The Queue: Spring Cleaning

I’ve been making a concerted effort to pare down a lot of things in my life lately, especially stuff like baby toys and that ugly tote bag somebody gave me as a gift but is just a little bit too big to be functional. It’s really motivated me to start paring down the amount of crap I’ve hoarded in games over the years, too.

Either fortunately or unfortunately, there’s no way to remove a particularly annoying mount in a fit of pique.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we’ll answer (assuming it sparks joy).

Hold that thought. Let me introduce you to Ban Lu, the most annoying NPC in the game.

Not only is he the Monk Class Hall mount, meaning he takes an outsize amount of effort to obtain even now, but his lines are incredibly annoying little axioms that try to seem deep, and he talks to me every time I use him at all. He even repeats some of his random lines when you’re idle, which is super fun when you’re looking up directions on Wowhead and he starts talking about how you’re not going to succeed if you keep standing there.

Shut the heck up, Ban Lu.

Yup! Very excited to queue up and find myself with 6 stacks of determination on Anduin. Hype.

BlizzardWatch Bucks are worth the same as 20 Stanley Nickels. Not sure on the exchange rate for Schrute Bucks. However, you can’t convert BlizzardWatch Bucks into actual or in-game currency, because BlizzardWatch Bucks are so valuable it would completely destroy the entire world economy. It’s better this way.

With two (2) weeks to go to the expansion announcement on the 19th, we’re going to be seeing a whole lot of quote-unquote leaks going around, many of which aren’t worth acknowledging, because you can kind of infer a lot of what’s going to happen just by thinking about events up til now. For example, I’d expect that, when we go back to Azeroth, we’ll be seeing Magni a whole lot more, simply because he can talk to the planet and there’s still a sword jammed all kinds of up in there. However, I’d count it unlikely that he’ll be involved in daily quests and whatnot, because we can all still hear “CHAMPION” in the moments which haunt us between sleep and waking. So, were I making a set of “leaks” for clout, attention, or luls, I’d definitely include Magni in a meta lore sense, and not in systems. Other perennial favorites include Player Housing (especially involving that old portal in Stormwind), Tinkers and/or Bards, Hero Classes, any continent or area which has been mentioned and not explored yet (I think Tel’Abim is the main one left at this point), and systems from other games which are really slick (the Jobs systems from Final Fantasy in particular).

That said — and I’ll keep this bit spoiler-free as possible — there is one worth talking about. The web certificate URL teased out by Wowhead is probably legit. The name evokes WoW, but in evoking WoW, you’re also by necessity including both Hearthstone and the previously announced unnamed 2022 Warcraft mobile game. Hearthstone has an expansion coming out next week, so it’s unlikely the cert is Hearthstone related. However, the timeline is right for it to point to either the mobile game title or the next expansion. The rumors floating around would make it somewhat likely to be the next expansion, but then we go back to the first point — it’s the kind of thing people have been saying is totes magotes the nextpack, no really, for a super long time.

I think either expansion or mobile title is plausible, but we’ll see for sure in a couple weeks.