The Queue: Midnight? I hardly know her!

The expansion name Midnight is excellent because it’s rich with meaning — it implies and conjures the image of many different things, from colors to the doomsday clock. However, from an editorial point of view, I’m a little flummoxed because it feels like there should be so many more puns available to me with this name. And yet, it’s mostly just sloppy entendres so far.

This is The Queue, our daily column where you ask us questions, and we’ll mid-write them for you. Is that anything?

Probably not. I think they developed Player Housing with this in mind, and that’s part of why each house is its own instance, and each neighborhood is gated to a certain number of players as well.

This is likely why we’re capped at the number of actual doodads we are. If you want to make a table and six dining chairs, you need to have six dining chair items. Over time I think this may become an issue for lower spec machines as we get more and more items available to us in multiple quantities, and there’s always the potential for something like the model Dalaran being the real Dalaran, or that one Paladin spell which was just the Sunwell. But compared to something like the moving bodies of dozens of particle effect blinged out characters, in addition to the number of prop bunnies and texture effects in a city, it’s unlikely we’ll see that scale of lag in one singular player house, or even a neighborhood.

So, there isn’t any real like, if you go do Cartel stuff it boosts your rep with the Ethereals, or whatever. There aren’t any prereq reps that I know of either, but I don’t think that has been a thing in a very long time.

As per usual though, most reps will contain items with unique (or uniquely tinted) transmog appearances, and there’s always the usual slew of toys, pets, and mounts. I’d also consider that later, some of these older reps may get some Furnishing items. And it’s almost always the easiest to gain rep while stuff is in the current expansion, with the exception of raids when you can dogwalk the bosses a few expansions later. So while doing all the 11.2 stuff is going to be your top priority, I would definitely consider doing the stuff that happened earlier in the expansion as we make our way to the last patch doldrums.

Bo Burnham’s Country Song (NSFW for language).

Is it a direct parody? Nah. Is it good? heck yeah.

KALCHEUS

In studying history via artifacts, there’s an important aspect to consider called archeological context. When they do things like dig in old garbage pits or graves, they can tell roughly when this thing happened by things like the mineral content or coloration of the soil and the other things found in those same stratified layers. Things from plant matter like seeds that may have survived through animal bones showing diet, things like how the styles and cultural contexts of pottery and glazing and processing changed over time, how metalworking and jewelry refined and changed as new materials began to be transported more globally, and as we get more and more into the modern age, even just the fashion and style of the times can help establish the timeline when new artifacts are found. They can also change our understanding of when particular species arose, or when trends might have changed, or if there were years where habits changed because the environment did, things like that.

And in that, I can’t help but think about how we’re living in an era with artifacts that will endure all but eternally and serve as a historical context around us when we’re all long gone. “Oh man, we just hit the Funko Pop layer!”

Maybe I’m just a weirdo.