The Queue: It’s not my job to ruin your good time

This is something I hadn’t really thought about before, but when someone really loves something I don’t enjoy — be it a game, a movie or TV series or a kind of food or whatever it may be — I’ve made a real, concerted effort lately to not interject with an opinion unless directly solicited, and to couch that opinion as fully as possible in a critique of the thing in question and not people who enjoy it.

I’m not the fun police. If you’re having fun playing something, or watching something, or eating something — if you find a moment of enjoyment in this world, however small, however fleeting, as far as I’m concerned that’s a positive for everyone. I’m really making an attempt to keep this in mind. The whole mentality of relentless negativity has poisoned a lot of discourse, I don’t need to add to it.

This is the Queue. It’s not just enough to let people like things. Be happy that they found something that they enjoy, even if you don’t share their enthusiasm for it.

Not that I could find, but I am not perfect and I might have missed one. There are a few Dragons out there, after all, and it’s certainly possible that some have, or even are right now, used a Troll avatar at times.

We accidentally talked about this on the Queue yesterday, but since it was meant for the Queue I’ll summarize here.

LFR releases in wings and is designed for a fixed number of players who don’t have the same communication, cohesion or even reliable rosters — it’s a randomly queued assemblage of players who drop in and out as things like schedules permit. Combine this with the fact that in such a situation, it’s just easier to divide the raid up into digestible chunks, and you get the LFR boss order.

Another way to look at it is that many raids like to let players have options on which boss to tackle first — after an initial intro fight, things can open up and you can choose any one of several bosses to work on. But for LFR, this would be more disruptive than helpful, so carving the raid up into assigned boss order makes sense for that format.

I mean, I can’t speak for anyone but myself, but I’m at least hanging on as best I can. Things are hard and often it gets discouraging, but I do my best to keep moving forward, not obsess on the things that aren’t ideal right now. Thank you for your concern, however — when things seem bleak it’s helpful when someone cares enough to inquire.

There’s an interesting idea in here, I think it would need to be iterated on — just bumping up a few zones to max level without new quests would probably not fly for the majority of players, but I do think it would be cool to have an expansion set on just Azeroth again.

One idea that comes to mind would be to make an expansion set primarily on, let’s say the Eastern Kingdoms, and one where the ‘zones’ were much larger, and contained subzones that were complete zones in classic WoW. So, an Old Lordaeron zone that’s as big as Tirisfal Glades and the Western and Eastern Plaguelands combined, with those zones as sub-zones inside it. Bordered by a zone comprised of Gilneas, Alterac, and the Arathi Highlands, then a ‘Wildhammer Lands’ zone of the Twilight Highlands, Grim Batol, Aerie Peak, the Hinterlands, a ‘Devastated Lands’ of the Badlands, Searing Gorge, and the Burning Steppes… you get the idea.

You’d make sure not to have this be the only Eastern Kingdoms, but instead leave the original version for players below the next expansion level, and only have people running that expansion’s leveling content see the new Eastern Kingdoms. Maybe there could be a Kalimdor expansion after that, and so on for places like Northrend, Pandaria, and the various Islands we’ve been to like Zandalar and Kul Tiras.

I mean, I can see problems with this version, too, but I do like the idea of the next expansion being focused on the actual world, you know? The game’s called World of Warcraft, let that be your focus.

Okay, that’s the Queue for today. And remember, it’s not just that you should let other people enjoy things — give yourselves permission to like things, too, and don’t always feel the need to defend that. You like what you like. It can be fun to interrogate why for yourself, but don’t feel like you have to justify it.