The Queue: Ambiance!

We’re rounding the corner on October. All I really want is to curl up with a book and some soup or baked pasta or chili, but it’s a high of over 90 today, with 81% humidity. Whatever happened to the crisp, windy, fall ambiance? I won’t even get greedy and ask for a thematic Halloween thunderstorm. As a completely basic millennial woman, this feels personal.

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us the questions and we’ll answer with a tall glass of ice water and a little mustache of sweat on our upper lip. Ugh.

Yes. <3

I’m not necessarily concerned about the loss of guild bank items per se. Given the scope of what the engineers were asked to do, I’m honestly surprised we didn’t see more of an issue — stacks of old garbage (complimentary) we don’t use anymore that exceed the stack limit overflowing into a new one but there isn’t any room to stack, for instance. The smashing together of both factions and accounts was a huge, dang near impossible undertaking.

However, there’s a difference between a very obvious, quite understandable issue cropping up from this sort of team — the team that flies completely under the radar until something is hecked up, and then not only are they suddenly tasked with the stress of emergency fixes, but they’re under a microscope — and the lack of any kind of communication regarding this issue. It was radio silence for a good long time, then a well, maybe this is an issue, and now welp, we’re sorry, it’s just gone forever, hope you don’t mind it too much (and if you do mind, feel free to kick rocks because that’s literally all you’re gonna be able to do about it). That lack of communication is what I find truly concerning about this situation. It’s not just that they didn’t want to talk to the playerbase, but also it seemed (to me) less based in wishy washy PR speak, and more based in real confusion. It seemed less like they were publicly denying the issue and more like they didn’t really realize it existed.

Though, speaking of not being surprised, I wouldn’t be surprised if they laid off and then smashed together a whole bunch of their technical backend teams during this ongoing series of layoffs, so the people reporting WoW issues are talking to some sysadmin who used to do infrastructure for just Halo or Minecraft, wading through a cobbled together mess of tech debt. I don’t know much about server infrastructure and the hamsters therein, but it’s hard to miss that the statement posted on September 20 is timed pretty coincidentally with a 30-day backup rolloff as compared with the TWW early release window which started August 22. Though, again, my grasp of what they’re actually working with is nonexistent. I don’t even know the names of the hamsters.

I will say that I’m glad that they did acknowledge the issue, and were unambiguous on the “we’re sorry, but this is final” aspect of it. They could have very easily continued to hedge about that until it was all but forgotten. And yet.

I’m going with The Sims 4. “Rosebud” may have started as a part of a vestigial dev kit, but now it’s fully just a part of the game. And even if not, I always have the basement painting goblin to keep me bankrolled. Also, the issue with The Sims tends to be that you run through money fixing up your ugly starter house, not that you have a hard time earning it, and the prompt doesn’t say you have to keep all that cash on hand to get it as a part of your end-of-the-day sum.

An active tycoon-style game with a tap/click element would probably generate more cash overall (Cookie Clicker, Egg Inc, Roller Coaster Tycoon, etc), but this would definitely generate enough money for me and the fam to live comfortably forever without completely destabilizing every current currency known to man. I have to think that would probably earn me a one-way trip to the guillotine, but you never know.

No. <3