Ask the Devs - Answers #5: Achievements

[bloodwine77]

who cares about achievments ? oh yeah people that have nothing better to do...it is just a waste of time.

Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted

Also, as Therec pointed out, anything and everything in WoW can be seen as a waste of time. It all depends on the person.

[Alayea]

We added the Keymaster achievement and then almost immediately decided to deemphasize the existence of keys in the game, and thus removed the achievement. Unfortunately it probably isn't even possible to track who had the older keys now.

Wow. Just... wow. You really dropped the ball on this one, Blizzard. You've got people who like the Barber Shop, but you didn't think that people would care about keys?

[Naro]

Q: Will we ever see a change to the Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin exalted achievement /reputation grinds? While normally a fan of time consuming achievements, these two seem to be a tad excessive. Warsong moreso as you can go entire games without gaining any reputation at all. You could in theory lose every AB you ever do, and eventually get exalted at a "reasonable" pace. Perhaps award rep for Flag returns, killing efcs, capping bases, HKs similar to Alteracy Valley, etc. – Idkmybffyata (North America/ANZ), Lunaticheart (Korea)

A: We think those are fine as achievements. They definitely take a huge time commitment, but so do some of the other achievements. And you don’t need to get them for the meta achievements.

Wrong, post-classic WSG is by far the slowest. No other grind can compare.

[Lothaeryn]

Wrong, post-classic WSG is by far the slowest. No other grind can compare.

simply for the fact that I have to go through demoralizing pvp scenario's just to earn rep for a faction makes me queasy on even trying to get those achis, hell, the What a Long, Strange Trip It's been achi was faster than that ever will be, since getting rep in WSG for the most part only occurs when someone drops/picks up/caps/ returns a flag, and no other time.

EDIT: not to mention that the amount of rep you gain is fucking abysmal, 1-3 rep per defend? are you fuckin kidding me?

I really do salute any and all people who actually have the justicar title, they actually did enough BG's to last a lifetime and grinded those reps to Exalted FFS.

[Frozen Death Knight]

I got the Keymaster achieve on my hunter in WotLK, and now someone from somewhere w/ a "blue" label tells me that's hard to track my keys........come ooooon......Blizzard again is BSing everyone. So, it's not hard to delete achieves and take my $15 per month, but it's hard to recover, ha ? So, where is my refund ?

I think the problem here lies in that recovering old information is hard to achieve, once it's removed. It's the same with anything about the internet or even any computer. Eventually, some information that was once stored there disappears, and then it is next to impossible to gain it back, simply because the data for it is lost. Of course, there are some programs that are able to recover such lost data, again, but then it needs to be able to go back to the time before it was removed, plus you can not go back how long you want, which makes it quite limiting and not all reliable.

[Vanirin]

Q: Are we going to see more PvP achievements that reward mounts? Currently most of the cool mounts are awarded for PvE achievements. – Demodras (Europe [English])

As an avid PvPer who really doesn't like PvE content, I am very very disappointed in the answer to this

Q: Will we ever see a change to the Warsong Gulch and Arathi Basin exalted achievement /reputation grinds? While normally a fan of time consuming achievements, these two seem to be a tad excessive. Warsong moreso as you can go entire games without gaining any reputation at all. You could in theory lose every AB you ever do, and eventually get exalted at a "reasonable" pace. Perhaps award rep for Flag returns, killing efcs, capping bases, HKs similar to Alteracy Valley, etc. – Idkmybffyata (North America/ANZ), Lunaticheart (Korea)

A: We think those are fine as achievements.

Obviously Blizzard once again patting us on the head and saying "No thanks". I feel Blizzard is disconnected from the player-base more and more lately!! Q_Q

[Malekius]

i couldn't agree more. it's just blasphemy for them not to have a 100 or 125 pet reward. they skipped 75 so you'd think at least 125 pets would reward a pet. -_-

To tell you the truth, its the same situation that happened between Leading the Cavalry and Mountain o' Mounts, there's no 75 mount achievement, just the 50 and 100 one.

[Gouky]

another batch of we know, probably not gona heppen, in your dreams, we got your money dude.

these Q and A makes bliz look even worse.

[Gohzerlock]

Question : can you ect ect ect
Blizz : we'd like to implement ect ect ect and will do so sometime in the future

Reading this shit has become comical, why even have this?? They rarely give any answers, they usually pick stupid questions. Here is a thought.......

Question : when are you going to fix things like how broken basic features of the game are like bg ques
Blizz : we'd like to fix bg ques but the problem is WAY more tough to fix with our army of programmers and piles of money than you think, we'll fix it whenever we goddamn feel like it ty!

[mordras]

Here's a question: When are you going to de-link soul-crushing guild achievements with items that are so useful for raiding that they are pretty much mandatory? For instance, fishing 10,000 fish from pools in order to get the "good" feast or making an obscene amount of flasks in order to get cauldrons.

I love the idea of the other types of rewards being tied to achievements. Please keep these sort of items away from them in the future.

The biggest problem with these achievements is that they don't scale with your guild size. So a 25 man raiding guild is going to have a much easier time getting these than a 10 man raiding guild will. It's a tough problem to solve because if it did scale to the guild size you'd just dump a bunch of people from the guild, complete the achievement and have them rejoin after.

[Lemons]

I'm pretty disappointed with this Q&A. They didn't even address Mask for all Occasions...which is a completely ridiculous achievement that needs to be toned down or removed. They also didn't say anything about the bug with the explore Tol Barad achievement which has been bugged since cata release.

And MOST IMPORTANTLY...they didn't talk about the titles for the bg exalted achieves never getting their titles when they were removed from Battlemaster...3.3 promised me titles. Where are my titles!?

[Peacemoon]

Not really a great Q&A, didn't really learn anything I didn't already know unfortunately. I like that they want to make achievements account bound, even if it will take a long time.

A nice question to have asked was if they ever considered adding more world events, or making achievements out of current world events. Darkmoon Faire is a great candidate for achievements, and being that its once a month not once a year they could get even more creative.

Also no questions on statistics, I know not technically achievements but I would have loved to have had some insight on what they intend to do with them. (they said somewhere they have plans to revamp it)

Otherwise I love achievements. Nothing better then feeling like you have completed an expansion once you have for example, Loremaster of Outland and all the Outland reps at Exalted.

Some people play the game with millions of alts, but for people like me who just have one character who has walked through everything Azeroth has to offer, Achievements are great. It is another way to progress the game outside of PvE and PvP.

[ElGeFe]

Q: There are still no Achievements beyond “Collect 75 unique companion pets”. Can I expect a reward for 100 companion pets in the future? – Whitewnd (Korea)

A: Patch 4.1 has achievements for 100 and 125 companions. Those particular achievements don’t reward pets, but we’ll probably do another reward at some tier in the future, perhaps 150 or 200 pets.

... well this sucks... I was hoping they would surprise us at the last moment with 2 "free" pets... but oh well...

[Peacemoon]

A lot of people were hoping for a Dalmation pup for the 100 pet achievement

[Sting]

Fuck those stupid people who ask every time if they can spend their achievement points. ITS NEVER HAPPENING, STOP ASKING EVERY CHANCE YOU GET.

Exactly. So many of the highly rated questions were completely retarded that pretty much all the good questions got ignored.

[PreventerWind]

So basically this wall of text is read the PTR notes?

So I also read some of the comments... perhaps I am the only one that reads the PTR notes? People asking about Tol Barad explorer achievement... ya its being removed learn to read.

Blizzard's stance... We would like to do it, if it get's done it gets done. If it doesn't, it doesn't sorry.

[MysticalOS]

all the ones that were asked that smarter plaeyrs already know are addressedin 4.1 are such a waste. i even mentioned it several times in the thread those posts were useless, yet they got upvoted anyways. it's a shame the devs answered such useless questions, especially ones they already answered before, like the spending of points. There were tons of GOOD questions in there. Like the guy who asked about the endless mode feat of strength for plants vs zombie. that is a question i would have liked to see asked. unfortunately since it wasn't on the first 3 pages, it didn't get upvoted. for most part, everything in fist 1-3 pages was highly rated even if it was a completely stupid question, and some really good later ones got completely missed. Devs need a smarter way to do it then that. The average person is simply not going to browse 26 pages and up/down vote every one. so the questions on first pages are pretty much what you get. Even if they were asked by complete idiots

[Becvar]

Here's a question: When are you going to de-link soul-crushing guild achievements with items that are so useful for raiding that they are pretty much mandatory? For instance, fishing 10,000 fish from pools in order to get the "good" feast or making an obscene amount of flasks in order to get cauldrons.

I love the idea of the other types of rewards being tied to achievements. Please keep these sort of items away from them in the future.

Any good raid guild will require you to have food and flasks just as part of being prepared. The "good feast" is no better than the Fortune Cookies or any other 90 stat food. The cauldrons are no better than flasks, they just allow each individual to spend/farm less. It's hardly a game breaker if you don't have them.

[Jantasir]

Question : can you ect ect ect
Blizz : we'd like to implement ect ect ect and will do so sometime in the future

Reading this shit has become comical, why even have this?? They rarely give any answers, they usually pick stupid questions. Here is a thought.......

Question : when are you going to fix things like how broken basic features of the game are like bg ques
Blizz : we'd like to fix bg ques but the problem is WAY more tough to fix with our army of programmers and piles of money than you think, we'll fix it whenever we goddamn feel like it ty!

why do people constantly bring up money.. when money can start programming computers i'll eat my hat.

[Snes]

I really do salute any and all people who actually have the justicar title, they actually did AFKed enough BG's to last a lifetime and grinded those reps to Exalted FFS.

Fixed. :P
As for the Q&A's, "...is something we'd like to do, but..." is where I stop reading and save myself the disappointment.