Elizabeth Harper

Mitch and I had a great time streaming the cute little game of Penguin Colony last night, in which you are a penguin sliding around a serene antarctic landscape, and also some other things happen. I won’t bore you with the details, but I do have penguins on the brain today.

But we can talk about more than penguins. We can even talk about more animals than penguins, so we should get started on that. This is the Queue, our daily Q&A column where I do my best to answer whatever questions you throw at me.

It's a pretty modest maintenance day for World of Warcraft, with a quick hour of downtime for Mists of Pandaria and The Burning Crusade, and a relatively short two-hour maintenance for Midnight and WoW Classic.

It's been a busy week, with a lot of fresh release dates announced, including WoW patch 12.1, Hearthstone Battlegrounds Season 14, and the Diablo 4 patch 3.2.0 PTR, all of which are imminent.

The end of a season in World of Warcraft always heralds the beginning of a new season, full of excitement and adventure. Or in this case, snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?

But I have kind of gotten tired of Season 1 content… even though I haven’t entirely finished everything… so off to the Coiled Isle we go.

This is the Queue, our daily Q&A column where I attempt to answer your questions. Let’s get to it.

Get ready to zoom through maintenance day, because all World of Warcraft servers only have an hour of downtime scheduled today.

We're gearing up for some big news days, I just know it.

I do have a Mage alt, but I don’t play it enough to keep up with how to play it, which means I usually don’t play it. I just want to go around spamming Arcane Explosion non-stop and be a ball of violent purple destruction, but apparently that’s inefficient and also it tends to result in my death. I’m that player in pugs when I’m on a Mage.

And I’ve been maining a Death Knight lately, so weirdly I’m not actually used to dying a lot anymore. Every other class I play feels squishy, but Mages more than most. So playing a Mage is a hard ask, but maybe I should anyway.

Existential class questions aside, this is the Queue, our daily Q&A column where we attempt to answer your gaming (maybe) questions (maybe) and sometimes succeed (maybe). Let’s get to it.

We have an unusually long WoW maintenance day, with four hours of downtime scheduled for Midnight realms and a full eight hours of downtime scheduled for core Classic realms.

I've got to admit, I'm a little more excited for this week's Bethesda news than anything in Blizzard games...

We exist on the very cusp of Friday, which itself is on the very cusp of the weekend. Myself and many others in the northern side of the country are currently attempting to make through a haze of wildfire smoke coming down from Canada, but… well, after looking out the window at the yellow-gray haze of the sky, I’ll just say it’ll be fine. We can do this. Nothing to worry about. Let’s play video games instead.

And now, this is our daily Q&A column in which we answer your questions about video games (and just about anything else). Let’s get to it.