I Hate WoW Achievements

Posted on May 2, 2009 by Scott Jennings| 125 Comments

As the title says, I hate WoW achievements.

Why?

Because I enjoy PvP in WoW. Specifically, in battlegrounds. Yes, I’m sure that’s not hardcore enough for you leet gank groups that cut your teeth on the blood of the damned in Darkfall or blow up Titans in Eve with your tackler or whatever. I enjoy killing things, and WoW lets me do that and rewards me with points so I can buy new pants. It’s a win-win, usually.

I can’t play this week. Why? Because Blizzard’s version of Children’s Week this week has, as a quest to unlock an achievement, capping flags in several popular battlegrounds.

Note: in a given game of Warsong Gulch or Arathi Basin, not everyone caps a flag. That’s not how the game is designed. It’s designed to be played as a cooperative team endeavor. In fact, everyone can’t cap a flag because only one person can at a time. And don’t even get me started about Eye of the Storm, because (a) the flag is in one spot where you are basically turned to paste anyway and (b) I play Alliance, and Alliance are never allowed to win Eye of the Storm. It’s in the rules. But hey! Someone thought it would be a brilliant idea to make an achievement for taking your little orphan sprog out to the battlegrounds, and spent about 3 minutes writing it up. Awesome.

Which means, currently, battlegrounds in WoW currently consist of nothing but achievement hustlers, frantically trying to unlock the achievement in the one week open to them before next year so they can get their purple pulsating flying manhood compensator (the flying mount, the fastest in the game, that you get for unlocking all the event-based achievements) trying desperately to outclick other players in clicking a flag, regardless of what actually is going on around him. Or, even worse, the achievement for Warsong Gulch where you have to return a dropped flag. Which results in entire teams camped around their flag in the hope that one foolhardy opponent actually tries to play the game as intended.

This is monumentally retarded, and here’s why.

  • You don’t force people into PvP who don’t enjoy it. My god, this is basic MMO Design 101. Blizzard usually plays in the big leagues, and then goes and makes a junior varsity mistake like this that makes me wonder if the adult designers went on holiday this month. PvP is an entirely different playstyle. You incentivize it, you reward it, you don’t make it a requirement, and you especially don’t make it a requirement for achievement playstyles who are collecting achievements instead of, you know, doing PvP.
  • You don’t make single player achievements that screw over other players. I literally wonder if the designer who made this achievement ever set foot in a battleground, so disruptive is it to gameplay. This incentivizes players – who, thanks to the point above, are there even though they have no interest in the actual gameplay – to screw over their teammates and be the first to win the CLICK CLICK CLICKY contest to unlock their precious little dingy achievement unlocked window so they can stop trying to screw over their presumptive allies and go back to doing what they enjoy. This is not good design. This is not even bad design. This is incompetent design. Anything that rewards players for pissing off other players is incompetent design.

I know. It’s only for a week. At least they didn’t include my favorite BG (though it seems awfully hard to queue for lately!) I should stop being a whiny …whatever the insult is for someone who just wants to kill people and right now wants nothing more than to kill his own presumptive allies (and lest we forget – I play Alliance. I *already* have a burning, unslaked desire to kill night elves) because Blizzard decided it’d be funny to direct the locust swarm of achievement whores through the wilds of PvP.

 

Just in case you think I’m being a whiny baby? Here’s what noted rantsite WoW Insider had to say:

Nightmare.

 

This…is not going to be a lot of fun.

School of Hard Knocks requires you to enter the four pre-Wrath battlegrounds and capture/return flags or assault nodes with your orphan out. It may sound simple, but think about the length and frustration factor of the average pugged battleground, and then think about the length and frustration factor of a pugged battleground where your own team’s sole concern is beating everyone else to an individual achievement.

This is going to work in one of two ways: either you get these achievements for being close to a captured/returned flag or a captured node, or you have to do it yourself. If it’s the former, then this achievement is suddenly a lot less nightmarish. (Editor’s note: it’s not. You have to be the one to return/cap the flag.) If it’s the latter…I really don’t know what to tell you that might help. Your best bet is to try to organize a premade (if your guild isn’t doing one already), rotate people into flag and node captures, and hope everyone sticks around long enough for everyone to get their achievements done, although this is obviously going to be a tall order by the time you hit the 40-man AV.

I’m looking forward (well, not really) to seeing a series of Warsong Gulches where no one plays offense, Arathi Basins where no one plays defense, Alterac Valleys where no one plays defense, and EOTS where the entire game is a writhing, howling mass of players clustered around the center trying to be the first to click the flag. Oh, and to make things even better, with the huge decline in arena participation and the relative ease of raiding, few players at 80 have serious resilience gear, making it easy for burst DPS on the opposing team to annihilate people in the run for a flag or node.

I return to my previous statement; nightmare.

Hey! Blizzard! Why not for next month’s event? Make an achievement that requires you to get an arena rating of 2000! That’ll be a hoot!

 

I hate WoW achievements. I want my game back, goddamit.

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  • Iconic

    I play Alliance, and I actually can’t tell much difference.

    Eye of the Storm: I’m convinced that capturing the flag could actually result in negative team score, and people would still swarm like moths to capture it just because it’s so much more discreet and easy to understand “pick up the flag and bring it home” than “control the most towers over time.”

    Adding the “Endanger An Orphan Week” achievements really doesn’t change the strategy for your average brain dead PUG.

    Alterac Valley: Defense is for chumps anyway– the entire thing is incentivized for quick matches where no one actually fights each other if they can help it.

    Arathi Basin: Running around and zerging each node in turn actually results in more honor, since there’s bonus honor for captures and defenses, but no extra honor for a static 3 vs 2 win.

    Warsong Gulch: Okay, this does result in really stupid (like, even more stupid than usual) gameplay. Since I hate WSG with a burning passion normally, this doesn’t really change much for me.

  • http://www.eldergame.com/ Sandra ‘srand’ Powers

    Lum said: …”you especially don’t make it a requirement for achievement playstyles who are collecting achievements instead of, you know, doing PvP.”

    Unfortunately, this thread has run through almost all of their holiday achievements so far. As a dedicated collector who avoids PvP like the plague, this has made the entire Violet Proto-Drake one incredibly sore point for me.

    As far as I can tell, one designer went through and set up a really nice diverse spread of achievements for each holiday — something for PvPers, for raiders, for soloers of several levels — and then someone else came through and said, “Okay — to get the meta you do *all* of those. Done!”

    (By the way, why does this site think I am someone called Sebastian Mottschall? That’s random. Well, at least it didn’t let me post as him. I had to log out first.)

  • Horse

    I agree entirely. I hate PvP with a passion, and the World Event achievements are overflowing with fracking PvP. I presume Blizz thought “if we make them do a little bit of PvP, maybe they’ll realise that PvP is fun”, but in my case it just reinforces how much I fracking hate fracking PvP. Every god-damned time.

    I’ve been dreading Orphan’s Week for some time precisely because it was one of the more PvP-heavy achievement sets.

  • http://www.worldofwarcast.com Renata

    I agree completely. I wrote my own blog post about it, and I said that I felt sorry for people who like to play battlegrounds because we’re ruining it for them with our achievements. Believe me, we don’t want to be there any more than you want us to be there.

    However, I have noticed that some dedicated PvPers are using this as an opportunity to cull the unskilled, and make it harder for people to get their achievements. Don’t they realize that the fastest way to get us achievement folks out of “their” battlegrounds is to let us move as quickly through the system as we can — NOT making it as difficult as possible for us to finish?

  • http://www.psychochild.org/ Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green

    Sorry, your disclaimer doesn’t cut it, Scott. You’re playing a game where the alpha and the omega is PvE content with PvP thrown in as a bone, and you’re complaining about them not considering the consequences of their actions in PvP? Really?

    Anyway, you’re late to the party. These stupid achievements have been in there as long as there have been achievements. I realized how stupid the whole thing was during the Christmas/Winterveil holiday. The one PvP achievement for that is to do PvP disguised as a holiday gnome. All fine and dandy, until I realize I CAN’T FUCKING SHAPESHIFT AS A DRUID BECAUSE I WOULD LOSE THE GODDAMNED DISGUISE. Yeah, that makes WoW’s so-called PvP real fun when I can’t even use my core class ability.

    I think Sandra’s being too kind. I fear that some of the WoW designers are trying to see what they can get away with at this point. “Hehe, we’ll make the OCD victims do PvP! So awesome…”

  • Kaalinn

    I can’t help but wonder why the last guy you quoted plays MMO’s at all…. He doesn’t seem to enjoy or want any of the features or social interaction inherent in them that regular single player RPGs don’t have.

    This exactly fits what I’ve come to perceive WoW as.. It brought people that aren’t _really_ MMO players into the genre. And in most cases I think they still aren’t.

    That guy is pretty much a _player_ that thinks MMOs started with the launch of his favorite, because only then MMOs as a concept seemed worthwhile to him, despite it being quite different than what it was originally about, i.e. that guy would probably not touch a MUD with a ten-foot pole, and just be confused and frustrated by UO.

    These people are swarming the market now though, and if you were to make Bartle’s hinted at kind of game now (which as you pointed out would be pretty close to UO) you’d be considered a commercial failure, because you’d only attract (or retain) the core MMO customer base, not the … let’s call em RPG Heroes.

  • http://word-of-shadow.blogspot.com Melf_Himself

    Lol. That sounds mighty irritating. Couple of points though.

    I don’t think there’s anything wrong with rewarding people to do PvP, as a lot of people will actually enjoy PvP but need to overcome the fear of sucking/being abused etc.

    It’s hardly *forcing* them if it’s just to get some achievement (I am correct in assuming that it does not alter player power, aren’t I? If it does, I take it back, that’s dumb…)

    Designing the achievement so that it does not involve doing your best to win the game is retarded though – it should have been something like “win 3 games of X with your orphan out” (I know nothing about these orphans, and am assuming they can’t be attacked (otherwise, internet outrage) and can be out for the duration of a match)

  • Asimo

    Achievements like these are one of those decisions (along with, say, Weapon Skill and the unusuable LFG system) that I assume continue to exist as is only because someone on the staff is too stubborn to admit they made a stupid design mistake and back down, vindicating the criticizers. Holiday Achievements in general tend to be designed towards unintentionally aggrivating players, either due to limited-opportunity RNG issues (imagine the rage of someone who misses the violet proto-drake by not getting a Brewfest mount, or worse, a toothpick during Halloween trick or treating?), or by active encouragement to grief other players over a limited (in both time and amount) resource, like the current debacle.

    The only consolation is School of Hard Knocks is pretty much the only achievement of note in the holiday that’s actually difficult and frustrating. But it does still show a depressingly backwards design method with Achievements in general.

  • ahoythematey

    Here’s what I want to know: why the fuck did they need an achievement system in a game that was built from the ground up as a fucking achievement system? Every piece of goddamn loot on your character is just another version of, “Achievement Unlocked – Are you Ashamed Yet?”

  • Trevel

    ahoythematey — because City of Heroes did it, and then so did LOTRO, and then so did Warhammer Online (who tried to sell it as if they were doing something new), and of course everything X-box and PS3 …

    And Blizzard is ace at stealing ideas.

  • wumpusbait

    After the joys of Noblegarden (“..did you just spend several hours staring at a wall? Just standing there, waiting for eggs to spawn? Are you, y’know, having *fun* doing this?” ), I’m less than surprised at the current aggravation.

    I decided about 10 minutes after the Achievement system went live in WoW that I wouldn’t be fanatical about getting them. And every day it’s getting harder and harder to restrain the urge to be a Smug Bastard about that decision.

    I’m trying to look on the bright side: Most of the Achievement Junkies won’t come back in the BGs once this is over, and we can go back to killing each other like adults..

    ..until the next bloody festival…

  • Blake

    My wife is a very non-PvP type player. She’s also very into doing things like the holiday events, and does want her Violet Proto-Drake. Now she has to spend hours PvPing in order to continue along the path towards her drake.

    She’s willing to put the time in, however, it is not at all fair for the real PvPers that she has to take up a slot trying to accomplish the PvP tasks rather than having a player who wants to PvP there. She knows she’s going to die over and over again, and will probably not add much to the games she’s forced to join, but she has to do it as she wants the drake.

    Stupid, stupid development choice by Blizzard forcing a playstyle on people who have no interest in it, and also forcing a non-PvP player on PvPers — thus making their games suffer as well because of it.

    I wouldn’t be shocked if the development decisions were made like you said Lum.

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  • http://www.lawspotonlnine.com Kate

    “…a lot of people will actually enjoy PvP but need to overcome the fear of sucking/being abused etc.”

    Trust me, the 5 or so hours I spent being chain killed as a holiday gnome in the hope of racking up 100 kills did not help me overcome my fear of sucking and being abused.

    I have put in a lot of time into this achievement, and I’m sorry I disrupt gameplay, and I hate it, but it’s a very small aspect of the year worth of effort, so I will suck it up and do it. I’m almost certain this one portion of one event will prevent me from finishing out almost a year of effort.

    It’s true that the reward doesn’t improve character power, and I don’t usually even care much about mounts, but I do like achievements and especially the ones that have titles as rewards. Plus, who can argue with a year-long achievement entitled, “What a Long, Strange Trip it’s Been?” (maybe you have to be “of a certain age” to have the Grateful Dead echo through your mind whenever you read that, LOL)

    When I started this year of foolishness it wasn’t clear that Children’s Week would be part of the year-long achievement, and as it was written then, it was shorter and had virtually no PVP.

    Anyway, enough ranting, I’m off to ruin Lum’s pvp experience. Sorry, man.

    ps I’m not Blakes wife :)

  • Cedia

    Well, I’ve decided to be on the hopeful side. I played Horde on Moon Guard (Emberstorm) right after BC and when I came back a few months ago I decided to go back to Alliance, on a server also on Emberstorm. I cannot believe the difference. Alliance gets steamrolled. I’m trying to get the damn mount and, out of about 40 games played so far, we have won 3.

    So yeah, I’m hoping that this achievement will at least bring us more Alliance people queueing up, because usually we are simply outmanned by Horde. Add that to the general complete fogginess of Alliance players, and yeah, it ain’t pretty.

    Why? Why why why is Horde and Alliance so different for BGs? I don’t get it!!!

  • Daniel

    I guess that I am the only one who likes this decision, maybe because I am not after some “purple pulsating flying manhood compensator”.

    My take on it is this. It’s *supposed* to be hard to get the drake. If one guy missed out on it because he can’t PvP or didn’t get the right RNG drop well, too bad, so sad. And Scott loses out on your precious PvP for a few days. Cry me a river.

    If people chose to wreck the game because they are after the drake that’s their decision. Maybe there were ways that Blizzard could have made this insanely difficult without doing the meta thing. But I honestly don’t think it’s a bad idea. Maybe it’s having unintended consequences. But the one thing I think is that the drake should not be made easier to get.

  • Brent Michael Krupp

    @Melf_Himself
    The holiday meta-achievements are required to get the 310% speed flying mount which is one of the very few extra-fast mounts (all the rest are 280% speed). It’s not a huge boost but it is a very distinct PvE advantage which is why even people ambivalent about achievements are doing these.

  • Longasc

    Achievements and Meta-Achievements are a current plague that has not only befallen MMOs.

    They are not content, they stretch content and actively ask people to do the most hilarious bullshit ever for… a certain carrot, the ultimate reward.

    Guild Wars has an achievement for death-levelling your char (i.e. you let mobs kill your char, and then when they levelled up by killing you, you kill them and slowly level up yourselves) in the starter area to max level. Some people did it initially just to try if it is possible.

    Make an achievement out of it, make it count to a Meta-achievement, and people will do EVERYTHING.

    It is a lazy way to stretch content instead of adding more. I even think it is going to annoy people in the middle to long run instead of being “fun”, and going to burn them out.

  • dartwick

    he said “retarded”

  • Gx1080

    If you want your players to do stupid stuff and strech your content without much effort, just call it archievements.

    Another Title for this: Archievements are the new black.

    Fact: Less than half of the people that is annoying now in BGs are going to get the violet drake.

  • Boanerges

    I generally find that achievements are either of the “later, rinse, repeat” variety (do X 1000 times) or the unusually rare (kill X while he’s standing on Y doing Z). One is kinda fun because it happens over time. The other is maddening because you have to play forever waiting for just the right set of circumstances.

    I suspect Blizzard is trying to avoid the EQ system of alternate advancement points. These are a simple way to do that but it promotes undesirable play.

  • Pat

    I made arrangements to do every holiday so far. That included scheduling a vacation day during Love is in the Air so that I would have more time to get gifts. I planned ahead and purchased a Brew of the Month Club membership before achievements went live. I did Noblegarden by getting up at the ungodly hour of 8:00AM and spending an hour collecting eggs. (and laughing at the idiots who were camping before the crowds came, meaning they had to wait forever for a respawn.)

    I even engaged in some auction house exploiting with a bagful of hand-crafted chocolate cakes for Children’s Week. But I am not doing the Battlegrounds. Once I realized what was actually required, I couldn’t bring myself to play bizzarro BGs. I initially thought many of the achievements were group ones, but they aren’t.

    If the achievement isn’t removed, I might do it next year. Even though I really wanted that Purple Penis-mobile.

    PS- Didn’t there used to be an achievement for killing 10 enemy players who had their orphans out? It was called “Orphan Maker”. I swear it used to be there. Why remove that but not “Hard Knocks”?

  • marlowe

    And the end result of “Hard Knocks” *won’t* be converting any PvE players into PvP players. It is going to be miserable for them. They won’t be geared or speced for PvP and it is going to be a miserable rape parade of incineration and DK overpowerage. Fun…

  • http://lost-war.org Mist

    I started playing WoW again less than a month ago. WoW achievements are still fun for me. However, WoW achievements for the stupid limited time holiday crap are not. I did School of Hard Knocks in 2 hours the first night, just so I could piss people off on various forums who could not complete it themselves, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an incredibly dumb achievement.

    Putting the ugly yet fast purple drake for completing the holiday events is stupid.

  • http://www.ritchian.com Ritchian

    I gave up on getting all the achievements on one character some time after my 40th or 50th kill of the Headless Horseman without seeing any sign of a Squashling or any of the various other luck-based drops. The RNG obviously didn’t want any of my characters to be “the Hallowed,” let alone ride a purple dragon that flies at Mach 1, so I wasn’t going to argue with it. But I have tried to get specific titles for specific characters. Elder seemed to fit pretty well with my Death Knight (And I would never, ever want to do that ill-conceived time-sink of a meta-achievement on another character again.) I had no problem running around for a few hours swiping eggs from people in order to get my Paladin his “the Noble” title.

    Over all, the Children’s Week achievements aren’t horrible. But I agree that the take your orphan to a bloody battlefield achievement is plain stupid. I can live with luck-based achievements (I must have been the only person in the game with five bags of candy in my pack before they upped the drop rate on it.) that reward those with no life or 24-hour access to WoW. Many of the achievements reward people who have the time to devote to a game which I don’t possess at the moment.

    But an achievement that rewards the worst impulses in battleground PvP is beyond foolish. Players don’t need more reasons to make Warsong Gulch into an unending turtle. Players don’t need more reasons to huddle into the center of Eye of the Storm while the other team captures all four towers. And you haven’t seen frustration until you’ve watched 20 people cram themselves into a single tower or bunker in Alterac Valley attempting to capture the same flag.

  • http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/ Wolfshead

    I agree with you Scott 100%. Forcing folks who don’t like to PVP to do PVP achievements is wrong. A game designer should never force anyone into having to engage in a playstyle that they aren’t interested in. This issue also causing a lot of consternation on the official WoW forums.

    Putting an achievement system into WoW was the brainchild of none other then Jeff Kaplan — who’s seemingly run out of original ideas these days — not that he ever had any to start with. After copying most of the design of WoW from EQ he felt the need to steal this idea from the XBox and other gaming systems. He spent much of this time and resources during the Wrath of the Lich King slumming around on the beta forums asking for input on achievements and banning forum posters.

    One of the most pathetic things about the Achievement system is the name itself; lacking any semblance of originality they shamelessly called it the “Achievement System”. Just brilliant guys. You have to wonder given the success of WoW if Blizzard is getting either lazy or arrogant that they can believe that garbage like this is acceptable. But then again, they call their new content “patches”. You really have to wonder why Blizzard these days has such a glaring deficit of imagination.

    Earlier this year wrote an article that slams WoW achievements if anyone is interested:

    http://www.wolfsheadonline.com/?p=1052

    Achievements don’t work in WoW. They nothing more then a juvenile and imbecilic timesink. They remind me of an online version of the children’s game Simon Says. Flawed from the outset they were tacked on to WoW in a clumsy and unimmersive way that lacks a sense of harmony and cohesion with the rest of the gameplay mechanics. I’m glad that other people are finally coming out of the closet and expressing their disappointment with this so-called Achievement system.

  • Informis

    “They remind me of an online version of the children’s game Simon Says.”

    You know, that’s not a bad metaphor for raid content, either, except you have 25 people who all must do what Simon says. One person fails and Simon enrages, killing all of you.

  • Facebook User

    I’d be happy if they changed them to require you to be within X yards of someone capping the flag/capturing a tower. As it is now, they actually encourage you to fight against your own team instead of completing the battleground objectives.

    I never had a problem with the Hallow’s End or Winter’s Veil PVP achievements, because all you had to do was earn HKs. I wasn’t being punished for rolling a healing-spec’d priest as I am with this one. (As if trying to heal in battlegrounds isn’t punishment enough.)

  • Hely

    I don’t have a problem with the Hallow’s End pvp requirement. I do have a major problem with the Winter’s Veil pvp requirement.

    I used to play a feral druid. Every time I shape shift I loose that stupid costume. The only class that does. So I was stuck trying to lolferalheal. This was way before dual specs. It didn’t work out too well. I died not long after I cast my first heal. I lost the costume then too. I gave up soon after.

    It’s just not worth it. I do want a proto drake mount though. I’m stuck trying to RNG the green one from those stupid eggs.

  • http://beafraid.com Hellfire

    The nature of the PvP achievements is the problem, not specifically having PvP achievements as part of metas.

    Most of it could be solved pretty easily by using proximity detection or making the achievements themselves raid-wide (with an increase in complexity) so that TEAMS would reap the benefit for doing a TEAM activity. It shouldn’t be that hard to figure this stuff out.

    This part is minor, but as a class that spends a half their time stealthed as a core component of PvP having to pop a critter before doing actions (which can’t be done in combat) is kinda, you know, shitty shitty.

  • Angelworks

    Some achievements in wow are fun, but yeah this one was painful. I managed to do it, but my character who pvp’s a lot has a ton of resilience and stamina (elemental shaman). It was really funny to see players come after me to find that they couldn’t kill me, but I could crit them to death ;) .

    More than once I was the only one with an orphan and actual pvp gear on.

    What’s sad is with some minor tweaks they could have made this achievement encourage good battleground behavior – instead of the other way around.

    Blizzard will keep it the way it is though – because high speed mounts should be rare for some reason. It wouldn’t surprise me if they removed the violet protodrake from the achievement next year or changed it.

  • Angelworks

    Oh I would add – that I think its OK to have pvp achievements in game – especially for holiday events, but with two qualifiers:

    a) they should work (remember the Christmas gnome pvp achievement – that was pretty broken…?)
    b) they should be designed to promote good gameplay – you know – to maybe encourage players to come back to BG’s and do things like capture towers etc.

    and I would agree – these were designed by someone who has never done a bg himself (because it probably was Jeff who came up with these).

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  • Aufero

    My theory is that many of the WoW holiday achievements were designed by CSRs who lost their minds trying to read every thread on the official boards. It explains the sadism perfectly.

  • Viz

    Why should one presume that because they’d like to do something, they should be able to do it?

    The legitimate complaint against achievements is that some require actively screwing over people who are supposed to be on your team.

  • Sullee

    Achievements sucking ass is news to you?

    I’m going to have to reiterate my complaints that industry insiders stop giving blizzard money between failing at cloning WoW and start being more critical of the fucking lame design that riddles the thing.

    Did you blast blizz when achievements were put in for promoting unhealthy gameplay? There is a reason kids aren’t allowed to gamble in casinos yet we’re all ok with blizz exploiting reward schedules to addict players regardless of age? Maybe the politicians should go after the whole industry since you folks are so bad at policing yourselves.

    Achievements are todo lists with at best a reward for something you were doing anyway. At worst they encourage gaming* to the detriment of the broader activity and\or unhealthy gameplay such as long camps waiting out the RNG by repeating actions for a low probability result.

    *Gaming as in game the system.. manipulate and take unfair advantage of loopholes etc.

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  • http://iggepsrealm.blogspot.com/ Iggep

    Achievements have been incredibly good for the game. But I completely agree about world event achievements having to be done in BGs. Bad idea.

  • Asimo

    Honestly, I’d argue whether Achievements have been good. They do encourage people to play a bit more than they normally would, but they also heavily discourage the play of alts – one of the biggest way to retain players – by virtue of them being character-specific rather than account-specific, as well as discouraging people to swap from a “alt” to an “main” in the future, even if they would enjoy this better. A lot of Achievements are pointless busywork, and this becomes blindingly obvious when you stare at that blank spot on a second character. It actually manages to devalue the achievements on the main once this realization is hammered in.

    The biggest failure with the holiday achievements regardless is making many of them purely-RNG or heavily-PVP based to begin with. The benefit of the holiday, in a business sense, is keeping certain people subscribed for a year basically for free, so they can get the collective achievements as they go along. Once they miss a holiday achievement – especially if it’s due to some random or unfun bullshit – that motivation goes away, and Blizzard’s at potential risk of losing months of obsessive player time.

  • hitnrun

    “My god, this is basic MMO Design 101. Blizzard usually plays in the big leagues, and then goes and makes a junior varsity mistake like this that makes me wonder if the adult designers went on holiday this month.”

    What? C’mon Lum, surely you must have noticed that the adult designers left to focus on Diablo and Starcraft two years ago. Since the release of Burning Crusade Blizzard’s design decisions have consisted of nothing but stuff like this.

  • Cedia

    Actually, I think it was Kaplan who put in Achievements. He’s the one who loves to put “work” into MMO’s.

  • Vetarnias

    I see a few things hinted at here and there in this thread, but I’ll just put it bluntly.

    It’s Blizzard’s fault, allright, but what I would add is that it’s probably deliberate.

    It’s just the mighty treadmill at work. Every activity in WoW is a treadmill more crass than the other. The way quests are constructed is one; the blind quest for gear is another. So is the level-divided map, the development of skills (fishing, etc) pegged to levels, crafting pegged to grinding for rare materials that have nothing to do with the craft they’re associated with (ichors of whatever in armorsmithing, *really*?), etc.

    Achievements? The largest treadmill in the game, making use of all the other treadmills, gear, level, you name it. And including PvP requirements — limited to two weeks in the year — just means you’re making sure that a large chunk of your players never see the end of it, for any reason: because they suck at PvP, because they’re not geared or speced for it, or because they just have the unfortunate choice of not joining the juggernaut side on their server.

    In other words, it’s rigged to prevent the player from ever seeing the end of achievements by completing them all (until the next expansion kicks in). It’s the same thing as if a friend of yours invited you to dinner and promised, as a bet, to give you $10,000 if you ate everything he served you, but when you showed up, you realized that the side dish was full of the one ingredient he knew you were allergic to. The dice are loaded, and Unethical WoW marches on.

    And by the way, I urge you to take this very interesting discussion to the MMORPG.com forums, where it will be met with hostility from the regulars because it’s not entirely pro-WoW. One poster in particular will make it his duty to run you through an inquisition and distort (or ignore) your answers, while dismissing you with three times more punctuation than needed, random sentences in teal and others underlined, and reducing all discussion to the magic figure of 11.5 million, all of this with more Belgian obnoxiousness than an Agatha Christie omnibus. And don’t be deceived, you’ll be the one ending up with a forum warning. That should remind you of the futility of ever questioning anything regarding WoW or Blizzard.

  • Noel Walling

    I’m still of the opinion that Blizzard’s biggest mistake with their achievement system for WoW is not in the specifics of the individual achievements, but rather, that the system is character-specific rather than account specific in a game that encourages players to experience multiple class styles through re-rolling.

    This becomes an even larger mistake when one considers how they’re tying accounts together through battle.net log-ins, rather than game-specific accounts, because at this point, there’s no really good way to show an ‘account achievement score’, because such a thing just doesn’t exist in WoW.

    In theory, they could tie all the character achievements together and add them up, but that’s pretty silly, because it would immensely diminish the achievement ‘worth’ of other Blizzard titles when (not if) they implement them.

  • http://deathknightspree.blogspot.com/ Stabs

    Think you’re kind of missing the point of pvp.

    Player. Versus. Player.

    Other players with a different agenda are coming in and messing up your honour farm. Hostile players. Who you can kill.

    That IS pvp, not the mindless farming you’ve become addicted to.

    I’m very much reminded of the Diablo 2 PK debate where Blizzard said

    “The addition of the occaisional anti-social player only adds to the feeling of tension and fear that makes the rewards of success that much better”
    http://www.warpcore.org/~sirian/diablo2/protest-2a.html

    OK it’s frustration rather than fear and tension but after so many bloggers have been ranting about WoW being a mindless hand-holding treadmill it seems inappropriate to complain about other players messing up your player versus player farming because they have competing goals. Find a bunch of like-minded folks and gank the living snot out of them. Make them scared to go into a bg to get their achievements. Now that would be pvp.

  • http://tagn.wordpress.com/ wilhelm2451

    I actually like the achievements. They are fun to go out and run with my daughter. But when I saw the Children’s Week achievements I just said, “That ain’t gonna happen.” I’ve played enough battlegrounds to see the futility in it. We did the holiday quests, got our little pets, and moved on.

    But I know people who are even now in battlegrounds, and will be all week, trying to get that achievement because they have to have them all.

  • Vetarnias

    @Stabs
    And while I disapprove of ganking, I must admit this suggestion gets quite a high rating on my schadenfreude meter.

  • Alarik

    @Stabs
    The enemies playing counter to your goals aren’t the problem, precisely because you can gank the shit out of them; it’s the people on your own side screwing you over, which you really can’t do anything about.

  • Guus

    I agree with you completely. I hate having to do PVP solely to get the damned achievement, which is what I am after. I like PVP sometimes, and I agree with you completely because it bugs the crap out of me that I have to learn a new playstyle for one day to get my achievement, one that ruins the game for you. Sorry.

  • hitnrun

    I don’t think it’s the PvP that makes this achievement so horrible – though I realize Lum never misses an opportunity to bait teh hardcorez and his eternal nemeses are always happy to strike back – it’s the particular goals that must be reached to get these achievements.

    Anyone who has spent 5-minutes in Blizzard’s little sandboxes can tell you how horrible an idea it is to tie anything to actually completing an objective yourself. It would be just as bad if they were a Gears of War “Horde Mode” style PvE-gauntlet encounter. There are only handful of relevant unlocks in these time-consuming scenarios and they punish you (by taking more time) for leaving them early.

  • Vuddy

    I think you are missing an opportunity Scott.

    Get 3 or 4 friends who like to PvP together, grab the Eye of the Storm Flag and let the sheep come to the slaughter. Your side will scream at you to drop the flag so they can cap it, but you will be too busy killing the achievement whores that dribble in one by one.

    This works in Warsong Gulch as well, but its harder to get the flag with all the sheep in the flag room.

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