The Queue: I am become Matt, the destroyer of Queues

That’s right, I’m paraphrasing the Bhagavad Gita by way of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

We will now commence.

I have zero idea what people want. I didn’t even want WoW Classic. Clearly, other people did, even if they do cheat at it, which baffles me.

But there are lots of people who wanted this, and aren’t cheating, so it’s clear that I do not have my finger on the pulse of what people want.

I think Blizzard will roll Burning Crusade out on the Classic servers if and when they think it will profit them to do so. I hope they don’t, but maybe if they get all the way to Cataclysm on the Classic servers I’d laugh a bit.

When World of Warcraft came out in 2004, it was by far the most casual friendly, soloing friendly MMO that had ever existed. It was by far the easiest to grasp, and there were a variety of systems in place to make it more approachable. From dungeons to raids, compared to its predecessors, WoW was simply much less difficult.

Sure, leveling could be a grind fest, especially compared to the game as it is now. But compared to games like EverQuest? The simple and bare fact is, this game was made popular not by the hard core, I want everything as hard as possible crowd. The huge surge of players was, by and large, people who just wanted to run around and experience Blizzard’s Warcraft setting, explore the world, and play on their own terms and at their own pace. From the beginning, WoW grew because of those casual players who wanted a relatively easier game, or at least a less time consuming one.

The great irony of WoW Classic as a success today is that, mechanically speaking, it’s far simpler and much easier than the live game. It takes longer, and it’s far grindier, but the fact is, WoW Classic is not a hard game. It just lacks things that the current game has. The idea that WoW Classic is somehow harder is based entirely on perception, not reality. But it doesn’t have things like heirlooms, or dungeon finder, or easy quest markers, or any of the other things that let you shave time off. And that’s fine — but it’s funny to me to see how perceptions change, and the supposed easymode MMO is now held up as so much harder.

I mean, I played City of Heroes at the same time as WoW, and let me tell you, CoH was so much harder. And I loved that game, but I ended up playing WoW a lot more, because I could level in it by myself.

Stardew Valley is completely jacked and nuts, y’all. I watch my wife play this game, she’s built some kind of lunatic commune where she has robots farming for her or something, I think she’s got like 88 million gold and goes underground to fight giant blobs, and if she doesn’t get done in time she falls asleep and loses all her stuff or I don’t even know. She has a magic mining pick, I think. Look, I don’t get why they have chain stores and use gold as their currency the game scares the crap out of me.

First off, a lot of talk on the street is just people on the forums doing a great impression of the seagulls from Finding Nemo, and I don’t believe that BFA was created purely to set up the next expansion. There’s too much quality work in zones like Drustvar, Stormsong, and Nazmir for me to believe that.

I mean, I have some serious problems with how this expansion started. I honestly feel like I’d have been upset by the burning of Teldrassil no matter what, but if they’d have the Alliance attack Lordaeron first, I’d feel less bad. If that makes sense. I probably still would have preferred they not have the Horde burn a whole lot of innocent civilians to death.

But since I don’t know what the next expansion is even going to be, I don’t know how Blizzard could set it up without doing Battle for Azeroth.

I tend to agree with the consensus here — do Nazjatar until you unlock the various Essences and do the bodyguard quests because if you’re going to want flying, you’re going to have to do both zones eventually. But once you get the stuff you need from Nazjatar, go ahead and do Mechagon to your heart’s content.

And I’m happy you’re feeling better. Good luck on the rest of your recover.

Okay, that’s the Queue for this Wednesday. Liz is back next week, and I’ll be here again Friday.