I think that point came when two friends invited me to run Scarlet Monastery. I love those instances because of the lore, the design and the look. It’s just a cool instance. But these two friends were utterly obsessed with the achievements, finding and hastily ‘reading’ every book that they could get for the achievement, repeatedly pointing books out to me that I might have missed ‘FOR THE ACHIEVEMENT!’ They never actually bothered literally ‘reading’ any of the books and actually had no clue what was in them and even less of a clue what the whole instance was about.

I eventually lost my temper and told everyone to shut up about achievements.

I’ve since found it to be a sort of litmus test for players. If they’re obsessed with achievements, and expect ME to be obsessed with achievements, chances are they’re going to annoy me even more down the line with other things.

I’m working on this for the mount, but because I’m a collector, not because I want to show it off. I don’t particularly care who sees or doesn’t see what I have. I use what I want to use or what I like to look at, and other people’s opinions don’t really matter to me. I will say, though, that I wouldn’t be working on it if I hadn’t already snagged the Brew of the Month quest last October (purely by accident – I did that whole mess because I thought it would be neat).

GArmadillo: I realise now that I could have phrased that more tactfully. I’m sure the mount will be cool. And I think the developers knew exactly what they were doing. They know how many people have done daft grinds for mounts previously. I figure it this way: rare, non-random, accessible, fun — pick any 3. So if something is rare, accessible and fun then it’s going to be very random. If it’s rare, accessible, and non-random then it won’t be very fun. And if it’s fun, accessible, and non-random then it won’t be rare. (And rare, fun, and non-random is where the hardcore raiders like their game to be, inaccessible to the rest.)

Ysharros: I like that a lot. It’s nice to have a small visual perk to note that you’re an old dino of the game. Like the way that WAR gave out titles to people who had been in the last beta test (World-Shaper, I think it is).

*That* is actually a really nice move which in itself is unusual for MMOs (let alone SOE ). When I went back to SWG for a bit in late 2007, I had a butt-ton of veteran rewards available for selection. None of them are earth-shattering, of course, but I think that’s far more to the point of such rewards than giving out LeUltimateItemdeDoom only to people who can go without sleep for 120 hours straight. I’d rather have a nice/cute/funny housing deco or personal deco item I can get without having to chew my own arms off.

But yes. I experienced this WoW Valentine’s thing for the first time (didn’t exist in the dim & distant when I first played WoW) and those double firecrackers and general groaning and keening and … ugh. No, thanks. Not an achievement I’m likely to get.

This particular player vs developer struggle has turned into an ugly war of attrition. The devs clearly intended to have this thing be a supremely rare mount, and the players feel that non-raid/PVP achievements should, as a general rule, be attainable by players who spend a reasonable amount of time on them. The portions of the events that are NOT fun are the ones that are intended to keep the achievement rare. The end result is looking like a not very fun event grind that ultimately won’t end up being very rare either.

I think part of the disconnect is become of the slow speed of content development at Blizzard. Players are starved for content, so they’re expecting events with incentives like Warhammer has, that provide something for everyone to do while the event is up and running. Blizzard seems to have underestimated the number of players who have elected to participated (who now feel too strongly invested to back out). They thought that only the dedicated would bother to do the content, which was the case before the achievement system went in, and apparently didn’t realize that people are more likely to do things that the game rewards them for.

There is no pressure on anyone to complete these events at all, and anyone who is feeling pressured to do them should ask themselves why.

My view is that you should have fun doing achievements; they are there as a goal, of course, but if you only do 2/3 of them whilst having fun, so what?

Better that than sit at your computer feeling you have to do stuff simply because it is there, no matter how tedious.