The Queue: Imagine if dinosaurs could be vampires

Pegomastax was almost certainly not a vampire. I mean, it had weird, elongated fangs, especially for an herbivore, but it was almost certainly a normal member of the Heterodontosauridae and not a vampire. Which is good, because if it were a vampire, it might well have survived all the way to the present day and then you’d have to worry about a vampire with 65 million or so years of experience coming after you when you slept.

With all that experience you would never hear it until it had those teeth in your throat.

This is the Queue. Don’t worry, there are no such things as vampire dinosaurs.

Yet.

It’s absolutely never possible to please all of the people, and I doubt Blizzard is worrying about doing so. But I don’t think it would be all that hard to do a story that would absolutely either please most of the players, or upset them all equally in a way that would motivate people to see what happens next. Here are some options that come to mind:

1. Sylvanas wins. She beats the Alliance, defeats Saurfang and his rebels, and the whole next expansion is dealing with the fallout of an ascendant Sylvanas and those that are loyal to her. It could go so far as changing the factions so that you have the living vs the dead, with Sylvanas and her loyalists and undead versions of other races for those players who want to play an undead Night Elf or so on.
2. Sylvanas is raised from the dead as a living being, and is immediately forced to deal with the memories of her life and undeath in a body that can completely feel again. This is quite possibly the worst possible punishment for her actions, and yet she would still be available for future stories.
3. Sylvanas steps down as Warchief, avoiding an all out pitched war between her followers and those of Saurfang and the Alliance, but in return she is granted amnesty for her acts as Warchief and returns to the leadership of her people. This one would enrage everyone, I suspect, except for Sylvanas’ fans.
4. Sylvanas fakes her ‘death’ and goes underground, escaping everyone who is seeking her demise and promising a return which her loyalists will work to bring about.

Now, these are just a few that came to my mind, and I’m not the Blizzard writing team, who are smarter than me, understand MMO’s and MMO storytelling better than I do, and have multiple people to bounce ideas off of. But to be completely honest, I personally don’t think it’s ever going to be possible to avoid backlash — people got to hate Thrall so much by the end of Cataclysm that they were thrilled to see the back of him, and he’s one of Warcraft’s most beloved characters.

Yes. And not just one or two, either — there’s a wide variety of prehistoric rhinos that I think we should get as mounts, from the wooly rhino to Paraceratherium, the largest land mammal ever to exist, at least as far as we know. There’s also Elasmotherium, another gigantic species of rhino almost the size of a woolly mammoth. So yeah, I’m down for all sorts of rhino mounts.

And yes, rhino babies are so adorable I’m forced to result to expletives to express just how #&@(ing adorable they are. I have long been a fan of rhinos.

If you preferred constant, inescapable PVP, then PVP servers were better. Some players absolutely did love that, and didn’t want to switch away from that paradigm. For those players, PVP servers were better. For other players, who want the ability to opt in and/or out at will, War Mode is better.

Look, all joking aside, Mitch is a valued colleague and someone I’ve worked with on the podcast and on the site for a while now. I would not support punting him.

No.

I’m just not really that kind of player. Even back when you could easily use the Garrison to make millions, I never bothered. I’m not a ‘let’s make a lot of gold’ kind of guy.

Okay, that’s the Queue for this Friday. I hope to see y’all next week. Liz is back next Wednesday and Anne is doing Monday’s Queue, so try and ask a lot of questions if possible.