Never enough time

One of the absurdities of playing an MMO for any length of time, much less for ten years, is that you see certain cycles repeat again and again. For instance, I've seen players make the same assumptions about personal experiences in the game being universal so many times that I could republish that post every two weeks and it would be relevant. Another way I've seen the same cycle repeat multiple times since the end of Burning Crusade is this - people always complain (myself included) that the expansion is taking too long to get here and we're sick of the old content, and then, as soon as the new expansion is announced, we start panicking (myself included) to get certain things finished that we could have done long, long before the expansion ever got close to done.

I mean, I have six characters on various stages of the legendary cloak quest, that I just never bothered to finish up on because reasons. I don't think I can argue I haven't had enough time. It's September. Nine months seems more than adequate to have gotten that done, and yet, nope. Just never bothered to do it. In a way I feel like the extreme length of the content drought lulled me into a false complacency. A year in SoO seemed so monumentally long that it never really sank in that yes, it is long - but it still had an end date.

This has happened to me before. At the end of BC, I just barely managed to get my guild organized and into Naxxramas 40 to catch up and get the kill achievements for people. (Ironically, I got sick that weekend and had to leave early, but I'd raided Naxx at the end of vanilla and didn't really care.) Naxx 40 at the end of BC was still pretty hard, btw, especially if you were only bringing 20 people. Then at the end of Wrath, we squeaked down to the wire to get Heroic Lich King down. The only expansion where I didn't end up scrambling to finish anything was Cataclysm - I got my heroic Madness kill in with a couple of months to go and spent the rest of the expansion relaxing.

I don't know what it is about the end of the expansion that always leaves players so flat-footed. Mists exacerbates the problem by having so much for people to be catching up on - there's a lot of this expansion that's going away, from Challenge Mode transmog sets mounts and pets to the Legendary cloak. People have been asking for months and months about this, and we always had the same answers - we didn't know. Now we do, and it feels a bit like we could have been better informed - Blizzard could have told us months ago about the loss of the cloaks, for example. It feels like people who may have coasted, or even thought that they'd come back at 100 to finish, were caught off guard.

I still remember working like a trojan to finish a friend's Atiesh before BC came out only to find out that the Karazhan portal was less an awesome thing for the whole guild (going from 40 to 10 was a gigantic pain, raid size wise) and more a way for that specific player to prank the rest of the guild from that moment on. I lost track of how many Wrath raids ended up with me standing outside Karazhan. It was the Dalaran Crater portal of its day. We managed to finish another Atiesh just in time for the end of BC and the removal of Naxx 40 (and thus, the removal of any way to finish another Atiesh) and again, it was mostly used to punk us in raids. Expansion cycles are strange this way - packed with months of waiting, then punctuated at the end with a burst of hurry up before it's gone, but this may be the first expansion to so deliberately obsolete itself in this way.

At any rate, we have less than two months before Warlords of Draenor, which makes it likely we'll see a month or so of patch 6.0 before that. Get what you can done while you can.