The Queue: What a ride!

After ten days, the local fair has moved on. What a wild ride it’s been! Over those ten days, my favorite person and I have eaten some weird food, been too cold because we misjudged the weather, ridden a bunch of rides, seen some huge concerts, some smaller concerts, robotics competitions, superdogs, local wrestling, and even hopped on a mechanical bull. A nap might be in order, but then I could do another ten days, easy.

Best food so far? The Ube bun hamburger from the Filipino food truck. Best ride? The Mach 3 that spun me around so very high up in the sky. Best concert? Tom Morello, although July Talk was pretty cool, too. Best free promotional thing at the fair? Nerds kept giving out free packs of Gummy Clusters, and now I have eaten my weight in them.

While I try to get my brain out of fair mode, it’s time for — The Queue.

I’m pretty sure it’s arson and tax evasion foremost, followed by a whole host of other organized crime-related charges.

That horse was never as innocent as she looked. If there were a movie about Blanchy’s life, she would be voiced by Beloved Character Actress Margo Martindale, and it would focus on her ruthless ruling of Hillsbrads’ underground horse-based mafia.

The oat trade has never been so cutthroat.

Just a few off the top of my head.

• Bioshock
• Heroes of the Storm
• Transistor
• Hades
• Bastion
• Halo: ODST
• Burnout: Revenge
• Mario Kart: 8
• Mass Effect trilogy remastered
• Star Wars: KOTOR
• Final Fantasy 8
• Fall Guys

I haven’t played World of Warcraft at all in The War Within! This is nothing to do with my feelings on the TWW at all, as it looks like a perfectly excellent expansion, with lots of fun things and Goblins and cool mounts and such. It’s just trying to find the time to play without missing out on doing other things, like going to the local fair every day for ten days.

Being in a raid that was pushing into Mythic was tough to find time for, especially. Showing up to play just at raid time wasn’t good enough; I also had to farm outside of it, and run Mythic+ and all the extra stuff around that. It wasn’t required, but if I was going to be the tank for a raid doing that content, I needed to make sure that I wasn’t going to be exploding when a Mythic raid boss sneezed on me.

I miss it sometimes, but not enough go back. Maybe some day, I’ll get to roll through a few expansions all at once and watch raids explode in one hit as I go looking for the perfect transmogs from each.

As for the current event pacing? I welcome it, throw lots of things at the wall, and give players lots to do. If you want to engage, you can. I like that permanence means you don’t feel pressured to do them right away, but also, if it’s permanent, then you get another breadcrumb as you level that might be nothing or might be super important.

Choice paralysis for newly max players into an already established expansion can be a real issue, and I’ve run into that on a few other live-service games I’ve played. Most recently in Division 2, where seventeen different events seemed to jump out at me once I hit the endgame, some of which I couldn’t even do because I didn’t buy the expansions! Yet those exclamation points were all right there and pulling my attention all over the place.

Ideally, I’d say that events like the Treasure Goblin hunting should be set up as yearly returning things so that if you have missed them, you don’t have to worry about never getting your hands on the Red Judgement Paladin set, you know that during July next year it’ll come back and you can get a crack at it.

They do seem to have a pretty good handle on things like that, at least Arthas did with Sylvanas. Of course, maybe it’s less about being able to rip the soul out and more just there’s a dead thing in front of me now and a soul kinda hanging around, that now I can bend to my will/shove into a corpse.

Warlocks do seem a bit more ripping out and leaving the body intact. Then, using that soul to power up something. But I feel also like they’re just launching the soul into the wood chipper to extract the power, and less controlling the soul.

So maybe it’s both, or neither.

I collected most of them! I can’t remember how many I got/had left, but I did spend a lot of time in there killing Druids of the Flame to make that one stupid rare spawn. I also can’t remember if I got his Mark or not, so for my sake, I hope so. I’m sure that along the way to getting him to spawn, I also got most of the rest. Fun system, and they should do it again so that Druids have a little extra to hunt in content.

The best non-werebear looks are the Nightmare bear Green and Red tints, and the Hidden artifact skin with the bones on it.

Here’s Bacardi comfy and cozy in my gaming chair. You’ve seen this one before, but he remains a good and generous cat who will give you extra luck in your gaming endeavours.

Would you rather

Run a carnival games booth

Or

Run a ride at a carnival

Today’s Anna Earworm: Mama, I’m Coming Home

Have an excellent week, and I hope that there are things out there that can leave you feeling good. Leave Anna and the other writers lots of questions to make sure they feel good too!