The Queue: LOVE me LOVE me

I’m not all that into all that lovey-dovey malarkey but I can never pass up a chance for a great earworm no matter the day of the year.

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions, and I can’t care ’bout anything but youuuu~

Oh crap! Thanks for the reminder!

…if everyone in the comments could remind me of this next week, that would be incredibly great. Y’all know I’m not doing this before then no matter my intentions.

On one hand, they were incredibly isolated on all sides. Bordered by mountains, cut off from the oceans, and the gate was strong, and sturdy, and all but welded shut thanks to Genn’s now retconned xenophobia.

So, for the regular folk, completely isolated. However, on the other hand, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from constructed narrative, actual history, and lived experience, it’s incredibly difficult to enforce something like that unilaterally, for every single entity within a country. There will always be people –thrillseekers, bootleggers, and profiteers — who will skirt the law even if doing so is incredibly dangerous and ill-advised. Hell, frequently it’s because doing so is dangerous and a terrible idea.

It defies belief that Gilneas survived the plague of undeath as long as it did, honestly.

To me, the difference between Classic — at least, Classic-Classic — and Retail WoW is the sheer range of things to do and tools they’ve supplied the average user to do them out of the box.

In Classic, you level via questing. Maybe, sometimes, a little via dungeoneering. Don’t like questing or dungeons? Tough. When you hit level cap, you can farm materials to play the AH a little, you can sit in Ironforge or Orgrimmar and ask for an UBRS run (LF1m, must have key), you can raid, you can grind rep with the Timbermaw, or you can run AV until your eyes bleed and call it PVP. That’s it, end of activities list.

With Retail, you can do daily quests, or weekly quests, or the monthly adventurer’s journal for Trader’s Tender. You can use in-game tools to run LFD or LFR, you can test your mettle with challenges like M+ dungeons or the Mage Tower. You can pet battle. You can do one of multiple different varieties of PVP with different ratings and currencies to earn. You can do older content, like archaeology, or grind appearances for transmog. There are mount challenges and toy easter eggs to hunt. If you missed Shadowlands you could go back and find your way to Theotar’s Tea Party, or you could go all the way back to Draenor and build your Garrison, or hang out in Dalaran — either one.

The thing with Retail is that the vast majority of the stuff you could do in the Classic game is there, but it’s more accessible and there’s more of it, in addition to an extra several chunks of additional UX piled on top of it.

And, when we’re talking about old content, I just can’t pass up the opportunity to mention just how awful Dazar’alor is. Just, so bad.