The Queue: Waiting in an all new login queue…

The new login screen is kind of mesmerizing. Maybe I don’t even want to reconnect. Maybe I just want to stare into the swirling darkness, leaning ever closer to my monitor…

No, wait, I need to write the Queue. Let’s do this.

I would much prefer a little snow every day to having a mountain of snow one day, because a mountain of snow is a mountain to deal with. I have a long driveway up a hill, and a three car garage of which at least two spaces need to be cleared, plus there’s a drive down the side of the house which needs to be at least partially cleared because that’s where the oil tank is for heating the house.

A very small snow? you might be fine with a push broom to clear it off, and then put down some ice melt to make sure it doesn’t freeze over. It’s a little chore every day to make sure the front of the house is safe, and it would be a predictable chore. A very large snow? That turns into an urgent all day job.

Fortunately I’m not far north enough to have any snow just yet, and the sun came out today to bask in (even though it is still 40 degrees). I can ignore snow problems for at least another day.

I’m primarily wearing the Monk tier set, which is pretty nice, but I don’t care for its little sock feet — foot protection is very important when you’re kicking things all the time, and you never know what you’re going to step in while wandering around Azeroth — and also I prefer the muted colors of the heroic set, when I have upgraded most of my gear to the Mythic appearance, which is bright teal with golden glows. It’s too much, plus I’m wearing crafted gloves that are red and don’t match anything, a helmet I can’t turn off, and the Reshii Wraps which aggressively match nothing (and also can’t be turned off).

Honestly I’m looking pretty good wearing mostly tier, but I’m getting some big flashbacks to the Burning Crusade days, and I may put on the tier gloves in my bag just to match (even though they’re a downgrade).

The anniversary event runs from November 16 through December 7, which actually is a little surprising because Blizzard hasn’t made a big deal of it or, that I am aware of, said anything about it. So presumably it will be very much like last year’s, giving us another year to earn cosmetic armor sets and other goodies. And last year’s was pretty good, that seems okay.

Housing is a wide-ranging system that touches practically every other part of the game. Housing decor is in every expansion and every profession. It’s hidden on unexpected vendors (like the extra copies of Onyxia’s head that you can buy in Mudsprocket, completely legitimate) and reputation vendors scattered across the world.

But that does mean that buying decor requires things from other parts of the game. If you’re buying from a reputation vendor in an expansion that had a core currency of any kind… you bet decor at reputation vendors is going to cost that currency. And because you might want more than one piece of decor — like a fully matched set of chairs for your dining room, or a wall of Suramar-style bookshelves in your library — you may need to buy a lot of it.

So you might want to think on checking your stock of expansion specific currencies, and stockpiling. Just in case.

In honesty, I don’t like playing alphas and betas. I’d rather play a finished game and play it once rather than playing the same content over and over. I’m not working in QA, and it’s hard for me to manage the attention span to play content once, much less through multiple rounds of testing.

But here I am, so here I am.

A lot of us have been playing this game for 20 years, which is a significant commitment. And in such, there’s a desire for the game to be good, to be bug-free, to take your experiences into consideration. That means playing betas and PTRs and reporting problems and giving feedback to help the game be the best it can be.

Yeah, I’m doing free QA for them which isn’t a job I love. But even if Blizzard doubled, quadrupled its QA team overnight, World of Warcraft is a massive game, and Midnight in particular is making some huge changes. That means it needs more testing, too.

So here I am, peeking into dark corners and looking for new housing decor and bug reporting whenever I can’t pet dogs. It’s important work.

That’s all for today my friends. Take care of yourselves, stay warm if you are in one of those places that’s gotten snow this week, and I’ll see you in the comment section.