Although I have largely stopped playing WoW, I still log on from time to time just to see what's going on, which I guess makes me an ideal customer. I take up no resources but still pay every month.
This week I logged on to find the Pilgrims Bounty Thanksgiving event going on, and while chatting with a few people started doing some of the achievements. But while I was studiously looking through the meta achievement, to ensure I did them all in the proper order as to minimize the time it would take I suddenly realized (and yes you can call me stupid for not coming to this conclusion a lot earlier) that this is utterly pointless.
When did achievements become a farm instead of an achievement? Originally we had high scores, rewarding you for being better than everyone else, and now we are rewarded just for playing? It's like getting a "Participant!" ribbon at a school race but we're not even doing something fun. We are effectively being rewarded for completing parts of the game that are so boring that we would otherwise never want to bother.
Shouldn't developers be focusing on making content that we want to complete? and shouldn't we, as gamers be demanding it?
Achievements started out as a good idea, but it has just gotten so completely out of hand in WoW. There's nothing wrong with achievements, but that's not what we have now.
From web dictionary:
Quote
Achievement - something that has been accomplished, especially by hard work, ability, or heroism.
Now tell me, where in the following do you see hard work, ability or heroism?
Unless the ability is breathing, and you consider logging into WoW to be hard work, I see no reason for achievements like this to exist other than to artificially inflate the amount of time you spend playing.
I'm not against true achievements. Server first boss kills? That's an achievement. Completing the Trial of the Grand Crusader without a single person dying at any point? Pushing it (as it's largely luck sometimes) but still an achievement. Clicking the Turkey/Christmas Present/logging in on the right day - Not achievements.
I think the reason this gets to me so much is not only because it's so obviously an attempt to entice us to keep our subscriptions active, but because for so many of us, it works.
I'm tempted to make a "True Achievements" site that parses out the armory and removes all the achievements that only require pointless grinding/clicking/running around and not actual playing ability, so people can see who's really on top. But it seems more and more each patch that pointless grinding/clicking/running around is what WoW is all about.
