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It's not the system itself so much (though that is being made a bit shallower) as the circumstances in game right now, before the expansion is actually live.
1) Cooking daily quests to get the new ribbon cooking awards are already in the game... 2 weeks prior to Cata. Each normal recipe costs 3 awards each, which would be 14 awards if you do them each day. Occasionally, that daily will give 2 awards.. so you should definitely have at least 15 awards by Cata. This is 5 recipes.
2) Those cooking dailies can be done by anyone level 10+. You don't need any Cooking skill beyond paying 1s or whatever to learn Cooking. I have all 10 character slots on my server filled with now-level 10+ characters doing the daily each day (total of 10 dailies), and so does a whole lot of other people. You can use these cooking awards to buy crates of Cata meat. In short, Cata meat will be in abundance by the time people December 7th and Cataclysm's activation.
3) A fishing exploit made it into the game with the Shattering. You can stand in Tanaris, right by the border with Uldum, and fish across into Uldum waters to catch fancy high level Cata fish. If this would've been fixed quickly, this likely wouldn't have been a big deal... but it hasn't been fixed. There are tons and tons of these fish, used for 500 skill recipes, that will get you all the way to 525.
4) WotLK food can get you from the current max of 450 all the way up to 475. Though I suspect server first cooks will actually not make use of this, if you ignore the server first achievement this is still pretty iffy. You can, given enough Blood Shrimp or Giant Turtle Tongues, simply use leftover WotLK food to get to 475, all those Blood Shrimp or Giant Turtle Tongues from 475 to 500, and then one of the exploited fish from 500 to 525. Even if we're talking 6 months from now when the fish are legitimate, you can max your skill using 2 recipes (6 or fewer dailies) and a trip to the AH. WotLK cooking wasn't tons better than this, but at least it had those Northern Spices (and a quest to get a recipe) to make it a little less one-dimensional.
So... yeah. Cooks will be online 11:59 PM Dec 6th with meat in their bags... 12:00 hits, click the Cooking trainer, pay to learn Illustrious Grandmaster Cooking... click Combine All on one recipe, get 475 skill, click to learn a new recipe or two, click Combine All once or twice to get 500, click to learn new exploited fish recipe, click Combine All again and wait til you're 525. With the Chef's Hat this will take next to no time. The actual server first guy will be the one who gets the luckiest on his yellow/green skillups.
It took something like 5 days for WotLK server first cooking, at least on my server. Quite a difference! :p
I suppose I'll have my fingers crossed and hope RNG is with me. I'm actually not going to use a WotLK food, I think, to use a higher skill rate 450 Cata food at the cost of 3 more cooking awards... but since 500+ is only going to require 3 cooking awards thanks to the tons and tons of Cata fish I should have plenty to spare. Currently going to use 1 recipe for 500+, 2 recipes for 475-500, and 1 recipe for 450-500. I'll have at least enough Awards left to buy one other recipe in case of emergency, and possibly enough for two extras depending on if we get this sweet 2x cooking award daily yet again. :p (and RNG there is another problem with server first, actually, but it doesn't apply to Cooking outside of that so I'll leave this issue alone.)
I think it would've just made more sense to leave the Cooking dailies disabled until day 1 of Cata... if nothing else, it would let some people choose some priorities instead of having all the Cooking stuff prepared in advance. Fixing that fishing exploit right away would've been cool too, but at this point it's too late for them to even bother.
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