The Queue: What’d I Miss?

I went on vacation last Saturday, and we’ve had a great time, going to Niagara Falls on a train, hitting up with Adirondacks for some outdoorsy fun. We even went swimming in a waterfall! I’ve been largely out of the loop in terms of information, but I’m sure there’s not a lot of stuff that happened I need to catch up on.

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us the questions and we’re going to take a great big swig of water before we look at them.

This is going to be a bigtime question mark simply because the scope of this patch — specifically Warbands — is beyond the scope of a just about any other technical leap we’ve seen in the past. This will alter a ton of the background architecture that we’re not used to noticing, especially because it’s happening near-instantly the first time we log on one singular character. In the past we’ve had to log on every single character in order to get that kind of stuff to populate, but not for this patch. And that’s also going to be a big play-by-player question mark. I know I have literally 20 years of saved garbage on a myriad of alts, including some I got to like, level 27 back in 2009 or whatever. The first time I log in, I’m expecting to log on and then spend the next half an hour at minimum getting a snack, putting in a load of laundry, and all that while it populates. Somebody who just started playing in Shadowlands likely won’t have all that data to arrange. And while that time is technically separate from server stability issues, it’s closely related.

Also, as we’ve seen in the past, on a technical moving parts level, it’s almost always some tiny little bit of vestigial code or a duplicated backup or whatever that starts kicking errors. While I would definitely log on in terms of getting all of my Warband synched up, in terms of tempered expectations, I wouldn’t expect things to be perfectly stable and playable until maybe even the weekend.

Yes! Pretty much everything based on making the faction numbers go brrrr is going to be Warband-wide. The one exception are things like the Aldor and Scryer rep, where the one completely locks you out of the other, but I’d guess there are going to be quite a few more Insane titles going out today as people start logging in.

I don’t think it gets more wacky or iconic than the Corrupted Blood incident. It’s less a bug per se, and more an unintended interaction or consequence, but man was it both kinda neat, and also uniquely awful.

They’re being shot out of a cannon, gaining enough velocity so that they at least maintain low earth orbit. Hopefully though, they shoot past earth’s gravitational pull into the far solar system, drifting past each and every planet we’ve ever sighted, eventually drifting through the cold void of space, alone for all eternity.

That’s The Queue for today. I’m never leaving my house again as — like the Queue — I am clearly cursed.