The Queue: First!

Wait… what do you mean it’s not January 1? I don’t think that’s right and I’m not changing the headline just because we have a slight temporal disagreement, folks.

TIME IS AN ILLUSION. IT IS NOT JANUARY 2. I AM NOT READY FOR IT TO BE JANUARY 2 YET. Or January 3, 4, 5… really, I’m just not ready for 2019 at all.

We chat in Discord and then one of us has to copy it over to WordPress to put it here. I tend to edit it down a little, but it looks like Mitch pasted in the whole copy and then formatted it up all pretty like. Discord works because we can be really conversational. If we both wrote answers (which we have done before), there wouldn’t be any back and forth.

I don’t think we could convince anyone to transcribe our weird conversations, and neither of us are going to DIY that. (Transcription is terrible.)

So I hope you enjoyed this brief glimpse into our occasional Discord debates.

Only occasionally, at best. We really just do it as a fun curiosity, but they take a little more effort than just writing a Queue solo — and because it’s two people talking back and forth, they aren’t necessarily as coherent, either. They’re a fun every now and then thing, but we have no plans to do them regularly.

I think it’s confusing. Reputations themselves are not account-wide, but a few perks are account-wide. The biggest one for those of us (me!) who have been lazy about leveling our alts is that all characters get the benefit of your rep with Magni to get those Heart of Azeroth ilevel boosts. Reputation on all of your characters now counts towards reputation achievements (which helped me leapfrog way ahead on that one). And transmog items with reputation requirements can now be used on all characters on your account.

So we have a handful of little quality of life improvements, but reputations aren’t really account-wide.

I admit, I finally swore off LFD this expansion. I was doing normal Tol Dagor — which I was really overgeared for — because I just wanted to do a quest and get on with my life. Except the tank ran through the cell blocks without stopping or trying to catch runners. When group members died, they corpse ran back and went right into the fight … without bothering to wait for me, the healer, to rez and run back. I fail to understand how anyone in the group thought this was a good idea. I quit and decided I was done. (I still haven’t finished the quest.)

But I don’t think this is entirely new. There have always been good players and bad players, but because a tank typically leads the group and sets the pace, you really feel it when you have a bad tank. A tank who’s careless or who rushes can sink a group, and that’s been true since the vanilla days.

I do think the rush rush rush mentality is exaggerated in recent expansions, though. For one, there’s usually less reason to play with care. Those carefully planned line of sight pulls that were musts in the old days are often unnecessary today. And healer mana, which used to be a huge limiting factor, is now much less of a concern. (In my current experience as a Mistweaver, it is difficult to run out of mana and I really only do it during long raid fights — dungeons just aren’t that taxing.) So people don’t take things slowly because often they don’t have to.

Secondly, after a number of months running the same dungeons, I think people are a little bored. This is getting to be old hat for everyone. Like me, the just have a quest they want to finish or a piece of gear they want to get. They rush to their goal and ignore the rest. And rushing means a sloppy, and sometimes very frustrating dungeon run.

Random groups will always be random groups, and whether you’re willing to put up with that depends entirely on your level of patience. It’s entirely possible that no sane person belongs in LFD anymore, but perhaps that’s just my own lack of patience talking.

Oh, gosh, this really makes me think we need to get the gang back together and do a leveling stream, Hivemind edition. Except I’m pretty sure all (or maybe most) of us don’t have our leveling stream characters at 120 to get a Hivemind, plus getting all five of us together in one time and place is a pretty big challenge these days.

So (1) that sounds awesome! and (2) we probably won’t do it. Dang. Now I’ve managed to disappoint myself.

Horde got a story and Alliance didn’t, which seems like a bizarre story choice to me. Horde in Nazmir hear about G’huun pretty early on, while Alliance stumble into Uldir and have no context for where they are, what they’re doing, or who they’re about to fight. So if you want to know what the heck is going on, play a Horde character through Nazmir. It’s not a great answer, but it’s the only one I’ve got.

Fortunately, they aren’t repeating this problem with Battle for Dazar’alor, which will give both factions a reason to be there.

And that’s all for this… ugh… January 2 Queue. I hope your year is progressing well thus far, and will see you here again next week, if and when next week arrives.