The Queue: player housing?

Did you ever get a wild hair and decide that you’re going to rearrange your furniture or get new curtains or retile your backsplash? Yeah, me either.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and no, there’s no teal paint under my fingernails. Could you help me move this tent peg?

I think it’s fine. It’s alright. It’s kinda doing what it’s supposed to, and it’s definitely better than the nothing we had before. It’s basically the shrug emoji in content form. I’d guess that the Guild Work Orders have some decent uses, especially if you have designated guild crafters, but I don’t have firsthand experience with that.

However, I feel like there might be a slightly simple fix — qualifying, as always, that from my perspective as a writer who has I have no earthly idea what might be simple or not, especially within the tangle of legacy code. It seems like the best way to make it better is to start making NPC orders within the system, either personal, a la daily quests, or even easier public ones people will fight to complete.

I’m not sure whether this would be good, since it would add yet another gold generation source to the economy while taking away more materials. But since some of the reason it was added was to give people a place to get rid of the crummy crap you grind on to make the good stuff, it makes sense to have NPC work orders to fill for the useless crap they know we need to make and nobody wants.

Plus, it would be a fun way to drag in some older NPCs we haven’t seen in a while. Have Khadgar ask us for a suspiciously specific number of potions. Thisalee Crow obviously needs a couple new daggers. Gazlowe could ask for whatever neat but useless gadget Engineers are making this expansion. Nomi could ask for a stack of steamed hams he could pass off as his own cooking. Honestly, this seems like such an obvious solution it makes me think there probably is something in the background code which, were this implemented, would cause the aurora borealis to happen in the Roasted Ram.

I just finished a biography of Sarah Orne Jewett which was so incredibly, intensely dry my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth the whole time. Informative, and worth reading for me, but honestly, how do you make the story of a writer who was a lesbian in the late 1800s shacking up with the widow of the editor of Atlantic Monthly dull? Next on my list is Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands, about the “transcendentalist Eden” he made his whole family move to in the 1840s, with a lot of lofty dreams and very little pragmatic planning. I’m familiar with his daughter Louisa May Alcott’s autobiographical short story Transcendental Wild Oats about the same events and plan on re-reading it afterwards, which makes the idea of reading the former far more interesting.

I usually alternate between fare like that and page turning pulp, usually whodunnits and thrillers, and I’m churning through them at an almost alarming rate. We Lie Here by Rachel Howzell Hall was a big standout that I read relatively recently. Right now, I’m in the middle of the seventh or eighth book in the Blake Wilder FBI series by Elle Gray, and it’s fairly decent for a page turner. I can sometimes feel weird about fully endorsing things like crime novels in the same way I’d endorse high fiction, but even within that genre, sometimes I want something piercing and well-written, like Turn of the Screw, and sometimes I just want to be entertained with a Holmes mystery. And hey, since the final Holmes in the canon just hit the public domain this year, knock yourself out!

While I get that the name and nature of that particular geegaw you’re seeking is kind of offputting, the answer is that, basically, they can’t use gold because we already have that. Using a resource like that, or ore, means that you effectively get to bypass that grind within the content, thereby necessarily decreasing its shelf life and your time spent and thereby possibly interest in the game as a whole.

The point of the quest isn’t to finish the quest; the point of the quest is the grind to finish the quest.