The World Will Shatter

Tomorrow the World of Warcraft will shatter.  Deathwing will rise up out of the ground causing incredible carnage and destruction and reshaping the very landscape.  This is an incredibly ambitious project by Blizzard, to release a brand new version of the entire old world at the same time as a new expansion offering all kinds of new content.  It certainly made the expansion take an incredible amount of time, far longer than people really felt was reasonable, and shortly we will get to see if all of the waiting was for a good reason or not.  Watching the behaviour of the players on the night before the cataclysm is very interesting indeed - so many are desperately running around trying to complete all the things that will vanish forever tomorrow.

There were people feverishly trying to recruit players to go and attempt extremely difficult achievements that are going away tomorrow.  I would normally advise against trying to do very hard things in very little time, but trying to do them with random people who have no idea what they are doing makes the proposition even worse.  Somehow even though these achievements have been around for 20 months the fact that they are going away is enough of a push to try any desperate action to complete them even though there was no particular incentive to do so last week.  Champion of Ulduar is a rough thing to do with a group of guildies who are experienced raiders and know the fights - getting trade chat puggers to try it is a bit of a joke.

Several factions are going away tonight when the servers go down and there of course were people desperately hawking reputation materials knowing that tomorrow they will be worth absolutely zero but tonight they might be worth a fortune.  It sounds a little like tickets to The Big Game where the seller hopes there is some guy truly desperate for it right now but if no sale is made then tomorrow those tickets are worth less than nothing.  There is an escalating game of chicken going on with those who really want to finish off a faction grind fighting those who have hoarded these items for no good reason and everyone knowing that the entire thing vanishes in but a few hours.

The world will be fresh and made anew and those who are nutty completionists like myself await the new quests and zones with baited breath.  I cannot wait to rip around the old world doing all the quests there are even though their rewards and difficulty are both utterly trivial.  It is that need to see it all, do it all and have every person in the world run out of tasks for me that consumes me.  Those like me are also preparing for that mad rush to be the very first person to get the new Loremaster title and achievement.  I cannot say exactly why I pursue these things so intensely - there is no real challenge aside from the time sink but nonetheless I must go and do it all.  Maybe it is just that need to know that the great hero Redcape has solved all the world's problems, rescued the damsels in distress and slain every villain there ever was.