Wednesday, September 24, 2008

My new fear of Achievements

When I first heard of Achievements in WoW, I was somewhat excited.

I figured they'd give some nice fun little things to do when you're not otherwise occupied (for instance, you've already dinged 20k gold, gotten all the BG gear in the game, hit exalted with every solo-able BC faction and most of the instance rep ones too).

And some of the achievements are like that.

But now Brewfest.

And I'm already seeing people writing up guides for preparing for achievements and how you can save brewfest beers in your mailbox and all these things you simply HAVE to do right now.

My actual first taste of this was the other day when I glanced over WoW Head's achievements page.

And I saw some about the 2008 Bejing Olympics games.

Calendar-based event, comes and goes, and now your toon has a permanent record of the fact that you didn't participate.

Brewfest is the same way. You've got two weeks. Get your achievements done, or look at that blank part of the screen until next year.

These "time bound" achievements will either drive me insanely addicted and obsessed, or they will totally turn me off to achievements in the first place.

Brewfest comes out. Everybody's dropping everything to go do massive amounts of brewfest action.

My big activity right now is trying to get my Hordie to 70 before LK comes out. And since they wont grandfather me into the Recruit-a-friend program (created the new account a few weeks too early), its going to take quite a bit of time and energy to make that happen.

I have zero interest in doing Brewfest stuff, because that'll distract me from my primary goal.

So I'll likely remain with those Brewfest achievements undone, at least until next year, perhaps forever.

The feeling of unachievable achievements will pretty much detach me from the entire concept. Nice going.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The whole thing with achievements though, is that they are optional. They are little things that you can chose to do or not do, depending on whether you are interested in them or not.

For example, I am really excited about getting achievements like killing the racial leaders from the opposite faction, or the ones that involve having all the continents discovered. However, I could care less about finishing a battleground in 6 minutes or less.

So I'm going to go try to get my whole map discovered, and I'm not going to try to finish super fast AVs.

If Brewfest doesn't conjure up enough interest to you to spend time to do it, then why would you care if you have the achievements?

You can always go back next year and get them.