My XBox 360 Gamerscore is less than impressive.
My WoW achievement score is quite impressive. Especially if one takes into consideration achievements across multiple characters. Not kidding. I have spent a stupid amount of time and an even more stupid amount of gold getting various WoW achievements.
100 Mounts? I got it. Ring of Dalaran? Yup. Loremaster? Check, check, check, and check. Minipets? At least one on every.single.toon.
Today’s Breakfast Topic on Wowinsider discussed what achievements *should* be in WoW. A great topic to discuss. Many of the suggestions for Burning Crusade raids were exceptional. (Nobody Move – awarded for no one moving during Flame Wreath on Aran. Brilliant.) But many were suggestions that while could mildly be interesting would be terrible WoW achievements. Of course, not to fault the people writing them in, but Blizzard themselves seems to not have a standard for achievement and achievement changes.
Bad WoW Achievements:
1. Any achievement that cannot be completed by every class/race/faction combo. Allowances can be made to have the 2 version achievements for Horde and Alliance. This means no achievement for x amount of spells cast.
2. Any achievement that can only be earned during a single short time. Though having Feats of Strength instead of achievements seems to work well for this.
3. Any achievement that requires leaving the game or something outside of the game.
4. Any achievement that effectively locks out level capped players.
Now having said that, I feel that Blizzard is very arbitrary on achievement creation, criteria, and removal. There are achievements that are wildly specific. And then some entire areas of the game that are ignored. They give achievements for gold loots, but not item loots. There are achievements for professions as a whole, but not for mining x ore, or disenchanting x items.
Of course, due to the fact that they added achievements in Wrath, they didn’t add many of the smaller more interesting dungeon achievements to old world and outland dungeons and raids.
When they remove achievements, for the most part, they make them Feats of Strength (but not all of them, see The Keymaster achievement). Also if they remove an achievement that was a part of a criteria for a meta achievement, they generally remove it from the meta (again not always, look at the Naxx achievements.) They also have been inconsistent with removing rewards from achievements, then not removing rewards from the exact same style of achievement. (See Naxx drakes vs. Ulduar/ICC drakes.)
They need to make achievements consistent. They need to make the removal (which is fine) consistent. They need to make the addition of achievements a part of each major content patch, even if it is just filling in old holes and gaps in the system. Imagine if they simply added a section now that gave a player an achievement for soloing all the classic dungeons?
Like it or not, achievements became a huge part of people’s enjoyment of WoW. Now they need to make it work across the board instead of just being shotgunned across expansions and spurts of creativity by designers.