The new Warcraft expansion delivers a lot of new material and promises many more hours of enjoyment with our friends. Initial explorations have led us through many new lands and gorgeous places, and I look forward to more than our sampling of it so far.

However, it does seeem to have brought inflation with it. Most of the new easy-to-get gear outclasses counterparts from the pre-expansion game. Thus, equipment that took months and months to obtain last year now goes the way of the dodo in only a few hours.

On the one hand this is depressing: all that time and work gone in a few moments.

On the other hand it's exciting: better gear! Nice stuff!

Going back to the first hand, though, and keeping perspective: if you had fun getting it then that is all that matters in and of itself. If you didn't have fun then you shouldn't be playing the game.

Still, for people new to the game who can move directly from the old areas to the new ones, it will most likely mean missing out on a lot of stuff that they simply won't have to do. Why spend hour after hour repeatedly running through the same dungeons when you could just go to the new lands and get better stuff?

Before the expansion, repeated runs were the only way to pick up the really nice gear. Now almost all of it is obviated by the expansion. New players simply won't have the same experiences as the older ones. They just won't understand what some of that gear means and what it took to achieve it.

I wonder whether it would have been better to allow characters into the new areas only if they had adventured in the majority of those older areas first. Since that's not the case, I suspect many of the older areas won't see nearly as much traffic as they used to, which is a shame given that so many of them set a great atmosphere and should be seen just for their own sake.