The Queue is very cold today

It’s so cold outside that even my eyeballs feel cold, which is pretty gosh-darned cold. And I know this because Abby refuses to go outside alone, so I have to walk with her, even the many times she wants to walk outside for long enough to decide she doesn’t want to be outside, then turn around and come back inside, then repeat again when she’s forgotten she didn’t want to go out in the cold. In short, I’m spending an above average amount of time walking around outside, so I can say without a doubt that it is very cold.

But enough about that. Let’s answer some questions.

I agree that the blurring of the faction divide is going to continue. It seems like Blizzard is intentionally taking small steps here, which I think is a good idea. If the devs started big, and something didn’t work out, it would be hard to walk it back after it was in the game. But they seem to be planning to roll out this limited form of cross-faction grouping, watch feedback, and decide what to do next. And even though I think removing faction barriers is a good thing, taking it slow and listening to players as is also a good thing.

This is a big change to how the game works, and rushing to do everything at once could lead to mistakes. I really think they’re handling this well.

And all that said, I think it’s almost certain we’ll be seeing more cross-faction features. The fact that we’ll be able to play cross-faction means we’re going to need better tools to find and coordinate with players of other factions. There are communities, but those have limited functionality — even less functionality than guilds, which don’t have any particularly sophisticated features themselves. Blizzard could further build out communities, but the obvious change is to make guilds cross-faction as well. My dream implementation would be that Blizzard would improve guild functionality and add modern community management tools at the same time… but considering the limited development of guild features to date, I’m not going to hold my breath on that one.

When Blizzard might roll out cross-faction guilds is less certain to me. It will be ready when it’s ready… hopefully.

Even if Blizzard intends this to simply remove the worry of faction imbalance in endgame content, it’s still a good change that will let us play with friends and have fun together. And the faction imbalance can make it very difficult for players to find groups, particularly successful groups. Basically this is going to help a whole lot of people have more fun, and that’s a good thing even if Blizzard did just make this change thinking about end game.

Even if you think the changes need to go further, this is a good start — and as I talked about above, Blizzard seems to be taking it slow, not rushing into a mountain of changes. I expect we’ll get more further down the line.

Moose, who is actually a mouse and for that alone I dislike them. Not cool. We are enemies for life.

For those who haven’t seen this, Roxxii is talking about the Activision Blizzard Earnings report from yesterday, which included this line:

Blizzard is planning substantial new content for the Warcraft franchise in 2022, including new experiences in World of Warcraft and Hearthstone, and getting all-new mobile Warcraft content into players’ hands for the first time.

It’s a statement that talks about “substantial” new content, which may not mean as much as we’d like it to mean. That could mean patch 9.2 and nothing else. Basically, I think we shouldn’t read much into that part of the statement. Blizzard developing new content for these games isn’t exciting.

The second part of the sentence, about mobile games, is a bit more interesting. This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about a mobile Warcraft title: mobile development has been mentioned in previous earnings calls and last year a job listing was looking for a 3d environment artists for a mobile Warcraft title. But we don’t know anything else about this mobile game, which is why it’s so interesting to find out it’s slated for a 2022 release date

So what is this game? We just don’t know. I suspect it will have some kind of tie in to World of Warcraft, like a stand-alone battle pet game. But we haven’t had a single hint of what it could be. And that’s kind of exciting to have something on the horizon that could be anything at all.

I have a garden bed in the front of the house that I’ve filled with plants that handle themselves, and I mostly ignore them. But I have a garden of plants in containers — which, due to the cold, are currently all piled into the living room or kitchen — that I spend a lot of time on. Or perhaps more accurate to say that I baby them. Some of them were my Grandmommy’s, and I brought them home after she passed away, and I fret over them. Others I’ve added to the collection since then, and I fret over them too, but a bit less. There’s a big Chinese evergreen, an umbrella tree, and lots of aloe. One of my new plants is a prayer plant that’s just wild, with vibrant green leaves that fold up towards the sun.

It’s nice to watch things grow, particularly during dark times. There’s still life out there, unstoppable.

I’m all for this — and in fact, I’m all for fixing everything. I’d love to see a whole expansion of us going back to fix the things we’ve broken over the years, to try to make the world better for our arrival in it rather than constantly leaving rubble behind us. Let’s fix things. Let’s build things. Let’s do good.

I don’t know if the devs agree, though. We’ll just have to wait and see if we’re ever going to fix up Teldrassil, Undercity, or anything else — but I hope so.

And that’s all for now, folks! If you’re in the path of this winter storm — and I think a whole lot of people are — please stay safe and warm. It’s the weekend, so that makes it a great time to curl up in a blanket and hibernate. That’s certainly what I’m planning on doing second I finish writing this post.

I’ll catch you back here next week everybody.