Why I'll be taking the expansion slowly

At this point in the expansion, I have spread my time out quite a bit between all there is to do. I have quested a bit in Hyjal, played through the Worgen starting experience and gotten my little rogue to level 13, gotten my archeology to 37, leveled cooking about 25 skill points, fished a bit, leveled enchanting to 460 with my leftover Wrath mats, an through it all, gotten my druid half way to level 81. And I have thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. But something captured my attention more than the great new quests, the fragments I find with archeology, and even being able to fly in the old world (which is, in my opinion, the best part of this expansion pack). That something was the goblins and worgen I saw questing along my side in Hyjal. Yes, characters which I thought couldn't have existed for more than a day or two, now above level 80. Seriously?

Now, I quickly realized that these particular players may have simply race changed an old character that was already level 80, and I felt very silly, but my moment of myopia did remind me of a thought that always comes up for me when new content comes out: power-levelers, and how little I understand them. Now, I'm no one to judge other people for how they play and suggest that they play otherwise; as a solo-er, I'm on the receiving end of enough of that to know better than to subject anyone else to it. So let me just say right now that I'm not writing about power-levelers to judge them, or admonish them, or suggest that they change their ways. I am only writing about them because someone choosing to race through the new content that quickly just boggles my mind.

But even with that said, I understand that there are some people who enjoy the challenge of finishing content as quickly as possible, and for them, the content itself comes second to its speedy completion in terms of what they find fun about the game. If that's the way they want to play, I'm happy to see them finish so quickly. I, however, am not that type of player; I play for the content itself. And the thing is, once you finish the content, that's it; it will never be new and exciting again. It is forever in the realm of "seen it", and you can never enjoy it as much as you enjoyed it the first time. And considering that this is my chance to "start over", to break all of the bad, fun-killing habits I formed in Wrath of the Lich King, one of the habits I would like to break is the habit of steamrolling through content and exhausting it quickly.

Now, one might say, as long as you play through the content itself a slow pace when you do play, what does it matter how much time you spend playing? If it takes me fifteen hours spent over the course of ten days to get to level 85, and a friend of mine gets there in the same amount of /played time but spends two days doing it, haven't we both soaked up the content at an equal rate, and shouldn't we have theoretically enjoyed it just as much? It is to this question that I say no, and that is the fundamental reason I am taking the expansion slowly, both in terms of content experienced per hour of play and in terms of real-world time I spend playing. There have been some games that I played through in a short amount of real-world time, and it has been my experience that playing through a game like that can ruin the game for me because I simply get sick of it faster. The rate at which I get sick of a game just seems to increase as I spend a greater fraction of my time playing it.

It is with this knowledge that I have become very deliberate about how much I allow myself to play WoW. WoW is a big part of my life, you see; I spend a lot of time reading about it online, blogging about it here, and, of course playing it. Yet WoW became stale for me quickly because of how much I played during Wrath of the Lich King. With Cataclysm breathing new life into the expansion pack in so many ways, I'm not going to allow that to happen again. I plan to play more casually than I did before (you could say I was a dedicated soloist before), and by doing that, I hope to maximize the amount of /played I can get out of this content before I stop enjoying it. If that means that I can't write about things from first hand experience until long after others have already experienced them, so be it; I'll take that fall for the sake of a game I enjoy this much.