the ripe old age of 34, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’m probably not going to convince my wife to spend $500 on a new console and that I’d rather pick (or better yet build) my own workbench. Although my dad could get me an oscilloscope if he really wanted (he’s an engineer)…. but I don’t think he wants to part with his $4,500 one and is looking forward to retirement sometime soon.

So instead I bought myself a present yesterday. It was totally worth it.

What did you get under the three or otherwise gifted to you this holiday season? Was it everything you hoped for?

If it was a Switch we’re not friends anymore :(

Alex, my friend, comrade in founding the Blizzard watch … let me tell you the story of another mythical hero of Christmas. One who would come down chimneys and deliver presents to deserving boys and girls (and adults, too). This guy had on some festive socks, at cookies and drank milk, too.

He delivered us boxes of loot, surprises in every present we opened.

Sometimes he’d tease us with a big box and it’d had only a little thing in it; we’d care about it for maybe five minutes and then never touch it again. But it was the thought that counted, and even though we’d feel robbed sometimes, we never really got mad at the old guy. It didn’t matter, because he’d be back next year, bringing us new loot and teasing us with new misshaped presents; all the while drinking his cookies and milk.

So you see, what really happened yesterday doesn’t matter if it was real or not. The magic isn’t in if there was a loop or not, the magic is in ol’ Chris Kringle Jeff Kaplan himself.

This has gotten brought up from time-to-time, but each time it has the WoW devs and designers have said that it’s too difficult to handle with the positional data that’s needed and the various states that go along with it. When you think about all the varying things a character can do at any one moment, and the possibilities that such a moment would need to record, you get a lot of variability; too much to record in an accurate way that’d make everyone happy.

Combat logs are good and tell part of the story, but WoW logs don’t tell the full story; whereas it’s much easier to track an SCV moving from point A to B where it uses ability X to eight seconds.

All that being said… the last time I heard about this was several years ago. I know there’s been advances in tracking algorithms and storage over the last few years in particular, and these certainly could apply to WoW characters. So I have a feeling that if asked now, it’d come down to priority for Blizzard. Probably not very high up on the list compared to making other gains.