The Queue: A new day, another day

It’s a new day, Queue.

This is important information — and don’t forget that it’s World Quest bonus week, so you can triple down on reputation buffs this week.

Blizzard certainly made a big show of new character customization options at BlizzCon, and it’s possible that they aren’t finished yet. It really feels like we only got a sketchy overview of the expansion, and even though it was a nice sketch it was still just a sketch.

And that makes me think there’s more to come; possibly a lot more which could well include more customization options.

But Blizzard isn’t always predictable. Even as we approach the game’s 15th anniversary, there are a lot of decisions that have been one step forward, two steps back; one step to the left, one step to the right. We’re doing some kind of age-old dance and none of us no the steps.

So I hope we’ll get more racial customizations that give you options to further choose your character’s background — but there’s no telling whether we will.

Being as Chromie, for the anniversary event, is not in her dragon form, she is quite small and thus difficult to see. She is up on a small hourglass-shaped pedestal, but it certainly doesn’t make her taller than a yak mount.

When I checked in earlier, there wasn’t a dismount zone around her, and there were a lot of people, so you may have to do a bit of crowd-surfing to find her. She’s located in the bottom of the Caverns of Time, near the central dais on the opposite side from all of the dungeon entrances.

Good luck.

Blizzard has said that Sylvanas isn’t Garrosh 2.0, and the fact that our attack on Orgrimmar (also at version 2.0) wasn’t the end of the story tells me that they’re at least trying not to make her a full-on villain.

Sylvanas is calculating and ruthless, and we still don’t know her end game — aside from the fact that it no longer requires the backing of the armies of the Horde. She’s taken what she needed and moved on when it ceased to serve her. And now…

Well, the problem is that we still don’t know what her end-game is. “This world is a prison,” she said when she tore apart the Helm of Domination and tore open the veil between life and death. But to what end? She’s been feeding souls to the Maw, but we still don’t know to what end.

I think she’ll be a complicated villain, at the very least.

This is a problem with any narrative — including that of our own player characters. As we continue to grow stronger and stronger, how can the world keep challenging us?

We’ve vanquished Elemental Lords; beaten back the Black Dragonflight (twice); killed Old Gods (three times); destroyed (sort of) big lore figures like Illidan and Azshara and Gul’dan; brought down the Burning Legion; and killed a Titan when we took down Sargeras. We are godslayers three times over, and in patch 8.3 we’re gunning for a fourth.

How do you keep challenging a character who keeps growing in power? Like us and like Sylvanas.

You keep throwing bigger threats at them. It’s possible that we will be that threat for Sylvanas. It’s possible that Sylvanas’ deal with her allies (possibly the vaguely defined Jailor) will break down and drop her back to her previous power level. It’s possible that the Jailor himself is the threat in a deal-with-the-devil sort of way.

At some point Sylvanas’ power will be tested and will fail. But at the moment we’re just at the point where we’re all wondering where all of that power came from. Maybe Blizzard has lingered on that phase for two long, but eventually it will come to an end.

There are still so few women in professional esports, and when they get there, they often have to prove themselves well beyond their male counterparts). Geguri, who remains the only female player in Overwatch League as it heads into its third season, was so good that she was accused of cheating. Even after Blizzard cleared her of the charges, she had to go on stage to play and show that, yes, it really was her playing that well: no hacks involved.

The boys’ club of esports pushes women away by assuming they can’t play, and by jeering and accusing them of cheating when they can play. Twitch chat after VKLiooon’s win was a pit of toxicity, because even after she played on what is certainly the most carefully monitored stage in Blizzard esports, how could a woman pull off such an amazing sweep?

Unfortunately, the only way out is through. More women will have to put in twice the work, while putting up with insults and harassment, to show they’re as good as the boys. And it’s easy to be discouraged by that and just quit. I’m sure many, many, many women have. But the only way to get more women in esports is for more women to go through hell getting into esports.

We did do a story on her win, but just the one. It’s hard to promote women in esports, too, when there are so relatively few.

That’s all for now, everyone. Be kind to each other.