This week, Blizzard passed out more information about the plans for guilds in Cataclysm. That’s more about guild ranks, guild levelling, guild achievements, guild reputation, guild rewards, and by the way if you’ve completed any of the activities required for guild achievements previously then those won’t count and you’ll have to do them again.
They helpfully gave an example:
Let’s just say, that for example, you need to complete the new guild achievement “We are Legendary” in order to unlock the Dark Phoenix. That achievement requires the guild to gain access to all 6 legendary weapons currently available in the game. (note that all guild achievements start on Cataclysm launch, so anything you have now will not matter, it must be done with your guild after launch)
This is just an example, so may not be the actual achievement required to unlock the pretty dark phoenix mount. But what a way to make people feel that their Wrath legendaries are not only worthless (liable to be replaced by Cataclysm greens in a few months) but also that their guild might have to go farm them all over again. The question is, would people feel less resistance to repeating some achievement if they did so with a different or new guild?
For example, when character achievements came into the game, players had to start from scratch, even if they had completed some of the achievement raids or instances previously. I couldn’t really be bothered to go repeat the older instances on Spinks just for an achievement. But on a new alt, I might be more inclined to go out of my way to do it. Crazy, huh? But in the back of my mind I was thinking, “I’ve already beaten TBC heroics on Spinks several zillion times. Like hell I need to do that again!! It’s not my fault that the game is stupid.” I think this comes from mentally ticking off achievement boxes in your head. Once you know you have completed a goal, it feel sour to be told that you need to redo it because the first time didn’t count.
If this is true for other people, then there has never been a more appealing time in which to start a new guild. A new guild can tackle all of the new achievements together without ever having to think, “This sucks, we did that last expansion so why do we need to do it again?” I could easily imagine 10 man guilds holding regular runs through old raid instances with the aim of eventually collecting legendary items (assuming that achievement makes it live.) But I’m not sure I can imagine raids doing that who already have done it before.
Maybe one measure of how hardcore a guild is will be how easy they find it to get people to do these runs again. And again. And again. At least it answers one question about what raid guilds might do on their off-nights. Wonder if we’ll be able to solo Molten Core at 85…
Are you planning to start or join a new guild when Cataclysm hits? I know I’m looking forwards to tackling the achievements in our newish little Alliance guild.
Welcome to Spinksville! 
I don’t understand the logic behind the legendary achievement. Who in their right mind would go get them during Cataclysm, and besides, you’d need at least say 4 or 5 other people to help you farm the bosses even at L85. It’s crazy.
I’m not changing guilds, but you’re right this would be a good time for massive re-shuffling.
The logic behind the achievement is that Blizzard currently isn’t tracking Legendary Item acquisition by guild. I would assume that the achievement updates when the player FIRST gets the item, and not simply for having someone who owns the item in the guild. If it worked the other way, you’d just need to pay someone who already has the legendary to accept your guild invite for a minute to flag your guild for that “achievement”.
That’s one option. Or they might flag every single raid that involves the legendary (or components) and make sure they all were guild raids.
Certainly I’m sure hardcore raid guilds will charge people lots of gold for the privilege of joining, repping up, and then buying the shiny guild goodies from the guild merchant.
Maybe teams of mercenary players will also sell their services to less hardcore guilds, for joining and then getting guild achievements.
Yeah, I’m not sure if this one is a joke achievement for winding players up.
But actually, new players probably wouldn’t mind going on a few trips to Ulduar and the like. I bet they’d enjoy it. In fact, achievements which encourage guilds to do tourist trips to old raids are laser targetted for new players 😉
They’ll have to adjust the drop rates in places like MC though, I would have thought…
Missed vanilla raids completely. Missed TBC raids by few months. Now I’m missing WotLK raids due to time restraints keeping me from guild raids and inability to gain high enough GS fast enough to PUG them.
So what ever happens in Cata, I will most probably miss LK achievement and the most important end boss ever. Sucks to be me.
No achievement will make the earlier instances or raids to be run more. I can’t see that one hit when Cata goes live, really.
C out
This seems like a serious problem for quest-based legendaries, since many players would be locked out. Unless of course they plan to reset the quest chains… In that case, I gotta get my rogue a TF before then!
This Achievement cannot exist as written in the example because it is impossible to get Atiesh from Naxxramas 1.x (unless someone has the quest and items lying around still and never assembled them). http://www.wowwiki.com/Atiesh,_Greatstaff_of_the_Guardian
Nah, there are in fact 6 legendary weapons currently in the game. The blue poster was right about that 🙂
I’m rather out of the loop these days but it seems to be implied in your post that achievements are the game.
Back when I last played people were split on achievements. Everyone wanted progression but many couldn’t care less about achievements. Pugs were notoriously hard to get achievements in because there would always be one person not willing to raise his game to the higher level of difficulty spoiling it.
Are they really that important now? Or is it the loot associated with them that’s important?
They’re really important for some people.
But a key thing here is that guild achievements will reward a lot of guild levelling xp, and some (like the example one in the post above) might also be involved in special rewards. It may well be that later in the expansion, when most of the guilds are fully levelled anyway, people will stop caring.
The new system does give Blizzard a way to reward an entire guild when a guild raid or player/s do something, not just the people who were there at the time. (Which is nice for people who were subs when a raid group got an achievement, but I’m not really sure how it’ll affect the game otherwise.)
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