The Queue: let’s get trashy

It’s not that I enjoy summer, but there’s just something about being outside with your eyes closed and sunglasses on. It’s such a vibe.

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us the questions and we give you something approaching some kind of answer, maybe. As long as we can do it from the hammock. Related, would you mind putting up the hammock while I lie in the grass? Thanks.

Glad you asked!

I bought this tshirt yesterday and it is absolutely 11/10, no notes. The raccoon is drinking boba and has a couple crumpled cans and a banana peel at his feet. Bigtime summer mood.

In a purchase I will definitely regret, I also bought my kids lollipops which double as a slide whistle.

Very much so, yes. I really enjoyed the core loop of Horrific Visions both on a gameplay level and a lore one. N’Zoth messing with our minds to see an untrue future was a really neat little idea, and lends itself to some fun encounters that would suck if they were canon. The gameplay loop was also fun, with neat little twists of its own based on self-activated extra restrictions (which is one of my favorite ways to play anything).

The only thing that I didn’t like about the original Horrific Visions was that you had to go grind out keys (or currency for keys) to do the event. If I messed up, flew a little too close to the sun, welp, have fun farming more keys — and that made every run by necessity a stressful, slightly unfun one. It also made it less likely that I’d progress further along the difficulty path, because in my mind a sure victory with slightly crummier rewards is better than making a slight leap and getting wrecked, thereby “wasting” the attempt. By nixing that restriction, I’m all in on the new Horrific Visions.

I do think it marks a bit of a turning point, though we’ll see how much more of a turning point it is as the expansions continue on. If we’re talking about “WoW 2.0” specifically, I’d say Cataclysm‘s world revamp takes that title handily — and it was such a huge undertaking the rest of the expansion felt a little uneven. And even though I would love a narrative update on the world again, it was so controversial that it’s what essentially kickstarted the idea of Classic at all.

In general I’d say that marketing a game like WoW as the ‘updated version’ beyond addons like expansions, is a mistake. You want to foster that distinction if you’re marketing something like an iphone, so people feel compelled to go one number higher. You don’t want people to get too attached to the thing itself, but the brand and ecosystem as a whole, because you want them to buy the next new thing. With WoW, you want them attached to their character and their character’s story, plus the sticky elements of things like their guild, and the daily or weekly grinds. While we do see those aspects undermined a little by expansion cycles, having a great big marketed shift to a huge new thing necessarily will take away a lot of those things that lend stickiness. This is part of why they’ve said they don’t want to make people go back and kill Arthas for a couch now that they’ve already been farming him for literal decades.