The Queue: Look at this whelp, splish-splashing his troubles away

Sometimes all you wanna do is think about cute whelps having fun, and perhaps even wish you were in their shoes. (Do dragons wear shoes? I don’t know; someone should ask that on the next Queue).

But you don’t always have access to a pool, or bathtub, or the ocean, so you might consider doing the second best thing instead: answering questions, and adding fun prompts and pictures to embellish some of them.

I’m in luck, for I can do that second thing. So let’s get to that!

Not to get all philosophical here, but… what is “ready” exactly?

In this age of nearly omnipresent internet access and the ability to patch software after it’s released, most big games are a permanent work-in-progress. This is, of course, a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it’s fantastic that developers are able to fix bugs, make improvements, and even release new content to games that are already out. In the olden days, games would often ship with certain bugs that would simply never be fixed, or glaring issues that players would have to learn to avoid or look past.

On the other hand, this ability to keep working on games also allows developers to release things before they’re “ready.” Especially on a game like WoW, where patches with new content are expected and there are so many variables, it’s not uncommon for the developers to simply run out of time, and decide to postpone work on a particular spec, or class, or race, or what-have-you.

So it’s not impossible for Blizzard to have already planned out every single upcoming change for Shaman, or any other class, in meticulous detail, but conclude that they won’t be able to get it done in time. However, that’s “okay” in a sense, because they have the ability to implement those changes for the next patch, major or minor. Will players of a particular class or spec be happy with that? Probably not. But it’s still better than getting rushed changes that don’t work properly and have to be redone later — or worse, no changes at all.

(With all of that said, the round of Shaman changes we recently got (finally) did look pretty good.)

Put… put the trash in the trash.

I tend to agree with you. And I think it’s a very good outlook, in general, if you just want to be happy, you know?

People — especially people who are passionate about something — tend to overthink things and focus on the negatives, or worry too much about scenarios that they think might happen. It’s something our brains are wont to do, that helps us survive — but it doesn’t necessarily work that well in every single scenario, since not every single issue is a life-or-death issue.

However, it’s also important to remember that Overwatch 2 messed things up bad. Really, really bad. And you know I don’t mean that as a simple nerdrage-filled diatribe like “this movie sucks, the colors are too bright!” or something.

The people in charge of decisions — most likely executives — actually engaged in several anti-consumer practices, prioritizing profit over quality. They sold us a new product on promises and delivered something that was overwhelmingly considered inferior to the previous product — which they had made inaccessible, forcing all players to jump ship. They made people start having to pay for things that used to be free. They kept an enormous number of fans engaged with promises of a huge game mode that never came to be, for literal years. Those players have every right to feel cheated, lied to. What Blizzard did with Overwatch 2 should never happen again. They managed to completely squander whatever investment and passion their fans had in that game, leaving apathy in its wake.

But even though I am one of those players — I made real, professional plans around that game; I had legitimately been looking forward to becoming an Overwatch 2 PVE player and writing articles about it — I’m happy that the game managed to stay afloat in some manner, and even revert some of the worst decisions the people in charge made.

At the end of the day, the better world for players and for Blizzard is the one where the headlines read “despite immense hardships, Overwatch manages to turn things around and please players,” rather than “Overwatch is dead and buried with droves of players spitting on its grave.” I truly believe that, and I’ll never begrudge anyone for still playing and enjoying the game — far from it. I’ve even considered jumping back into the game lately myself — I stopped playing around the time Ramattra released.

But I don’t think we should just brush off those grievous mistakes, and we shouldn’t simply forget about them either. Another blow like that could spell doom for Blizzard itself.

A snack. These days, my “snack” of choice for moments like that is a protein bar. It’s filling and it makes my macros happy.

But if you finished your lunch and you’re still so hungry that you’re considering a whole-ass meal, there’s something wrong with your meal planning process. Maybe hire a consultant?

Or ask Trade Chat!

This has been The Queue, friends! If you want your question answered here tomorrow, don’t be shy about asking it! Take care.