The Queue: I am not sneezing!

I don’t usually have a lot of issues with allergies, but tree pollen counts in my area have been slowly pushing up and over the 10k mark, when the benchmark for “extremely high” is just over 1500. It’s a real dilemma: do I want to be lethargic and feel terrible because of allergies, or do I want to be lethargic and feel terrible because I went ahead and took a zyrtec?

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us questions and we– I’m not really sure. Something something. It’ll come to me. You don’t mind if I crack open this Cadbury Creme Egg do you? Yes, I did settle on taking that zyrtec, why? That’s 2 questions down, so we’re off to a great start.

So, it’s weird, because on the one side I’m not necessarily opposed to this. You’re right that there are a ton of features to explore that are new and unique. It makes sense that the WoW team would want to capitalize on that by giving people the option of having a first hit free.

On the other side, they already offer a pretty generous free trial for both new and returning players — and at literally 20 years on now, I’d suppose it’s mostly in the “returning” category. You can play any character in Retail under level 20 to your heart’s content at any time with a demo version. You’re absolutely right that Plunderstorm is the new hotness that people want to experience, but considering the nature of Plunderstorm, what they’re probably banking on more than anything is FOMO. Since you don’t really get to keep anything from the experience, many players who aren’t going in with the incentive of wanting the cosmetics for the game they’re already playing can just play a round or two and then cut out, FOMO satisfied.

I will say that, however, if numbers don’t go brrrrr toward the end of Plunderstorm I could see them opening it up for a weekend so players trying to finish out their cosmetics get some fresh meat and reduced queue times.

It looks roughly 1 in 100, which is rare in a meta sense but not a real sense.

In a real sense, 1/100 is actually fairly generous — imagine getting Invincible after farming 100 murlocs, for instance. But at 1/100 for a limited-time boss fight, for most players, that’s going to take a lot of grinding in a very relatively short period. This first year in particular it’s going to feel extremely rare and special, but over time everyone who wants it will definitely get it — you just might be waiting til 2025.

I do think this is likely, but by including this question, I have put my finger on the scale of fate, so now the likelihood of each outcome has shifted. Much like Schrödinger’s Cat, by observing This Week in WoW, we have now altered the outcome. It is now far more likely that, in the time between my typing this response and its publication, This Week in WoW will either already have been published, or a statement will be released saying that it will not.

Now that we’ve passed the Mysterious Pirate Patch, we’ll probably be getting some news about TWW alpha soon, and Season 4 is just around the corner, so I’d expect more short newsy posts soon.