The Queue: Snow, snow, snow

Hello, Watchers, and happy frozen Wednesday!

I’m sure it’s not frozen for all of you — frankly, I’d be very concerned if it were — but here in the midwest, we’re getting a lot of snow. Like, a lot a lot. If history is any indication, it’ll either be gone by Friday or it won’t melt until like April.

Anyhow, this is The Queue, and unlike outside, it’s hopefully not too cold and unpleasant.

Unfortunately, it looks like you’ll have to collect them again. Hard to fault Blizz too much here, though — I can’t even imagine what kind of work (and subsequent ticket-answering) it would’ve taken if they’d tried to retroactively add all of your earn white and grey items to your collection.

It is indeed! Pip, pip, cheerio!

To do so would be to imply that not playing immediately when maintenance is over presents a disadvantage to players, and I think Blizz would rather players feel like they can play the game at their own pace.

Way back when, Blizz would sometimes give out game time if maintenance lasted all day, and they may have done it in the not-vanilla past as well. But I don’t think they’d do it for the Trading Post outside of very specific and rare scenarios.

Oh absolutely! It’s fun to see if you can “sneak in before opening,” as it were.

…That said, Blizzard folks (of whomst I have a few on my friends list) usually log in before the realms are officially up, which means it’s sometimes easier to tell if the realms are close to ready. That’s when I’ll definitely make those early login attempts.

Out of curiosity, can you not make sure of the Merit Tokens or whatever they’re called? I feel like it couldn’t hurt to stockpile sockets and the like if you truly feel like you’re out of loot.

If you’re really looking to confirm it’s the right choice to switch Vault specs, that’s not a bad time to check out raider.io (if you haven’t already) to see what the prominent gear picks are for the content you plan to run.

Addon updating has gotten to the point where they’re updated so often, it’s hard to keep up if you don’t have an auto-updater, and even then, new patches don’t always play nice even with up-to-date versions. More and more, I’ve been trying to run the game with minimal addons for this very reason.

That said, since I swap between laptop and desktop a lot — and because of the new UI options — I’ve been trying to have a “no/minimal addons” setup that I can still make use of on either machine if the need arises. Easier said than done, though, especially if you’re pushing harder content.

This was answered in the comments, but for anyone else who runs into this issue: It’s usually the result of your game not being up-to-date. It can happen when your launcher or game gets confused and thinks you’re up-to-date, skipping any automatic updates. Usually you can fix it by relaunching the launcher entirely. Otherwise, scan/repair from the launcher settings usually helps, too!

1. Early/Mid-February, but it’ll probably be focused on Splatoon 3’s spring season (and maybe any upcoming DLC). Plus maybe a surprise tease of something new? I feel like Tears of the Kingdom news will come later, but with LOZ’s anniversary in February, it would be cool to see included. Alternatively, Nintendo holds out on both and we get something completely random and unexpected.
2. I admit, I haven’t paid close enough attention to really know what’s going on with those fellas. I blame Shadowlands.
3. I’m not sure I have a perfect answer for this, because it hasn’t happened all that often for me. It also depends how much the gameplay makes up for the bad writing. If it’s fun enough, it can overpower bad writing. But if the gameplay is just okay or not really new and I can’t relate to characters at all, then it’s hard to keep me interested. Maybe if I have a group of friends playing at the same time and we can make fun of it? I dunno, if you’re not enjoying something, save it for later — if you still don’t enjoy it later when other things aren’t going to provide better alternatives, it’s probably just not for you.

That’s our Queue for the day! Please stay warm, safe, and full of questions for tomorrow’s writer!