The Queue: The Wishlistening

Ok, look. We’ve all said a lot of things lately that we regret and I fully accept the apologies of any Queue member who made a mean meme about me yesterday. Just the one, really. Now we’ll all just sit here and wait. I’ll turn this Queue right around and go home, mister.

This is The Queue, the daily column where you ask us questions and we came out here to answer them but we’re honestly feeling so attacked right now?

This is one of the rarer weather effects in Stormwind, but it’s my personal favorite. Makes me feel like I’m in a Dickens novel or something. If only it were Gilneas instead…

One of the perks of the most expensive The War Within expansion packs is that you get beta access, even if you didn’t sign up as a tester or just wanted the sweet mount or whatever. This is separate from the early access, where you’ll get to play on the live servers with your real characters before the expansion launches for three days before the unwashed masses show up.

If you don’t want to play it, you definitely don’t have to. Personally, I usually try to avoid questing in general during betas, opting instead to go ahead and try to break things as much as possible while I explore, looking for stuff to write about. I get so many characters stuck in rocks or murdered by random killboxes, it’s so fun.

On the one hand, probably not. On the other, it’s possible that you sort of already can. If you find a particularly person-looking spider out in the world, and then turn on the upcoming arachnophobia filter, you may get lucky and your weird spider will become a weird person-crab.

I’ll refrain from the obvious follow up: but why. Nope, won’t get into that part of it.

It’s tough for me to say either way. I tend to be Incredibly Online ™, so I’m just constantly being marketed to regardless of everything else, so the intensity or lack thereof is mostly background noise.

I do feel like they’re going a little overboard with the promotional cinematics — I said as much in Our Fabulous Discord ™ yesterday, when the new trailer to celebrate the beta phase launched. Maybe the reason they’re going hard on “ooh, beta” is due to trying to market that perk from the most bougie of expansion options. Like I said a couple questions ago, the most expensive expansion grants beta access. This particular cinematic definitely seems like it’s trying to bank on that FOMO a little.

Well-reasoned feedback, presented in a constructive way, will almost always be considered. The issue is whether it ends up going counter to their design philosophy — or even just class aesthetics and all that. There’s a difference between “we hear you so we’re changing it” and “we understand your concerns, but chose to go in a different direction regardless of your feedback.” Also, remember that sometimes the things we find fun, we find fun because they’re OP, so while nerfing it feels less fun, it’s also overall more fair. That’s what they seem to be expressing in their rationale for the change.

I think that, with the Demonic Core nerf in specific, they’ll probably want people to play with it during the beta phase, give feedback, and may bump it back up in time for live. Conversely, they may let people play with it til 11.1 and revert it. Something along those lines. (Sorry).

My personal favorite is Bad Things from True Blood. Not only do the lyrics talk about the whole vampire-y theme, the music and audio effects speak to the setting — incredibly hot rural Louisiana. There’s something about the way it’s sung that just seems raunchy, too.

Of course, the spoken word middle verse is cringey, but that’s why they cut it from the show’s open. And of course, I had to link the longer version since the show’s main theme is full of nudity and gore, just like you’d expect from a vampire show.