The Queue: When it rains…

Y’all got anything going on today? Any special embargos lifting or whatnot?

This is The Queue, where you ask us questions and we’re probably phoning it in because you have so much to comb through already anyway.

I’m undecided, largely because I have so much freaking stuff going on. I completely understand why they elected for a 6/6 launch date, but it’s incredibly inconvenient for me, when half my days are going to be spent either driving kids to camps or hanging out in the car waiting for kids to be finished with camps — I got myself a bluetooth keyboard so I can just work from my phone. Then, there are all the other games I’m trying to keep up with. At this point even the Duolingo dailies and weekly ladder seem onerous (though I’ll definitely be doing those in the car).

So for once, I’m probably going to do the responsible gamer thing and avoid the login nonsense and general instability and balance passes that come from preordering for a day one game launch, and then purchase a month or two out. When I do, it seems likely I’ll go for the super-ultra-mega deluxe edition, because I’ll want that initial bump up to the $90 edition, and the mega version is just $10 more, so I may as well.

The obvious answer are the Blood Elf and Draenei newbie zones and capital cities. I would bet actual folding currency we never see flying of any sort (beyond malarkey-based goblin glider unintended short bursts) in any of those zones.

In terms of Dragonriding, the Shadowlands and their weird geography will probably be a much later addition, simply because Dragonriding means you can do a whole lot more with a mount, and each Shadowlands zone is both its own space, but also located within the same technical landmass. In earlier betas, it was already possible to Shenanigans your way from one map to another. I’d guess that it’s going to take longer to enable it there, but it’ll likely involve invisible walls and things like that. I do think we’ll get it there eventually, it’ll just take longer to QA out all the nonsense players could get up to.

In actual history, likenesses like statues and even portraits on coins were how the common people knew what their monarch looked like, if they weren’t lucky enough to catch a glimpse during a parade or whatever. There’s a really excellent, well-sourced video on portraiture in the early modern period and the role it played in current events and disseminating news on one of my favorite history youtube channels, Reading the Past.

But we’re not talking about the early modern period, because we have gnomish and goblin tech and literal magic, so who freakin knows. For all we know, Khadgar sends out his bubble and yells about current events in all the cities, rather than disseminating by word of mouth and newspapers. Maybe goblins rig explosives to skywrite things. We have sentient dragons capable of complex speech, so maybe they just yell about it. Maybe Magni gets his whole 411 telepathically via interplanetary bluetooth.

It’s really next to impossible to say. But I’m pretty sure I’d be a hermit in Redridge or something.

I’m still undecided! I was leaning toward the clear peach ones because I felt like they’d probably be the most flattering, especially to make my blue-gray eyes pop, but I do love the green ones. My literature channel’s branding is cream, charcoal, and green, and that’s where I show my face most often these days. However, I’ve recently had a weird spate of comments saying stuff about my “sexy librarian aesthetic,” and the darker unique frames would kinda play that up so I’m hesitant. Though, as always, I can’t make decisions based on other peoples’ projections — I usually wear graphic tees with loose hair, and rarely wear my glasses because I hate the glare of lights off the glass, so in addition to feeling objectifying and socially tone deaf, it’s just flat out wrong. But nevertheless. Conflicted.