Achievements and guild climate

If you follow my blog you might know I’m not a big fan of achievements. I think it’s just a silly excuse for real content. But I know that just QQ’ing makes no sense, as fun as it is. I’d rather come up with ideas how blizzard could do better if they stick to the plan they chose, be it with achievements, buff homogenization or dual specs.

When it comes to achievements I don’t have any good suggestions. I see why it can be fun. I understand why shiny golden pop up windows, titles and proto drakes could be appealing to most of WoW players. I just can’t care. The one and only achievement I like is Sartharion, where difficulty scales with the quality of gear you get, that is pretty cool.

I play the game because of the social aspect, I like the progression of my character and most of all I’m in it for progression raiding. For me that is working on bosses and slowly advancing through a dungeon and not so much doing hard modes. But those hard modes will be the only thing most progression oriented guilds will get for the next few months, so I guess we’ll have to live with it. That’s probably still better than shutting out a big part of the raiding community with too challenging content.

Anyways, I made my point that I don’t care about achievements, but still they affect me.

Stompalina made a post on her blog about her raid pulling in two different directions. One part of her guild wants to try out raids on PTR while the other parts would like to finish all raiding achievements. Her post really got me thinking about the situation in my guild.

As I see it, the tone has got a lot harsher as we get closer to 3.1. Part of it a blame achievements for. And no, the guild I’m in is very friendly with a minimum of guild drama.

Achievements are in a way something not so unsimilar to gear. They mark our progression, achievements through titles and proto-drakes, gear through stats and the look of our character. The big difference though is that achievements are all-or-nothing. You get an achievement or you don’t get it. Gear is different, even if you don’t have any drop luck and get that piece of loot you absolutely wanted, you’ll still have something in that slot, or you might get another decent piece of loot. That’s why in most guild the loot system works pretty well, everyone gets a piece from time to time and nearly all raiders improve over the course of time.

Achievements as an all-or-nothing system are different from getting new gear. Everything that is all-or-nothing can’t keep everyone happy. That is pretty much the case in my guild right now. One problem is achievement vs. PTR. Same story as Stompalina describes. Some wanna hop onto the PTR as often as possible and blame everyone who won’t follow for not really doing all they could for the guild. Others absolutely want to complete all their raiding achievements and blame the people on the PTR for not helping them enough to achieve that goal by switching to the PTR all the time. And there are people like me who don’t really care about achievement or the PTR.

If you like proto-drakes and titles I guess the achievement system must be really cool. If you don’t care, things can get pretty annoying. Most of all I don’t like the huge amount of achievements that are necessary for the meta achievements. And a good chunk of my guild wants those meta achievements. So everyone who misses out some achievements is pretty pissed. So there are always people complaining because they are lacking The Immortal Title, the Naxx 20 achievement or some other Achievement, be it in 10 man or 25 man raiding content.

Why this bugs me:

• The final rewards for achievements and meta-achievements are mostly for pure personal showoff. I’m a social person. I like to help someone gearing up. I have no problem going to an instance I don’t need any equipment from to gear up people from my guild or friends. But if someone wants a cool mount I’d rather have him farm a stupid faction than make every raiding night twice as long as necessary just to get all achievement for everyone.
• Achievements will follow you everywhere. In every 10 man alt raid or heroic group someone will ask if we can do the achievements. Most of the time some others will agree and you’ll give those achievements some tries. In short: Those raiding achievements are a huge time sink, time that I could spend on leveling an alt or doing something outside of WoW.
• You won’t get all those achievements by showing up in every raid. You’ll have to do things like hopping onto a hover board as a healer and kill stuff which doesn’t really makes any sense. So at this point Malygos takes forever because we have to do a try just for this achievement and then countless tries to beat Malygos under 6 min.

You might say this isn’t all new. Similar complaining had always been there. I remember the time in my old guild when we were working on black temple and sunwell but many people still needed their T6 helms. There was always a lot of complaining, because archimonde mostly lead to many many wipes, which annoyed everyone who wanted to progress in BT and SW. But getting critical upgrades for raid members is pretty different from getting flying mounts.

So what could blizzard do better:

• More meta achievements that come natural with the raiding progression. Something like title A if you complete an instance and title B if you do the super duper hard achievements
• More hard modes that bring better loot. This loot would have to be significantly better than in non-hard mode. I would especially like to see good rings, bracers, weapons and shields drop and not gear in slots where you can wear tier gear, because more often than not you won’t switch out gear for minor upgrades if you loose a set bonus. Or why not additional tier gear (bracers, belts and boots). Then I could again motivate myself for achievements, because that would serve the purpose of gearing up myself or other raiders and not just titles and mounts.

How do you like achievements, meta-achievements and hard modes? Do they have any impact on your guild climate? Do you share some of my feelings towars achievements or am I just a poor sport?