The Queue: Sleep or Queue?

I usually write these way too late at night, because I know if I leave it to the morning I won’t get it done on time. But that means I regularly write the Queue at 3am, when I would rather be sleeping. And, yeah, I would rather be sleeping right now, but I’m here and you’re here (in spirit?), so let’s Queue.

There’s no guarantees until I know what it costs and what will be included. If there’s some sweet transmog, I’m in. Probably.

Blizzard has never offered transmog rewards that I recall — wings in Diablo, pets and mounts in WoW. But no transmogs. And Blizzard has been making some interesting transmogs lately. If there’s a sweet mog I’ll be very tempted, as long as the price is right.

The answer is a resounding maybe. Press passes for BlizzCon are always in limited supply and in the history of WoW Insider and Blizzard Watch we’ve gotten anything from as many as we asked for to zero. We can usually count on getting two, but I’m not sure how things will go this year with it being New BlizzCon (and me already having been warned that there are limited passes available). But regardless of how many we do (or don’t) get, we won’t know for a while — if patterns hold, and I suspect they might, we won’t know until September, possibly August.

If you’re keeping track of dates that’s pretty far after ticket sales have closed, and it’s always been that way. That means we have to join the scrum for tickets like everyone else, because we might not get any.

Basically, anyone who wants to go, anyone who can go, needs to try to get their own tickets or risk not being able to go if we don’t get press passes (or don’t get as many as we hope for). Blizzard Watch doesn’t have the kind of budget to pay for people to go, and we basically rely on anyone who’s planning on going anyway to help us out. (Such is potentially tax deductible as a business expense, but I am not a tax expert and I just throw all of my records at my CPA and let them figure it out.)

I’m not sure who’s going to be making the trip this year. Dan typically grabs one of our press passes because he’s local, but he has work commitments that weekend. I don’t think it’s practical for me to go because of the cost (not of tickets but hotel and airfare) — plus I get a lot less work when I attend in person because I spend all day running around the convention center and very little time getting work done.

Plus someone needs to look after the ducklings, because without an adult to monitor them they are likely to spend the day talking back and forth about announcements without writing them. (Okay. Sometimes the ducklings are very good at recognizing news and jumping on it. But if I had a nickel for every time I had to step into a conversation between writers and ask if anyone was writing this important thing they are talking about, I might actually have enough money to go to BlizzCon.) It’s impossible to keep tabs on every news announcement, hand out assignments, make sure those assignments are turned in, and then edit and publish them if I attend in person.

As to who will be there for Blizzard Watch… that really depends on who’s interested and who can get tickets in one of July’s round of ticket sales. We’re not doing any better than anybody else here.

As someone who has issues with clocks (and with numbers in general), I am the person for whom this information is not at all useful. In fact, usually it just confuses me. Are we going left or right, guys? Please keep things basic, because sometimes it takes me a minute to even get the left/right thing straight, and you’re expecting me to remember which direction a clock moves and then go the opposite direction? That is way too many mental hoops to jump through.

Amazon.

… okay, well, not really. Or at least not any time soon. Actually I’m with you, Moose — I think some kind of Witch class is at the top of the list. With all of the interesting lore in Hawezar, I think there’s a lot to build a class on. It could take some direction from the Diablo 3 Witch Doctor while also being something new, an evolution.

I see Red jumped in well before I did to bring up Templar/Crusader/Paladin — some kind of plate-wearing class that packs lots of defense (and can also use all those shields that keep dropping, because Necromancer is the only shield class right now). I agree that’s a possibility, and it feels like Blizzard has to add a class of this sort at some point. But we haven’t exactly seen where such a class would come from. The Zakarum are dispirited and hurting, while the Knights Penitent are jerks. Looking purely from a lore perspective, witch has much better story hooks — and while Blizzard could create a story for a Paladin or other plate-wearer, the lore for Witches is already right there.

Man, I wish I knew.

It’s an inconsistently appearing bug that we’ve never wholly been able to pinpoint, and our access to anyone who can do tech support for the site is limited. The Queue usually works, so it’s a lower priority fix.

And that’s all for now, my friends. I hope you have a very pleasant Friday and, for my American friends, an enjoyable long weekend to follow. For everyone else, I hope you have an enjoyable normal-sized weekend.

Until next week!