The Queue: A secret to be told

Let’s blast forth in the Queue today, folks. My apologies for it being a bit late — the little one has been being a little one.

If you’re going for the most popular servers:

• Area 52 for Horde
• Stormrage for Alliance

Although I’d highly recommend that you transfer your alts to a server that you’ve got friends on. If you don’t have any on the Alliance side, I’d recommend searching around for a good casual guild, transfer your toon over, and try it out. I don’t think what server you’re on matters a ton anymore. There are certainly cases where it does (Auction House), but besides the faction of toons you’ll see while out adventuring there’s not a ton of impact.

I play horde on Drenden and there’s a much larger Alliance population — does it make tagging mobs slightly harder during daily quests? Yes, it does. Is it a blocker to actually doing them? Not at all.

End of the day, find people you want to play with. Transfer your alts to that server and enjoy. If you just want to solo-alt it alone, my recommendation is the high pop servers above (and yes, the occasional wait to get in during launches, but I haven’t really seen them lately).

I’ll start from the bottom up:

Yes, you do want this question answered.

The greyish trail is because he’s walking around on sand, and that’s going to leave a trail. He’s probably dragging his baby-shell/turtle-bottom around on the ground and not lifting himself up all the way because he’s soo young and doesn’t have the strength yet. If you’ve ever walked on sand and gotten it wet, from a certain vantage point it can look kind of gray. That’s all that’s going on here.

Finally, he’s a turtle and doesn’t want to get confused. If he crosses his path, he’s going to see stuff that he’s seen before and think about if he’s already gone down this long and lonesome road. Since we cannot say to the best ney, we’ve got to move him in a way so that he doesn’t cross his own path.

It’s also sort of like in Ghostbusters. If you cross the streams, you’re going to rip and interdimensional portal open and get transported back to alt-alt-Draenor … and does anyone really want that?

It did grow in size a bit ago, or at least it did for my machine. I was able to shrink it down easy enough and it’s kept that way.

I will say too, that whoever designed the responsiveness of the app deserves some kudos. It’s a great study in how a truly responsive design should behave — elements shrink, become more visual and less wordy, and some non-essential things are hidden all together. However at the same time, the app itself doesn’t lose any of the key functionality or navigation. I’ve used it as an example as a few times in my own product management disucssions; it’s worth taking a look at if you’re into this sort of thing.

Truth be told I am not playing a ton of WoW right now. I do a few dungeons a week and an LFR or two, but that’s about it. I may get on an alt and tool around for a bit as well, but there’s nothing serious. Part of it is my own cycle of gaming — I’ll get into WoW hard core for a while, taper off, go back, tapper off even more then before, and finally return to going at it hard core. The cycle repeats, it’s happened before and will happen again.

I also have been reading and playing other games a bit more than I have previously, in large part due to having a kiddo. WoW is not the easiest game to play with a three month old in your lap. And for the record, the new Mario platformer isn’t either. But reading Kindle on your TV or a propped up iPad is, and getting through that backlog of endless Netflix and other shows is also pretty easy.

With that said, I haven’t stopped my involvement by any means. I’m going through and re-reading the lore volumes right now, since one day I want to be able to stand toe-to-toe with Matt and Anne and have a lore discussion. I’m still oddly obsessed with the Black Empire, and I can’t just stop thinking about how much it sounds like the Great Old Ones and their city from Lovecraft. Even the images are … well, basically that.

I again want to just say here for the record that I fully expect an expansion to soon be about the Black Empire. It’s coming folks. Or should I say, they.