Originally Posted by Arkamis

So last night I did some thinking.

The BC really will be cheapening my past experience. Just like a solider wears his scars with pride, I wear my gear with pride, not because its ZOMGBBQEPIX but because it's a mark of honor of what I've had to do, the toll and toil of it all. For me, regardless of what I'm doing -- school, WoW, life -- it's never been about the destination; it's about the drive. I have a story I'll tell some day about a $75 tank of gas I bought. I'm very proud of this story, not because I was a dumbass, but because despite being faced with a difficult task with pretty serious consequences, I overcame adversity and solved my problems through wit and will. If someone else were to buy a $75 tank of gas because they were simply a dumbass, then to me their story doesn't have the same value if they didn't have to risk spending a night outside in the mountains in December.
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But I'll still know deep down that the grand equalizing of the content in the BC has made everyone's destination the same, at the expense of those who drove harder to get there.

Ark, I didn't want to get all literary and philosophical, but dammit, you made me do it

Approaching WoW with the concept of "destination" or "ending" (or "telos" as they say in Greek philosophy) is flawed. Teleologically confronting an endless situation is not going to get you anywhere. Intrinsic finality is irrelevent to WoW because, again, the spectre of an "ending" is eternally elusive. Rather, what we are all doing is closer to extrinsic finality - working together to facilitate *perceived* movement toward a shared "goal" - a completely constructed and contrived one, which there is, realistically, no possible way of achieving. We do it... well... to do it! Together!

Think of the Big Bang, or of postmodern conceptions of reality as "rhizomatic" - there is no set, identifiable beginning point. Rather, we provisionally accept, as a group, a constructed center point, and proceed to build a more-or-less organic system around said center point. We have, at this point, completely invented a paradigm, but that doesn't stop us from living in it, because we have to (Yes, I'm aware that this is a game we can stop playing at any time, but all that would do is remove a limb from your OWN provisional system). The fact that we begin from an unidentifiable center presupposes that there is, in parity, no final end.

I'm getting to the point, relax.

After the Big Bang, the universe spiraled out in all directions from an unknown center, sort of like The Burning Crusade will do for the WoW universe. Eventually, even though it looked like crap and was a seemingly insane, contradictory, brutal collection of gas and stars, the universe produced Homo Sapiens (let's keep this focused on the topic, apologies if anyone disagrees with evolution... this is just my opinion.) Just because something looks like hell doesn't mean it can't yield something worthwhile.

My point, Ark: There will never be a point where we reach "the end". There will always be more - more room to learn, to fight, to explore, to loot. Seeing BC as an "ending" that all players - raiders or casuals - are "driving" toward serves only to downplay the real reason we are here: to hang out, argue, kill stuff and have a good time together. You said it yourself: Enjoy the drive! In a really, really big van full of people wearing heavy armor and... er... shooting fire from their hands.

It's all about creating a system that works within the chaos... and it wouldn't be a very fun system without ya