The Queue: Drudgery

This particular strat is supposed to be getting patched out of Hearthstone Battlegrounds by the time this Queue goes live, and good riddance. Sure, I hit a win with it every time, but at what cost? To be clear, I don’t hate the baller, I just hate the game.

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us the questions and we have plenty of time to kill so we’ll answer in the middle of this round.

Favorite Christmas movie: A Muppet Christmas Carol

Not only is it wildly entertaining, there’s no other movie version of the Dickens story that’s more faithful to the original text, or the Victorian setting. You know, aside from the whole Muppets thing. They even use Gonzo to frame the narrative so they can preserve things like the killer first line, and little touches like calling Scrooge “as lonely as an oyster.”

Favorite movie that isn’t a Christmas movie, but is totally a Christmas movie: Edward Scissorhands

Not taking questions or commentary at this point.

Nah.

I mean, if you have a steady raiding group or M+ group they might get miffed if you’re not min-maxing your horrible suddenly good ring, and if you hang out around here for the duration you’ll probably get at least mildly spoiled on plot points. But no, there’s nothing you’ll directly miss if you skip a couple weeks. You might be a little behind the curve, but it won’t truly matter. The people who are going to be jerks about that are the people who find reasons to be jerks about anything, just for the excuse to be a jerk. It’s the holidays and since nobody loves them they have to take it out on somebody who doesn’t deserve it, I guess.

And given the timing of the patch, having the first couple weeks be an irrevocable power boost would be kind of a jerk move in itself on Blizzard’s part. Let people travel, or enjoy time with their loved ones.

It greatly depends on the game and what “finishing it” means.

I don’t play a ton of games where the endpoint is dependent on the story finishing and rolling credits as it does. Even the ones which have very closely defined stories will usually allow you to continue playing after the fact, open world-style. Usually, for me, “finishing” is just kinda trundling on to the next game, for whatever reason.

I will say I usually have both a more immersive game and a more bite-sized game on the backburner at the same time. Right now, The Long Dark is the longer, more immersive game I have to be heads-down engaged in while I play. In general, finishing The Long Dark means a death, which means losing my character permanently, and when I do die I usually shelve that game as immediately and mercilessly as that pack of wolves just shelved my character. On the other hand, I can play Hearthstone Battlegrounds as I do things like type out this Queue. The latter can also be games like Vampire Survivors or Brotato, where there are rounds and a pause system where I’m prompted to take a breather every so often. Games like Star Trucker also fill that gap. Those games are usually what I go to when I’m working through a particularly cerebral subtext, too.