The Queue: Flying the unfriendly skies

I have been playing this game for a long time now, and this is the least dignified way I have ever traveled.

Ow! Unhand me this instant, you ruffian! Aaaahhhhhhh! I didn’t sign up for this!!

Dark mode.

I should start by saying that I don’t have a ton of time-limited rewards. I never managed to do the Mage Tower (I was interested in the Mistweaver Artifact, and I just wasn’t good enough to get through the healer challenge), I never bothered with challenge modes, and until BFA I had never gotten Ahead of the Curve.

But I do have one particularly treasured possession that you cannot get anymore: the Mini Tyrael battle pet. It was given out as a code at the 2008 Worldwide Invitational where they announced Diablo 3. I just looked it up, and if you want to buy one of those codes, it sells for a stunning $2500. Ouch.

The fact that it’s not available and that you don’t see them anywhere anymore doesn’t make me feel special because I have something other people don’t have — it makes me feel sad because there’s this cool thing that’s so rare you never even see it anymore. It’s so rare that no one would even recognize it if they saw it. The shine of exclusivity has long since worn off, and now I’m just bummed that there aren’t more Tyraels wandering the world for people to enjoy.

I don’t feel terribly strongly about the things I’ve worked for, either, like those Ahead of the Curve achievements. It’s fun to ride around on those unique mounts for a while, but then I always go back to my old favorites and eventually forget about them entirely.

So why not give people who didn’t play when these things were available have a chance to get them, or something like them? It’s nice to have an exclusivity period, but after a point why not spread the love? It doesn’t reduce anyone else’s achievement, just gives others something to enjoy.

The short gives some background to questlines we’ve already seen in Bastion in the beta… and it raises a heck of a lot of new questions.

I’m sure some of these questions are just me. I’m not a lore nerd and so I have some pretty basic points of confusion, like where did Frostmourne come from? and what happened to it after Arthas died?

It feels like this cinematic is one piece of a much larger puzzle, and we haven’t found the corner pieces yet. I have no idea what the finished product is supposed to look like, but I keep turning the pieces we have over and over, trying to figure out how they make sense together.

That all is to say that I don’t have many thoughts, but I have a lot of confusions.

That assumes that Sylvanas lets herself be found. The Maw isn’t a particularly friendly place. There’s no map, no yellow pages, no Google.

Instead of a game of odd couples of the afterlife, I think it’s probably more like a game of hide and go seek where one person is blindfolded.

Is it Garrosh? I hope it’s Garrosh.

That’s all for now, my friends. Have a lovely weekend — or as lovely a weekend as you can manage — and be sure to give your pets a scritch behind the ear from me. Monday will be back soon enough, so enjoy the weekend while you can.