Time to Make Our Own Cataclysm

Cataclysm. The word on everybody’s lips these days.

Kyrilean longs desperately for it. Spinks predicts that it only will be able to hold the endgame player’s attention for a couple of months. An old game is an old game and we can’t take much more of the same.

More and more of the veteran players have called it a day since they’ve lost their edge and hunger for endgame. I’ve lost count on the “See you in Cataclysm!” farewells I’ve taken recently, to bloggers as well as to guildies.

Cataclysm. The one and only answer to all our wishes. Or fears– what if it doesn’t deliver?

However I’ve got some good news for you people! You don’t have to wait for Cataclysm to get your world turned upside down. There’s a Cataclysm available right in front of you.

You can get out of your comfort zone and make something different. Scary, I know! But it makes you good.

Ixobelle wrote one of the most inspiring posts I’ve seen in a long time about his ventures into PvPing. This is a completely new world to him, and initially he lost every single match, pretty clueless about what he was doing. But somehow he managed to disregard of the natural resistance we all have against doing new things, which require us to actually make an effort and learn something. And the reward wasn’t just that he eventually started to win a few games. The main reward was that he about got the spark back:

“We're embracing the fact that we have no idea what we're doing, and having fun learning this new system.”

My RP Cataclysm
Ixobelle found his Cataclysm in PvP. Tamarind found his switching to Alliance. I think I've found my Cataclysm in my recent RP adventures at Argent Dawn.

It’s new. It’s a learning process. And it’s scary as hell. Most of the time I’m more or less paralyzed by stage freight. Saying anything aloud in character gives me butterflies in my tummy. I guess it challenges the obsession I have with being good at whatever I do in real life as well as in WoW. Now I have to practice accepting that Larísa sometimes suck at things and that it isn’t such a big deal.

Take this little true story, which took place a late night this weekend. I was out questing in company with another tauren RP noob, when we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of some sort of event in a stronghold. We were facing an entire guild of high levelled players from the Alliance, who seemingly were patrolling the premises in set patterns. It would have been hard to tell them from NPCs, if it wasn’t for that they did “strange gestures” to us now and then.

We were puzzled and didn’t quite know what to do not to mess with their activities. Could we just keep killing the guards, pretending that we were alone on the spot? Would they think badly about us if we did? Maybe we should rather flag ourselves for PvP so they could finish us off? Suddenly the concept of PvP-RP made sense to me. Why would they just stand there, doing nothing, as we defeated the useless guards?

In the end we decided to complete our quest as quickly as possible, and then moved away, still confused, but at the same time excited. It’s a part of a game we’ve never seen before.

The Gnomish Rally
Another memorable recent event was the SAN Campaign for Gnomish Rights. Never ever had I imagined myself spending almost two hours on walking between the gnome starting area and Ironforge at half speed, enjoying every second of it.

Not once did I think about xp/hour, gold/hour or other stupid measures of efficency. The most threatening creature I killed that day was a yellow-flagged level 6 boar (we were hungry, so we no choice). I talked to the king, I had a swim in the public fountain, I got pretty drunk and I disregarded of most of the orders of our beloved captain Maximilian. I was absolutely immersed into it, since RP:ing can require just as much of your attention as any raid encounter.

In short: I had more fun and giggled more than I have done in a very, very long time. Because, as Ixobelle puts it, it's good to rock the boat. (For a more detailed recount, there’s an abundance of posts about this already, as you could expect from a guild of bloggers.)

Finding your Cataclysm
This post wouldn’t be complete without a message. I have a suggestion to all endgame players out there, all of you who are suffering from end-of-expansion apathy, all of you who have completed your full tier sets, never want to see another frost emblem, all of you who think you have seen and done it all.

Don’t waste your time doing the same things you’ve always done, or even worse, making circles in Dalaran!

Go out and make your own Cataclysm happen! You don’t have to wait for the expansion. It’s already available.

PS Regardless of my RP adventures, my main interest in WoW is still raiding and as you can see from this post, my guild Adrenaline has lost a few players recently. Because of this we have a few spots open. If you are an EU player who is enthusiastic about ICC raiding at a challenging level, we might be a good fit. Check it out.