The Queue: Jurassic World must be stopped

Not for what they do in the modern world with their resurrected ‘dinosaurs’ that are decades out of date by this point. Featherless Dromaeosaurids? Whatever, it’s dumb, but I can ignore it.

What I cannot ignore is a flashback to prehistoric times — specifically the Cretaceous period — that has a Giganotosaurus carolinii get into a fight with a Tyrannosaurus rex. For one thing, they lived over 30 million years apart, on different continents that had no land bridge between them, and during that thirty million years that one of them was extinct and the other hadn’t evolved yet North America was further divided by a ocean over what we’d now call the Great Plains, keeping the Tyrannosauridae confined to Asia and North America.

I realize nobody cares but me but this drives me insane. Never mind the fact that big predators like Tyrannosaurus Rex and Giganotosaurus carolinii are very unlikely to get into a fight unless they can’t avoid it due to factors like food scarcity, but also the skeletal structure of a Giganotosaurus would have meant that it didn’t bite as hard as a T. rex and would not have done well in a one on one confrontation with one.

Yes, I know, most people just want to watch a dinosaur movie. And yes, I know Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum and Laura Dern are in the new one, and that’s great, love to see those folks. But gaaah it drives me buggy to see such blatantly inaccurate stuff in a movie. You want to make them fight now in your weird lab where you magically clone them or whatever, okay, sure. But making them fight in a scene set in the past is worse than having King Richard the Lionheart battle Ramses II in a tank battle in modern Syria.

1. Yes.
2. Because I think it would be cool.
3. Because that’s awesome.

However, I can also think of a lot of reasons why it shouldn’t be a pet battle class. Instead, in order to keep battle pets out of becoming necessary for anyone to collect — the pure optionality of battle pets and pet battling in WoW is what makes it special and unique, in my opinion — I would instead argue for a class that collects pets in a manner similar to a Hunter, but doesn’t ever use them to fight at all.

Instead, their pets are used as templates for specific abilities. Imagine a Druid who collected shapes based on animals they went out and befriended, combined with a Shaman except their ‘totems’ and ‘elementals’ would be their pets.

I mean, maybe one of the specs would in fact use the pets as pets, sending them into combat and then backing them up by shifting into a form combining their pet and themselves, so they could murder stuff together as partners, if that’s your bag.

On the one hand, I like the idea that we come out of Shadowlands with abilities we learned there. One of the few significant issues I have with the expansion is how it almost feels like it will just be forgotten when we go back to Azeroth, due to the whole veil’s back, Jailor’s gone, let’s just move on feeling of the expansion’s ending.

The idea that we went to the realm of Death and came back exactly the same, unchanged? That bugs me. So I’m cool with the Covenant abilities and various legendary item powers making it into the talent system as reminders of what we saw and did when we were there.

But on the other hand, I can’t say I dislike your ideas. Especially Spear of the Valkyr, considering all the time I spent ordering them around in Legion, it would be nice for them to show up now and again to help out.

Technically Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria did this, as did Warlords of Draenor — I mean, Tanaan Jungle got majorly changed and was basically a new zone, but it was the zone we saw when we first arrived on Draenor, just like the Vale of Eternal Blossoms was reworked into the Vale of Eternal Sorrows at the end of Mists.

Likewise, Cataclysm saw the Firelands invade Mount Hyjal as a progressive thing, leading up to the Firelands raid, and even reworked the Dragonblight into a raid zone without adding any new zones as such.

I think the issue there becomes that the world still feels empty as you progress, because people aren’t leveling as much and are focused on wherever the current endgame happens to be, but that doesn’t mean either approach is bad.

There are folks who love WoW Classic as its own thing, who have been happily playing it since it launched and want Wrath Classic to feel like more of the same kind of thing they love, and for them, LFD would be awful, because as those of us who played then remember it absolutely changed the nature of grouping.

I know people who loved the system and being able to run dungeons without having to spend significant amounts of time putting a group together — it could be seen to democratize running dungeons and made the content in them available to players who didn’t necessarily want to assemble their PuG’s through soliciting other players on their server via chat channels and friend networks. I also know people for who that was the big draw — that felt like the random nature of the groups LFD assembled and the inability to vet anyone beforehand or even know them by reputation made it a bad experience.

Personally, I would have liked it if they’d offered LFD servers and non-LFD servers. I’m not generally into schadenfreude and would prefer the maximum amount of players be happy. But I get why Blizzard chose to simply not put it in. I think the majority of WoW Classic players right now (not counting players who haven’t been playing but might have jumped in for Wrath Classic) don’t want it.

God, I hope it does.

I agree with the sentiment that trading leads to certain segments of the community playing Diablo in order to trade items, rather than for actual enjoyment, and I feel like the RMAH showed us that trades end up with people disliking the game. I want them to continue with the D3 model, especially as someone who routinely plays the game with my wife.

Frankly, Diablo 2 isn’t my bag anymore, and if it was, I’d just play that. I feel like people often overestimate how much the ‘community’ for any specific game agrees with them, and the reason there will be a lot of argument on the forums about this decision is that some people will indeed hate it, but hardly all Diablo players will.

That’s what a Tyrannosaurid dinosaur looked like when Giganotosaurus carolinii was alive. It wouldn’t have stood a chance against the larger animal.

So that’s the Queue. I’m listening to Pretend we’re dead by L7 and thinking about how annoying I find the Jurassic World movies. Remember to ask Mitch a lot of questions about dinosaurs, I know he loves that. Or if you actually want to be nice, maybe ask him about Bugsnax.