The Queue: Trois poules françaises

It’s the third day of Christmas, and honestly, what am I going to do with all these French chickens?

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we– what do you mean there are more of them coming?

The difficulty of the Duolingo MMR — which, yes, of course I learned how to game the system in Duolingo — swings pretty wildly depending on what time you start your lessons for the week. The leaderboards only have around 30 players before that leaderboard is closed and a new one starts, more like a game lobby than a true leaderboard. The players for the leaderboard are all slotted when they complete their first lesson, so I’ve found that if I want to take a week kinda easy — or if I want to push really hard for the top of the leaderboard myself — I should wait until about a half an hour before the midday rollover. That way, I’ll still be able to use both the morning and evening chests for an XP boost, but the lobby won’t be packed with the sort of go-getters who wake up early and do their Duolingo.

It’s both surprising and not all that surprising that all it takes is something labelled a leaderboard to turn me competitive, like it even matters that I can say, “je suis le meilleur pour parler français (pour ces 30 personnes).” Though, I suppose being able to say that en français is the whole point of Duolingo, not getting ultra competitive over a placing on a fake leaderboard with made up XP.

…nous reviendrons.

He says, “mraw snort huff huff. Rrrr? Rrr rrrr? Huff huff snuff snort.”

So there you have it!

Really, between the holidays and kid stuff and burnout and the holidays and oh my god I’m so freakin tired, I haven’t played a ton of Dragonflight on live servers yet. I’m trying to take my time and enjoy the ride, both out of necessity, and just because that isn’t usually my MO, so a change of pace is nice. I’m working through my Hearthstone holiday stuff and my Overwatch 2 holiday event stuff in the meantime, too.

They did, and they have! This was the series of shorts called Dragonflight: Legacies. I haven’t heard of plans to make one of those full motion CGI-style cinematics again like the Old Soldier series, but that particular style of cinematics seems so intensive to produce that I’m not too surprised. I feel like they could’ve told the same story from Old Soldier with the Legacies style of animation and been just as effective narratively.

On the one hand, yeah. It always feels kinda weird, especially as a lone DPS, to work through this long questline with your allies in a zone and then hit this roadblock where the NPCs are telling you it’s urgent that you address this threat now, and you’re really excited to, but then you have to wait in queue for a half an hour.

On the other hand, this is a natural way to tell these stories. It makes total sense to have the biggest threat in the zone contained behind an instance wall. There’s a case for an outdoor demi-dungeon, like how Jintha’alor in the Hinterlands used to be, but those tend to be a drag for a number of reasons. You can’t just queue up for them, for one — you have to actively seek a group. You could just pop on up solo and wait, especially since flying is a thing, but it’s pretty likely you’ll be waiting longer than it would take for your dungeon queue to pop — or your second dungeon queue to pop after the other DPS in your previous group was a jerk and the dungeon fell apart after the second boss. And besides, that’s exactly why they haven’t designed a whole lot of these outdoor pseudodungeons since flying was introduced. If you can just fly past all the trash mobs, there’s not a ton of point in having the rest of the mobs there, anyway.