We had an absolutely lovely storm roll through last night. There was thunder and lightning, and several hours of rain. I certainly didn’t put off writing this Queue to sit and listen to the rain at all. No sir, not me!

While I brew another pot of coffee for my sleep-deprived self, it’s time for — The Queue!

The War Within pre-expansion event, Radiant Echoes, is live through August 26, leaving the heroes of Azeroth (that's us) several weeks to contend with the planet's memories of the last 19 years of World of Warcraft.

After news broke this morning about the formation of a new agile team within Microsoft to produce AA-quality games using Blizzard's existing properties, naturally discussion immediately went to spitballing ideas of what exactly those games would be.

It's the weekend, Watchers, and time for all of us to revel in games unplayed during the last week.

Nick took this great screenshot for his arachnophobia post yesterday, but forgot to add it to the post so I put in a picture from the Sennarth encounter instead. But this is such a great shot I had to use it somewhere, so here you go, my future kabourophobes. The Crab King awaits in judgment.

Let’s Queue.

Join as we discuss the problematic mob tagging, expensive rewards, and inconvenient boss timers of The War Within Radiant Echoes pre-patch event.

While there was a lot of discussion of what effect the Microsoft and Activision Blizzard merger might have on the games industry in the long term, there hadn't been a lot of visible effect outside of perhaps some effect on Diablo 4's launch.

With all of the class changes in the pre-patch, it might be time to play something new.

One of the new accessibility features released ahead of World of Warcraft's upcoming expansion, The War Within, is an arachnophobia mode that turns WoW enemies utilizing the spider NPC model into either the traditional crab model or the lobstrok models.

For the next three days -- August 1 through August 5 -- anybody can play WoW for free.