If my friends are a much higher level than I am then, barring the few exceptions that prove the rule, I must rush through content to catch up with them.
When you rush through content in an MMO, all the little annoyances caused by those gates and obstacles that are designed to slow you down, keep you playing and corral your adventuring, are magnified a hundred fold.
Mister person,
The phrase “the exception proves the rule” was never intended to mean “exceprions give the rule credibility”. The original load of the saying was “exceptions CHALLENGE the rule” – then languages changed, words respecd for new meaning and so on.
If you think about it for a bit, there is NO GODDAMN REASON why an exception could do ANYTHING but force a rule to prove itself all over.
As for your difficulties – get your buddies to blue you up at 2-3 instances in your level range. Once you have 5-6 relevant blue items, the leveing time will be cut in half. If they feel no desire to invest these 1-2 hours in you, maybe you dont really need to skip content – it has it’s own personality and charm that will be gone forever when Cataclysm strikes.
Heh, I think if you’re going to be pedantic you shouldn’t talk about words respeccing. Or did the Oxford English Dictionary get talent trees in a patch I’m not aware of?
It’s awfully sweet of you to help out on the idiom front, ikew, but Melmoth’s talking generally about MMOs, where features such as sidekicking as pioneered by City of Heroes are noteworthy enough to warrant mention, “proving the rule” that most other games require rushing through content.
Being a pedant would be more worthwhile if you don’t write bollocks to start with. ‘Prove’ in the case of ‘the exception that proves the rule’ means ‘test’.
If a sign reads ‘No Parking, except on Bank Holidays’, by stating the exception it ‘proves’ that the rule applies in all other cases. No one can argue that they think the rule doesn’t apply on Sundays, for example, because the exception tells us precisely all the times the rule doesn’t apply.
Hence, ‘All MMORPGs require rushing through content to catch up with friends at higher levels, except City of Heroes/Villains’, is a fine example of the exception proving the rule.
Also, there’s no fucking way I’m going to blue up anyone, even Melmoth.