The Queue: These final hours

I tell you, we are here on Azeroth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.

I’m not necessarily sure I agree with that.

First, the Horde lost the Undercity — it’s completely covered in Blight. It’s not an eye-for-an-eye, exactly, but they didn’t get away without any repercussions.

Second, while Theramore was destroyed, Orgrimmar was also invaded and the Horde was nearly ended. Again, the parity between the two can (and should) be argued, but it’s not a clean cut.

I want to stop for a moment in this answer as well and say that I’m bias towards one side or another. The Alliance will have their hands forever stained in a major way with the internment camps they set up for the Horde and what they did to their prisoners. Now to continue…

The place of Thrall in all of this is interesting. He wasn’t exactly MIA in Legion, he was part of the Shaman story line and contributed to it nicely. There’s also other appearances of him as a supporting character in some PVP quests. What’s he up to right now? Great question; I suspect that we may find out in BFA … in a later patch or two.

If possible, could Jaina take out her retribution on him instead of Sylvanas? Besides him just showing up, he’d need to somehow take personal ownership and control of the Horde for Jaina to take it out on him, I’d think. Otherwise she knows where she needs to direct her war efforts at (or rather, her wrath, depending on how you look at things) — and that is solidly at the Horde’s current leadership. If Thrall were ever to get into a place of power where he took that kind of accountability, he’d need to remove Sylvanas, and I doubt she’d go willingly. At that point I could see Thrall using the leadership change as a token for peaceful negotiations as the two factions team up to deal with this whole Lich King Blight 2.0 thing.

So while no, I don’t think that a Thrall v Jaina fight is possible, you did bring up a good thread to pull. I really do believe we’re due for his return soon.

The Battle for Lordaeron is the only part that you’re missing, and you will need to queue up for that when you want to start your Battle for Azeroth adventure. You only have to complete it once, however — once you’ve done so your alts are given the choice to skip the scenario and jump right into the BFA story.

There is no title or achievement — if you got the mounts from the pre-expansion stuff you’re good.

One of the big failings of multiplayer game launches has been the ability to deal with significant DDoS attacks at launch. It doesn’t take much for a huge network of idiot script children to direct their “lulz” at Blizzard, but it does take a lot of effort for Blizzard (and other game companies) to stop them.

Sometimes WoW has failed under its own weight and Blizzard has been pretty open about that. Other times though there’s been the DDoS stuff going on. As to what will happen today and the new couple days, I’m sure that there will be some cadre of idiots doing their thing, but I’m also sure that there’ll be something that causes a certain level of game instability. It will be less than there was during Legion (which was really pretty good) and much less than there was during WoD (which was really pretty bad).

The one thing that I’ve learned with reporting on this game for over ten years now is that it’s not worth getting upset over. Not being able to play right out of the gate sucks, but Blizzard has gotten better at it year after year, and it’s not like there’s anyone they can turn to about how to do this… they’re at the absolute cutting edge of multiplayer technology at this scale. Millions upon millions will hit the servers tomorrow evening and expect response times around 20 milliseconds as they go into areas that haven’t been stress tested to that extent before. Blizzard knows how to handle themselves, but no matter what anyone else says, there is a level of risk in that launch which is inherent to the system. In the last six years I’ve worked with dozens of multi-million dollar websites and the expectation setting for perfection at launch of a new product at massive scale is a fallacy that needs to be stamped out. When things are not life and death, there is always a greater risk for error.

My advice? Have a good book on hand or another game. I’m reading some Vonnegut and downloaded Duck Tales this weekend. So it goes.

This made me happy. Thank you!!

I can’t think in terms of boundaries. Those imaginary lines are as unreal to me as elves and pixies. I can’t believe that they mark the end or the beginning of anything of real concern to the Azerothian soul.