Won't you Be Mine? (The State of Achievements)
The following is a list of achievements I feel are problematic and possible fixes. A lot of this has come up in the BB lately, and I just wanted to get it out here.
1) General
1.1)Mountain o' Mounts - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Problem: There's 2 problems here - the faction imbalance and the class imbalance. Locks, DKs, and Pallies get 2 extra mounts. Alliance gets 3 extra mounts from major cities and 1 from Wintersaber. That's a 4 mount advantage over Horde, and that's huge. It's the difference between farming 1% drops on daily/3 day/weekly resets for 4 mounts and not having to worry about it at all. I would consider the following "reasonable" for Horde to obtain: World of Warcraft Mount Checklist - with the exception of the HH mount, all of these are pretty easily obtainable. That's 95. The Baron's mount is pretty farmable now, so we could call that 96. At this point, Alliance is done, and alliance DKs, locks, and pallies got to drop 2 from the above list. Horde players must farm 2-4 1% mounts on hard resets.
Fix: Add 4 more Horde city rep mounts to even out the faction imbalance or add 3 and allow Horde to do Wintersaber (or put a mount on Tranquilien). Make the 6 class mounts not count towards the total. Without this fix, we will never be able to tune the numbers appropriately since the classes and factions aren't on equal ground. It's either going to be too easy for alliance or too hard for Horde. It was a problem in 3.0 for Horde (mostly Tauren), it's a problem now, and it will be again in the future. In addition, if it is the goal of Blizzard to stop real money trade for in game goods, TCG mounts should not count towards the total for the achievement. Not only does this inflate the prices of those cards, but causes the same tuning problem mentioned above.
1.2) Lil' Game Hunter - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Problem: This one isn't that big of a deal, but Alliance has access to one more pet than Horde ([Sprite Darter Egg]). There's a bit more leeway than with mounts (and rare pets aren't BoP), but depending on the rare pets you have, this could mean thousands to purchase a rare pet to bridge the gap (or real money for a TCG pet).
Fix: Add a Horde quest that rewards a BoP pet, to prevent future tuning issues. As stated above, if it is the goal of Blizzard to stop real money trade for in game goods, TCG pets should not count towards the total for the achievement (same for tabards too).
2) PVP
2.1 The Conqueror - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Problem: Pre-BC this was pretty easy. Now, this is probably the worst grind in the game. Your battlegroup can also play a big role in this.
Fix: Move "The Conqueror" back to a Feat of Strength and remove rep achievement from PVP, or a offer a repeatable rep turn-in for 1 of each mark.
2.2 AV - To the Looter Go the Spoils - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Problem: This is absolutely stupid, and actually encourages people to ignore everything in the BG and run around auto-looting.
Fix: At the very least, remove it from the AV meta. It's probably better to remove it from the game
2.3 WG - Grand Black War Mammoth - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Problem: 2 chances on a < 1% drop on a 1 week hard reset.
Fix: At the very least, remove it from the meta. It would be better as a feat of strength or not an achievement at all.
3) Dungeons and Raids
3.1) The Party's Over - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Problem: Kicking a guy out of your group to kill a boss is stupid, especially when it doesn't change the dynamics of the fight. Plus, you can just have someone leave the group, engage the boss, and still kill him with 5 (I don't think this has been fixed).
Fix: Remove the achievement, or change it to "Kill the boss within x seconds".
3.2) Defeat XXX with less than 9/21
Problem: As stated above, none of these change the fight in any interesting way (except Malygos with 8...maybe).
Fix: Nothing, just don't do it again in Ulduar.
3.3) Gonna Go When the Volcano Blows - Achievement - World of Warcraft / Heroic: Gonna Go When the Volcano Blows - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Problem: The easiest way to do this achievement is go afk while not standing on Sartharion's platform before the pull. Pull happens, you get hit with 2-3 fireballs, die, win. If you're leet, you can hit Sarth with a ranged attack before scurrying off the platform and dying--this way you get a badge and loot.
Fix: Change it to not getting hit by the lava wave and staying alive the entire fight.
3.4) Spore Loser - Achievement - World of Warcraft / Heroic: Spore Loser - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Now that it works, put it back in the meta.
3.5) The Immortal - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Problem: Due to server instability, this achievement probably isn't possible for some guilds unless they raid on a Friday or Saturday night. Until recently, it was highly unlikely that anyone on a decent sized server could get this achievement. Add in random DCs on the wrong fight (KT, Saph, Thaddius, etc) or MC shenanigans on KT, and it's a recipe for heartbreak. All it takes is one network hiccup or power outage.
Fix: Create sub achievements for 0 deaths in each wing, and one for Saph/KT.
4) Professions
4.1) Chef de Cuisine - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Now that it's possible, put it back in the meta. Edit: On second thought, The Chef de Cuisine numbers may be considered unreasonable for PVP servers. Drop the number to 155 and put it back in the meta. Sous Chef is a joke. (thanks Arawethion/Yaltus)
5) World Events
5.1) Love Fest - Be Mine! - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Problem: Ah, the bane of my existence for the last week, the inspiration for this post. The trick-or-treat aspect of the achievement (1 hour adoration debuff) coupled with a 5 day event duration and double RNG (first you have to get a bag, then you have to get the candy you need) makes this achievement a total crapshoot. This is without a doubt, the worst holiday achievement, and in no way fun or challenging. The only challenge is not sleeping or waking up every hour to get a gift of adoration. People have reported doing the gifts 40, 50, 60, and 70+ times and did not complete the achievement. Others got it on the first shot the first night. What makes it even more frustrating is that Kisirani thinks this is acceptable. She must not have been up at 6 AM Monday praying to the deity of her choice that her 47th bag would give her the last piece of candy she's needed for days. The main problem is that we had no control over this--unlike other "RNG" achievements like brewfest mounts where we could summon as many times as we wanted.
Fix: Too late now, it has to be removed from the meta. Possible solutions could have included: Making candy a possible quest reward would be good, or making the hearts consumable and you have to eat all 8 would work too (this way you can buy/trade, and it fits in the V-day theme, suggestion courtesy of Sapp).
5.2) Children's Week - Daily Chores - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Problem: A Simple Re-Quest has been buggy since release, and currently, I believe there has to be < 24 hours between each one, meaning, if I do it at 9 tonight and 10 tomorrow, it won't work.
Fix: Fix this, and make sure it works beyond a shadow of a doubt before the event is released. I'd imagine that a large portion of the wow population doesn't know this "trick" and the tooltip doesn't say anything about it. Otherwise, just make it X dailies with your orphan out with no time table or remove it from the meta. There isn't a lot of room for error on this.
5.3) RNG drops from summonable bosses.
Problem: Depends on what you'd consider a problem and what Blizzard wants to accomplish. The Halloween hat, squashling, and Brewfest mounts are all an issue. Personally, I don't care, but then again, I'm willing to summon in alts and buy off people from trade chat until I get the mount. Your average player isn't going to complete these things only doing it 5 times a night. Blizzard, I'm ok with it if you are.
Fix: If Blizzard doesn't think it's appropriate to summon Direbrew 200 times to get a mount or a squashling from HH, remove them from the meta. Maybe a failure threshold could be created--If you attempt X times and don't receive the mount, you get credit for the achievement and you don't lose the meta.
5.4) Brew of the Month Club - Quest - World of Warcraft
Blizzard, decide what you want: If the Violet drake is supposed to be the casual 310, remove all of the RNG achievements and make this just obtaining membership. If Long, Strange Trip is supposed to be difficult and not a guarantee after a year of dedicated play, leave this one alone. We all knew the achievement was coming. The information was out there, no excuses unless you're a DK (account-based achievements would fix that
).
Note: My fear is that people will use the current Be Mine situation to get another bitch in about the items described in 5.3 and 5.4, which may cause Blizzard to lump everything together as AUGH RNG BITCH TIME and tell everyone to fuck off. So everyone, do me a solid and only bitch about Be Mine for a few days until this gets sorted out. If history has taught us anything, it's that if enough people bitch on the forums about a specific item, said item gets changed or fixed, regardless of how misinformed the bitching is.
6.0) Feats of Strength
Problem: Realm First! achievements with tangible rewards (i.e. Realm first boss kills with titles as rewards) only reward the people in the instance. As anyone in a competitive guild knows, you can't run with only 25 raiders. That means someone has to be on the bench, and the odds are decent that a guy on the bench had as much to do with the guild getting to said boss. Sometimes, the nature of the encounter means that an off tank or a dps has to take a seat to make room for an extra healer.
Fix: Do away with Realm First titles, or give the titles to everyone online in the guild at the time the boss was killed.
I realize the technical implications of some of the changes I'm suggesting (adding things back into meta-achievements), but hopefully there's a way to grandfather achievements and rewards in and not break anything.
And finally, if anyone knows Kisirani, please pass this along:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Kisirani,
I read your forum posts here: MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Bag of Candies, ACT 2!
I guess I'm SUPER unlucky, I only got 3 bags and 7/8 candies
Let's do some math. Run a database query or whatever and figure out how many people completed both the Merrymaker and Elders metas. We'll call that "A". Let the number of people who completed the Love Fest meta equal "B". A - B = C. C is number of people who got RNG fucked out of a Violet Proto Drake this year due to the poor design of the Be Mine! achievement. When I finish everything else in the world event meta, I get to wait 5 months for Love fest and try again. If I don't get that piece of candy then, would I still be unlucky? Or will you finally admit that Be Mine! is poorly designed and should be removed from the meta?
Love,
Jameson
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If anyone has the armory scraping skills to figure out A and B above, or thinks I left something out of the list, please let me know.
1) General
1.1)Mountain o' Mounts - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Problem: There's 2 problems here - the faction imbalance and the class imbalance. Locks, DKs, and Pallies get 2 extra mounts. Alliance gets 3 extra mounts from major cities and 1 from Wintersaber. That's a 4 mount advantage over Horde, and that's huge. It's the difference between farming 1% drops on daily/3 day/weekly resets for 4 mounts and not having to worry about it at all. I would consider the following "reasonable" for Horde to obtain: World of Warcraft Mount Checklist - with the exception of the HH mount, all of these are pretty easily obtainable. That's 95. The Baron's mount is pretty farmable now, so we could call that 96. At this point, Alliance is done, and alliance DKs, locks, and pallies got to drop 2 from the above list. Horde players must farm 2-4 1% mounts on hard resets.
Fix: Add 4 more Horde city rep mounts to even out the faction imbalance or add 3 and allow Horde to do Wintersaber (or put a mount on Tranquilien). Make the 6 class mounts not count towards the total. Without this fix, we will never be able to tune the numbers appropriately since the classes and factions aren't on equal ground. It's either going to be too easy for alliance or too hard for Horde. It was a problem in 3.0 for Horde (mostly Tauren), it's a problem now, and it will be again in the future. In addition, if it is the goal of Blizzard to stop real money trade for in game goods, TCG mounts should not count towards the total for the achievement. Not only does this inflate the prices of those cards, but causes the same tuning problem mentioned above.
1.2) Lil' Game Hunter - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Problem: This one isn't that big of a deal, but Alliance has access to one more pet than Horde ([Sprite Darter Egg]). There's a bit more leeway than with mounts (and rare pets aren't BoP), but depending on the rare pets you have, this could mean thousands to purchase a rare pet to bridge the gap (or real money for a TCG pet).
Fix: Add a Horde quest that rewards a BoP pet, to prevent future tuning issues. As stated above, if it is the goal of Blizzard to stop real money trade for in game goods, TCG pets should not count towards the total for the achievement (same for tabards too).
2) PVP
2.1 The Conqueror - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Problem: Pre-BC this was pretty easy. Now, this is probably the worst grind in the game. Your battlegroup can also play a big role in this.
Fix: Move "The Conqueror" back to a Feat of Strength and remove rep achievement from PVP, or a offer a repeatable rep turn-in for 1 of each mark.
2.2 AV - To the Looter Go the Spoils - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Problem: This is absolutely stupid, and actually encourages people to ignore everything in the BG and run around auto-looting.
Fix: At the very least, remove it from the AV meta. It's probably better to remove it from the game
2.3 WG - Grand Black War Mammoth - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Problem: 2 chances on a < 1% drop on a 1 week hard reset.
Fix: At the very least, remove it from the meta. It would be better as a feat of strength or not an achievement at all.
3) Dungeons and Raids
3.1) The Party's Over - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Problem: Kicking a guy out of your group to kill a boss is stupid, especially when it doesn't change the dynamics of the fight. Plus, you can just have someone leave the group, engage the boss, and still kill him with 5 (I don't think this has been fixed).
Fix: Remove the achievement, or change it to "Kill the boss within x seconds".
3.2) Defeat XXX with less than 9/21
Problem: As stated above, none of these change the fight in any interesting way (except Malygos with 8...maybe).
Fix: Nothing, just don't do it again in Ulduar.
3.3) Gonna Go When the Volcano Blows - Achievement - World of Warcraft / Heroic: Gonna Go When the Volcano Blows - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Problem: The easiest way to do this achievement is go afk while not standing on Sartharion's platform before the pull. Pull happens, you get hit with 2-3 fireballs, die, win. If you're leet, you can hit Sarth with a ranged attack before scurrying off the platform and dying--this way you get a badge and loot.
Fix: Change it to not getting hit by the lava wave and staying alive the entire fight.
3.4) Spore Loser - Achievement - World of Warcraft / Heroic: Spore Loser - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Now that it works, put it back in the meta.
3.5) The Immortal - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Problem: Due to server instability, this achievement probably isn't possible for some guilds unless they raid on a Friday or Saturday night. Until recently, it was highly unlikely that anyone on a decent sized server could get this achievement. Add in random DCs on the wrong fight (KT, Saph, Thaddius, etc) or MC shenanigans on KT, and it's a recipe for heartbreak. All it takes is one network hiccup or power outage.
Fix: Create sub achievements for 0 deaths in each wing, and one for Saph/KT.
4) Professions
4.1) Chef de Cuisine - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Now that it's possible, put it back in the meta. Edit: On second thought, The Chef de Cuisine numbers may be considered unreasonable for PVP servers. Drop the number to 155 and put it back in the meta. Sous Chef is a joke. (thanks Arawethion/Yaltus)
5) World Events
5.1) Love Fest - Be Mine! - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Problem: Ah, the bane of my existence for the last week, the inspiration for this post. The trick-or-treat aspect of the achievement (1 hour adoration debuff) coupled with a 5 day event duration and double RNG (first you have to get a bag, then you have to get the candy you need) makes this achievement a total crapshoot. This is without a doubt, the worst holiday achievement, and in no way fun or challenging. The only challenge is not sleeping or waking up every hour to get a gift of adoration. People have reported doing the gifts 40, 50, 60, and 70+ times and did not complete the achievement. Others got it on the first shot the first night. What makes it even more frustrating is that Kisirani thinks this is acceptable. She must not have been up at 6 AM Monday praying to the deity of her choice that her 47th bag would give her the last piece of candy she's needed for days. The main problem is that we had no control over this--unlike other "RNG" achievements like brewfest mounts where we could summon as many times as we wanted.
Fix: Too late now, it has to be removed from the meta. Possible solutions could have included: Making candy a possible quest reward would be good, or making the hearts consumable and you have to eat all 8 would work too (this way you can buy/trade, and it fits in the V-day theme, suggestion courtesy of Sapp).
5.2) Children's Week - Daily Chores - Achievement - World of Warcraft
Problem: A Simple Re-Quest has been buggy since release, and currently, I believe there has to be < 24 hours between each one, meaning, if I do it at 9 tonight and 10 tomorrow, it won't work.
Fix: Fix this, and make sure it works beyond a shadow of a doubt before the event is released. I'd imagine that a large portion of the wow population doesn't know this "trick" and the tooltip doesn't say anything about it. Otherwise, just make it X dailies with your orphan out with no time table or remove it from the meta. There isn't a lot of room for error on this.
5.3) RNG drops from summonable bosses.
Problem: Depends on what you'd consider a problem and what Blizzard wants to accomplish. The Halloween hat, squashling, and Brewfest mounts are all an issue. Personally, I don't care, but then again, I'm willing to summon in alts and buy off people from trade chat until I get the mount. Your average player isn't going to complete these things only doing it 5 times a night. Blizzard, I'm ok with it if you are.
Fix: If Blizzard doesn't think it's appropriate to summon Direbrew 200 times to get a mount or a squashling from HH, remove them from the meta. Maybe a failure threshold could be created--If you attempt X times and don't receive the mount, you get credit for the achievement and you don't lose the meta.
5.4) Brew of the Month Club - Quest - World of Warcraft
Blizzard, decide what you want: If the Violet drake is supposed to be the casual 310, remove all of the RNG achievements and make this just obtaining membership. If Long, Strange Trip is supposed to be difficult and not a guarantee after a year of dedicated play, leave this one alone. We all knew the achievement was coming. The information was out there, no excuses unless you're a DK (account-based achievements would fix that
). Note: My fear is that people will use the current Be Mine situation to get another bitch in about the items described in 5.3 and 5.4, which may cause Blizzard to lump everything together as AUGH RNG BITCH TIME and tell everyone to fuck off. So everyone, do me a solid and only bitch about Be Mine for a few days until this gets sorted out. If history has taught us anything, it's that if enough people bitch on the forums about a specific item, said item gets changed or fixed, regardless of how misinformed the bitching is.
6.0) Feats of Strength
Problem: Realm First! achievements with tangible rewards (i.e. Realm first boss kills with titles as rewards) only reward the people in the instance. As anyone in a competitive guild knows, you can't run with only 25 raiders. That means someone has to be on the bench, and the odds are decent that a guy on the bench had as much to do with the guild getting to said boss. Sometimes, the nature of the encounter means that an off tank or a dps has to take a seat to make room for an extra healer.
Fix: Do away with Realm First titles, or give the titles to everyone online in the guild at the time the boss was killed.
I realize the technical implications of some of the changes I'm suggesting (adding things back into meta-achievements), but hopefully there's a way to grandfather achievements and rewards in and not break anything.
And finally, if anyone knows Kisirani, please pass this along:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dear Kisirani,
I read your forum posts here: MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Bag of Candies, ACT 2!
I guess I'm SUPER unlucky, I only got 3 bags and 7/8 candies
Let's do some math. Run a database query or whatever and figure out how many people completed both the Merrymaker and Elders metas. We'll call that "A". Let the number of people who completed the Love Fest meta equal "B". A - B = C. C is number of people who got RNG fucked out of a Violet Proto Drake this year due to the poor design of the Be Mine! achievement. When I finish everything else in the world event meta, I get to wait 5 months for Love fest and try again. If I don't get that piece of candy then, would I still be unlucky? Or will you finally admit that Be Mine! is poorly designed and should be removed from the meta?
Love,
Jameson
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If anyone has the armory scraping skills to figure out A and B above, or thinks I left something out of the list, please let me know.
Total Comments 6
Comments
|
I would be interested to an armory scraping that as well, to show Be Mine! issues. I had to stay up until 3 am Monday to get it with my 4th candy bag.
To the children's week dailies, a wowhead search shows you have need to do the dailies than 24 hours apart. Certainly many players don't check that site, but the information is out there (plus the post that says that is in green text). |
|
|
|
It's interesting that you call Chef de Cuisine fine after all the complaints about Alliance-Horde mount/pet imbalance. I'm pretty sure having people roll Alliance DK alts to do a quest in Hillsbrad isn't intended. Should probably also do something about the fact that if you thrown out an item like Recipe: Buzzard Bites, you have to get a new copy from someone else doing the quest (which then in turn means they are missing a recipe).
Definitely agree about how stupid BG rep is. |
|
|
|
|
Yeah, I didn't think about that until after I posted. Being on a PVE server, I have the luxury of rolling an alliance DK and picking up the recipes I'm missing. It's certainly more painful to accomplish on a PVP server.
|
|
|
|
|
There are ways around it--you can find any guildmate with an Alliance account and pay them (I'm pretty sure, now that the achievement is possible and people are doing it, you can actually make some cash just repeatedly farming those two). Instead of rolling a DK alt, you can also message random people in Hillsbrad and offer to pay them. And since you can skip 2, Horde can also do it without Tasty Lion Steak and Chimaerok Chops, and nothing in the other 160 should be incredibly painful.
None of this is ideal, but it makes this achievement pretty tolerable. Generally less egregious than some of the things you mentioned. I think lowering it to maybe 155 and putting it in the meta would be fine. Not totally hardcore, but at least makes people put in some effort to fill out their list (whereas 100 does not do so at all). |
|
|
|
|
Updated. Thank you for the input.
|
|
|
|
|
Worth noting there's one horde one (Dig Rat Stew) I'm currently running a DK though the starter quests to get, not to mention the 'joy' of Savory Deviate (which while farmable by both factions, is horde-controlled and not contested, unless it's been too long since I've played on a pvp server).
Agreed on pretty much all your points. Edit: Also you missed one of my personal pet peeves: Chef. Perhaps it's reasonable that the cooking meta requires fishing, but I cannot stand it. To get Rumsey's Lager, I'd have to do the daily every day for an unspecified number of days in -another profession-. At that point at least have the decency to move the meta from Cooking to Professions. I realize I'm a minor subset but I'd very much like if instead of forcing me to fish they would give me an extremely long and painful questline to have a shot at the title. I really detest the in game fishing, though I have no problems with cooking because I am quite capible of finding the AH. |
|
Updated 02/21/09 at 2:37 PM by Oggie |
Total Trackbacks 0
Trackbacks
Recent Blog Entries by Jameson
