The Queue: Technically writing The Queue is a weekly quest

I like building rep with all you Queuevians, but your mount drop rate stinks. I’m not even sure I’m going to get a toy or tabard or whatever out of all these answered questions. Well, another week, let’s try our luck.

Yep, which is why you see a whole heck of a lot of Hunters camped out there when it’s the World Quest. It won’t swap colors while the World Quest is active, mind you — if it’s the green variant the first time you get there, it’ll be green until the World Quest expires and respawns.

There are two ways to figure out which pets you still don’t have. You can either investigate out of game, or in-game using add ons.

Out of game you can go to your character’s Armory page, then look through their Collections tab, sorting by Uncollected. This is a bit clunky, since it doesn’t really have any info beyond, “you’re missing Mr. Snoots.” WarcraftPets is build around giving you that information though, in addition to ranking you against other collectors on your server. Wowhead just created their own tool that works similarly to WarcraftPets, too.

In-game, you can use the add on Rematch to shift more meaningfully through your pet list in a number of ways, including by uncollected. Honestly, this may be available in the base game as well, but I’ve used Rematch so long it’s tough for me to figure out what’s a Rematch feature and what’s not.

In any case, good luck!

With most gaming-related stuff I just go about it. At this point if I get spoiled it’s barely even a blip. With Blizzard stuff I’m so in the weeds it’s hard to even keep straight what’s live, what’s datamined, and what’s rumored or leaked. Even things I don’t really care about that are in the wider sphere of nerd culture I inevitably get spoiled over on social media or Twitch chat.

So that’s why I was so glad to find one of my favorite shows about 2 years ago. It’s amazingly scripted and the characters have depth and nuance. Despite a somewhat controversial subject matter and although it’s a popular show, it’s rarely discussed unless it wins awards. I was so excited to watch something fresh for once! I like to go on the journey unspoiled first, then revisit the story again to see how the writers led us to the end point, so it was so nice and fun and different for me to actually, you know, get to do that for once.

Yeah, that show is Transparent.

Even with Jeffrey Tambor being a trash human and getting fired from the show for it in early 2018, there was still an air of mystery in how they would play it out — would main character Maura just go live in Cabo? Would she be recast, hopefully with a trans woman playing her? — until showrunner Jill Soloway gave an interview that flat out spoiled exactly what would happen. Since I watch the show and the creeps at Twitter know it because of cookies or whatever, they saw fit to post the full spoiler directly into my eyeballs in a Moment.

In 2019 there’s no way to stay unspoiled unless you lock yourself in a box. To some extent that’s okay, because it arises from people being excited and passionate about the things that they like, and they want to discuss it with others. Especially in a narrative with a lot of depth, I find it really nice to discuss the questions a particular piece of media asks of its audience.

But in this case what I’m really getting at is Jeffrey Tambor is an awful person.

I like the idea of Emissaries, especially the idea of Paragon boxes, even though I’ve never gotten a ding danged decent thing out of them. I don’t like the odd, variable nature of the World Quests themselves, especially since it seems like they always seem to finally have a piece or reward I’d really like in a timeframe I’m not available to play.

However, I like World Quests much better than a static, non-rotation of daily quests where the quest turns into a pumpkin the second 2 a.m. rolls around, however, which was the initial model we got in Pandaria. It was nice to have a whole slew of quests available every day when I wanted to grind my entire face off toward a goal, but that led to burnout pretty hard, for me.

As the dirtiest of casuals I would love to see something like Heroes of the Storm‘s daily quest rotation, where you can hang on to a quest or two until you complete it, if that’s what you’d like to do. Would probably wreak havoc on the database but that’s why I do ideas, not implementation.

In theory this sounds great. More storylines being resolved, more overarching narrative!

In practice, especially with the scaling tech they’ve been adding to zones, that seems like it would lead to either a confusing narrative or a relatively flimsy framing that doesn’t involve the zone heavily. We’ve already sort of seen this in practice with the enchanted macguffins from every zone in Legion. Though we needed to round up all the Pillars of Creation for Khadgar it really had very little to do with the overarching story in each zone, but I’m not quite sure how else to execute it and make the story stay coherent.

This would also lead to even more wacky issues in the future as events unfold, as Liz sort of touched on yesterday. I stare into the camera like Jim on The Office when I’m playing an alt and Garrosh punts a dude off a bridge for attacking civilians in Stonetalon Mountains. Not only did I kill that dude like five years ago, his characterization has — let’s say progressed past that point now.