The Queue: Deja vu

It feels like I’ve been here before. Like I’ve done this before.

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I’m sure something’s different.

Hm. Well. While I think on that let’s get to some questions.

I’d say airplane. Easier to coordinate while the basset is squirming and giving you a look that says why are you doing this instead of scratching my ears?

I feel like I need to start by clarifying something: I rolled a Blood Elf Paladin in January 2007 when Burning Crusade came out, and that’s the Blood Elf Paladin I still have. I have a lot of good memories of playing this character, because I played it with a group of really good friends throughout two expansions.

But times change, guilds change, people change. That guild broke apart, and the Cataclysm expansion really changed how Paladins felt, and I left the character (and the faction) behind. Lately my wife and I have been having trouble meeting our Alliance guild’s schedule and when revisiting our options I realized we had some friends who played on the Horde side at a time that works better for both of us.

So the Paladin is back. She was level 113 or so and I’ve jumped her up to 120, gotten a legendary cloak, geared up to ilvl 420, unlocked some essences, gone to Ny’alotha, gotten lost a lot, and have yet to really learn how to play.

By all of that I mean it’s more of a re-welcoming.

The first thing I did after transferring the character was zoom over to Vul’dun to work on reputation for Vulpera. The second thing I did was fly to Dazar’alor and wander around lost for 20 minutes trying to find the transmog vendor.

I still have my Gnome Monk — heck, I was in Ny’alotha yesterday morning with her — I just don’t have a guild on that side anymore. (Unless you count the one I made for myself so that I didn’t get guild invites.)

But I’m having fun. I’ve been playing Mistweaver for so long that it’s interesting to learn another class.

They should have done this years ago. Thrall’jinfang Hellrunner would be … perhaps not the best actor, because who has the budget to pay for a top-tier actor handing out quests all day … but he would be a very enthusiastic actor, taking the role of Warchief-of-the-moment very seriously.

I think I would feel pretty bad about it if I didn’t spend more time staring at health bars instead of actual player characters.

We’ve always taken a “throw it at the wall and see what sticks” approach to content — with Blizzard games as much as anything else. We’ve tried a lot of things over the years and come to conclusions that some things work and some things don’t, and it’s better to focus our energy on things we know people are interested in reading.

Here’s an example of this thought process in action: For a few weeks we ran guides on the weekly Challenge Rifts in Diablo 3. Weekly guides to Hearthstone Tavern Brawls had done well, and Diablo content does well, so we thought this would be a hit — nope. So we dropped it and did a general Rifts guide.

Off-topic content is like that. We’ve tried a bunch of things — other games, books, movies, TV, and a range of general geekiness — but what really stood of all of that was D&D and tabletop content. And since it’s something that quite a few of us are enthusiastic about, it’s been really easy to ramp that up. (I’d still like to do more of it.)

As to other off-topic stuff, it really comes up when it comes up. We keep our eyes open for stuff we think our readers are interested in and our writers are interested in, try it out, and see where it goes. We had an Animal Crossing article yesterday, and since that’s the sort of game that completely takes over your life, and it is going to be taking over the lives of several of our writers, we’re going to do some articles about it.

And we’ll see where it goes.

Warlocks are just clerics with bad PR.

And that’s all I’ve got for this Friday, my friends. Have fun, play games, be nice to each other, and pet a dog. They deserve it, and you do too.