Patch 12.0.5 lands Monday, April 21st. I have known this date longer than I have known my dentist’s name. Blizzard has given me more reliable scheduling than the Indiana Department of Transportation, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, or the weather between Lafayette and Fort Wayne.
The headline feature, among the Void Assaults and the new Ritual Sites and the sixty-eight balance changes that will once again make my warlock a scheduling emergency, is Decor Duels. Competitive interior decorating. Ranked. With a seasonal ladder. With cosmetic rewards. With, presumably, a leaderboard.
A game I started as a joke is about to ask me to compete, against other adults, on throw pillow arrangement.
And I am going to do it.
Because here is the thing nobody outside my household wants to admit: my warlock has a better living situation than I do. He has a house with customizable window treatments. He has a neighborhood association. He has a crafting nook, a mailbox that works, and a standing order of decorative candles that never run out. I have a duffel bag, a dented prop case, and a motel pillow that has been compressed by other men’s nightmares.
On Monday, he is being judged on his drapes. I am being judged, quietly, by a front desk clerk in Peru who has seen me check in three times this month.
What Decor Duels actually is
For the non-players: your character owns a house in Silvermoon City. The house has rooms. You fill the rooms with furniture. You can now enter a weekly rotation where the game compares your room to another player’s room and strangers vote on which is better.
That is the entire mechanic.
It is also, functionally, a mirror. You are a grown person placing little benches in a little imaginary apartment so that other grown people, also in their own imaginary apartments, can rate your little imaginary apartment from four imaginary stars down to zero.
I understand how this sounds.
I also understand that I have already sketched out, on the back of a set list, where the reading chair should go if I am drafted into a tier-three lounge matchup against someone named Cyndwraith.
My warlock lives in the Ember Quarter, upper tier, facing west toward Quel’Thalas, with full afternoon light. I live in whatever room opens onto the ice machine because that is where a traveling clown gets put. His window looks out at elves on horses. Mine looks out at a dumpster and a seasonal flag I think is for the Colts, because everything in Indiana is for the Colts, even when it is not for the Colts.
Inventory comparison, for the record
Warlock:
- One house.
- Three interior rooms, one exterior lot.
- Neighborhood with themed districts.
- Customizable stained-glass inlays.
- A pet demon that now accepts food offerings because they added a feeding trough in 12.0.4.
- Patch notes, on time, every month.
Me:
- One brace, now less tight than it was.
- One prop case with a dent in the shape of a folding chair.
- One spare hat that still looks insulting in its newness.
- Shoes that squeak in exactly the kind of small room I get booked in.
- A lobster toy that does not belong to me but has spent enough nights in my bag to have tenure.
- A calendar that is held together by willpower and the fear of disappointing a principal in Frankfort.
If you put us in a Decor Duel, the judges would not even open the envelope.
The state of Indiana, entered as evidence
I do not want to sound bitter. I choose to live here. I made that choice with the full enthusiasm of a man who had seen the alternatives and decided that the middle of the country, at least, is honest about what it is.
But it is April. Indiana in April is not honest. Indiana in April is doing bits.
The roads
I drove US-31 from Kokomo to Rochester last Thursday. There is a pothole north of Peru that has entered a second phase of life. It is no longer a pothole. It is an installation. A passing motorcyclist crossed himself at it. I watched. I would not have believed it if I had not been there eating a gas station apple.
This is normal. This is Indiana April. The winter finishes its work in February, and then the spring opens the pavement like a zipper. Every year. We know it is coming. We have known for a century. The state has had since the Harding administration to develop a plan, and the plan is still, “wait for someone to post a photo of a minivan stuck in one, then patch that one.”
My warlock drives on cobblestone elf-roads that were rebuilt from scratch by an actual in-universe reconstruction effort three months ago. The cobblestones are seamless. There is not a loose stone in all of Silvermoon. Meanwhile, there is a stretch of State Road 18 where I believe the asphalt has achieved sentience and is trying to leave.
The BMV
I needed to renew a registration in February. This is not a story with a clever ending. This is just the report.
I took a number. The number was 74. The board said “Now serving: 41.” I went outside to smoke in a place that was not spiritually correct for smoking, which readers of this blog will recognize as an ongoing theme. I came back. The board said “Now serving: 43.” I checked the time. Forty-two minutes had passed. I did the math in my head and realized that if the pace held, I would be served sometime after Easter.
I ran into a man at the same BMV who said, without prompting, “I have been here since before my haircut felt fresh.” He was holding a ticket with a number higher than mine. I did not ask him what haircut he had come in for. I did not want to know.
My warlock has a mailbox in his house and it works. He receives mail within thirty seconds of someone sending it. Blizzard built a functioning postal system inside a video game, with attachments, cash on delivery, and automatic returns, and Indiana has not figured out how to let me update an address without bringing two forms of ID and a utility bill from the correct quarter.
The beer situation
Indiana finally allows Sunday carryout, which was a hard-won civil rights milestone that occurred in my adult lifetime. We did not do this in the 1930s. We did this in 2018. I remember the vote. I remember people on the radio saying that if we let Hoosiers buy beer on Sunday, civilization itself would dim.
Civilization, so far, has held.
But you still cannot buy cold beer at a gas station unless the law has quietly shifted again while I was driving through one of the four counties that still might not observe daylight saving correctly. You can buy warm beer. You can buy cold Gatorade. You can buy cold water. You cannot buy the cold beer. The cold beer has to be bought at the liquor store, which in most of my route towns closes before my set ends.
My warlock can purchase mead from a vendor at 3 a.m. in an open-air market inside a city he does not pay rent in. He does not have to prove he lives in the precinct. He does not have to show ID. He does not have to schedule his purchase around a county line.
The weather
We had a week in early April where the temperature was 78 on Monday, 34 on Wednesday, and back to 72 on Friday. I was dressed, at various points that week, for a funeral, a parade, and a water slide, in that order.
Indiana does this on purpose. I am convinced now. I no longer believe the weather is neutral. The weather is doing crowd work.
My warlock lives in eternal soft dusk. Silvermoon is always at magic hour. There is a gentle breeze. The leaves are always turning the exact shade of amber that my phone filter cannot replicate no matter how many times I try. He has never had to sew an extra button onto a coat in a motel bathroom because a cold front came through while he was on stage.
Why I am still entering Decor Duels
You would think the appropriate reaction to all of this is to log off. To put the fake house aside and address the real one. To stop pretending I care about sconces in a city I will never set foot in and start caring about, say, a mattress that is not covered in a layer of vinyl that crunches when I turn over.
But that is the joke of it. I cannot fix the potholes. I cannot speed up the BMV. I cannot change the county-by-county liquor ordinance of the state of Indiana. I cannot make the weather remember what season it is.
I can, however, place a bench.
I can place a bench in a fictional room in a reconstructed elf city and have it be, within the narrow square footage of that room, exactly where I want it. No folding chair will shove it. No generator will drown it out. No dog will drag a squeaky lobster onto it. The bench will stay where I put it. The bench will be there tomorrow.
That is the quiet appeal of a decor duel for a man who lives out of a bag. Control over a small square. A room that does not move. A neighborhood whose potholes are exclusively decorative and were placed there by a developer on purpose, for flavor.
On Monday night, while my real address continues to be “wherever the calendar told me to be,” my warlock will be submitting a tier-one bedroom setup with thematic lighting, a balanced sitting arrangement, and a reading nook that faces a view of Quel’Thalas at dusk.
I will be in a motel outside Lafayette, eating a gas station apple, listening to the AC unit imitate a moped.
If you vote in my duel, please be generous. Not because my room is better, though it is. Because the man behind the character could use the win, and the state of Indiana is not scheduled to give him one until at least June.
That is the whole post. Patch drops Monday. The pothole north of Peru will still be there. My warlock’s house will have new curtains.
See you in Silvermoon.