The Queue: My wife got me into World of Warcraft

In honor of my wife’s birthday, I wanted to tell a little story.

I didn’t play Warcraft 3 at the time, and had absolutely no interest in World of Warcraft when I heard it was coming out. MMO’s sounded ridiculous to me — I have pretty strong social anxiety and the idea of playing a game at the same time as other human beings just didn’t appeal to me in the slightest. Julian, a girl I knew primarily online, and I talked about it but it wasn’t until she came to visit and actually used my computer to play the game (she was in the beta) and showed me how to play it that I started to get interested. And even then, playing a Paladin on her account, I ended up getting yelled at to heal a Deadmines run. I did not want to heal, and so, I did not enjoy that group.

But after Julian went back up to Canada, WoW became how we kept in touch. It was our instant messaging, our shared activity (I would tank and she would DPS, we ranged across Azeroth’s many dungeons)  and our evenings would often end with the two of us sitting on the dock in Menethil Harbor chatting. Once she came back down to Seattle, we settled into a groove playing in a raid guild together, which is what led to pretty much the past fifteen years of us being married.

And so many of our shared memories have involved video games — both of us yelling treasure goblin and screaming around a level in Diablo 3 trying to kill the pesky things, innumerable dungeon runs and raids together, allowing myself to be dragged along on yet another attempt to tame something I’ve never heard of, so much of it I might never have done if not for her. In a real way, without Julian, I wouldn’t be working here, I certainly wouldn’t have ever played WoW, and my life would be utterly different now. I love you, Julian. Thank you.

Honestly, I feel that if we saw a Muppet movie of World of Warcraft, Thrall would be the one played by a non-muppet. Like how in A Muppet Christmas Carol, Michael Caine played Ebenezer Scrooge? Like that. In fact, I’m just going to say that Michael Caine would play Thrall.

And yes, I know Fozzie answered a bunch of Muppets questions but I felt like sharing my idea of Michael Caine as Thrall with y’all.

Also I wanted to link this video.

There is a frankly enormous bug fix patch — patch 1.1.0 — that’s so big that Owlcat are actually putting it on a PTR instead of just rolling it out.

We are now preparing version 1.1.0 that will bring hundreds of fixes to the table! As it is going to be a really big one, we've decided to put it on a test, before applying the patch to the main game.
Follow the link for more information: https://t.co/v6yWwHTgRL

— Owlcat Games (@OwlcatGames) October 19, 2021

Check to see if any bugs that are affecting your games are included in the list of fixes, because like I said, it’s really big.

Yeah, it’s really nice. I especially like doing Warlords of Draenor in Chromie Time with War Mode. It’s kind of a social anxiety sufferer’s dream, it turns the game into a single player experience. My Orc is still running around Frostfire.

I mean, I don’t really want to write it from the perspective of the unknowable alien space gods. That was my biggest problem with Mass Effect 3, ultimately — I don’t want the Reapers explained. I don’t want to know who made them or why. I want them to remain verbs that distort reality around them just by existing.

But if I had to, I’d write it from the perspective of their technology — show the effects of their reality warping, sanity destroying gear as various alien races meet and interact and are distorted by it. Think the Monoliths from 2001 — we of course view the hominids that find one as being ‘evolved’ because they start acting more like we do. But from the perspective of an Australopithecine, we’re horrific monsters.

We’re horribly hairless, our children are born with such large heads they can barely fit out and sometimes require surgery to escape and they are ridiculously helpless for the first couple of years after birth, and we look like spindly mutants next to them. I’d focus on that kind of thing, the horrible idea that our very evolution has been shaped by alien entities that don’t even really care that we exist, just as a byproduct of their own vast, titanic existences deforming the universe around them.

So you keep changing the deuteragonists, have a series of characters come in, interact with the alien tech, and be changed by it, and keep the POV on the tech itself — imagine if you just have one room in an ancient alien ruin and keep seeing new beings find it, change around it, and go forth to destroy their own civilizations, then wait for the next group to do the same.

There was a lot of discussion of Mike Ybarra’s guild selling carries for gold,  which every single raiding guild I’ve ever been in before my current one (which is a casual guild) did frequently, and I really don’t know how to process the outrage. I mean, is it okay for my guild to literally sell runs for people to get the various mounts for gold? Would it be okay for me to do that, but not Mike Ybarra? Honestly, I just don’t know. So, sorry I didn’t talk about that, but I honestly have no idea how to feel about it — I had just assumed it was something people were okay with.

Anyway, that’s the Queue for this Wednesday. Be good, take care of each other.