Forget Knowing The Fights, Link Your Achieve Plz!

Wolfshead at one point discussed his hatred for the WoW Achievement System. At the time it gave me some things to think about, but I had not completely formed a solid opinion of it…

Until today.

Up till just a few hours ago I was truly indifferent to the WoW achievement system. I didn’t loathe it or even like it, at times it seemed more annoying as it often took the form of in-game spam and useless pop-ups. Then the achievement system started being used by players as evidence of skill, much like this cult following of relying heavily on a player’s gearscore to determine their adequacy for raids. I cannot express my frustration and strong dislike of the WoW community using these “tools” to judge whether a player is worthy of a raid spot or even a simple group.

The problem is simply the lack of socialization. Forget your gearscore and the achievements you do or do not have, if you demonstrated that you were a good player in a group and can perform well in your role and listen to instructions, more than likely you made friends or at least made a reputation to get you future invites. Otherwise, as a stranger, people have nothing to go by anything but your gearscore and achievement. Sadly, people seem to not understand that even with all the gear and achievement “checking” that nowadays, you still have a very high chance of getting a very bad player on your hands.

It isn’t news that with WoTLK that WoW has been exponentially easier in order to appease a wider demographic, so getting all the badge gear is really not that much of an achievement. And consider this, what if you go into a raid with 9 other people and its a pretty well geared group with all very skilled players except for 1 person who not only has a good gearscore but performs badly and doesn’t do good dps/tanking/healing. Basically, because of the 9 other players pulling the slack of that 1 lacking player, he/she will essentially be “run through” the raid and get the achievement. So I ask people that rely so heavily on achievement links:

Does having a certain achievement truly demonstrate the player’s ability to perform in a certain raid?

Of course it doesn’t. Like I said, Joe the Paladin over there could have just been doing 2k dps the entire raid but no one ever bothered to replace him because the other players were performing so well it was barely affecting the raid as a whole. Bad players are run through raids all the time, so I implore future raid leaders to please consider this factor along with this next question:

Does not having an achievement truly demonstrate the player’s ability to perform in a certain raid?

Again, no. Let’s take myself for example. I’m geared enough to do the Icecrown Citadel dungeons but I am in a guild with a bunch of a friends and not a serious raiding guild, thus, I have to resort to pugging to get involved in any raiding action. Of course the problem is that a pug is a pug and therefore failure rates in raid dungeons are sky-high and as a result almost all my raid groups did not possess the dps to kill Saurfang, the last boss of ICC (well at least he was before the release of the newest boss additions). This results in me having an incomplete Icecrown Citadel 10-Man Achievement and because I’m one boss short I’m quickly dismissed when I offer to heal. What’s sort of funny and quite sad is that these groups will spend hours in the chat channels looking for a well-geared healer (don’t forget with the full achievement!) when they could have had a healer who not only was well-geared but knew all the fights.

Like I said, it all goes back to WoW players turning anti-social. Groups and raids these days have become all strictly business, rarely if ever do people bother to form friendships or get to know other players. If we did, however, players wouldn’t have to resort to ridiculously inaccurate sources such as gearscores and achievement links to make an overall judgement on your playing abilities. Is it just me or has these two constant requirements act as sort of in-game resume to whom we present the raid leaders who are essentially the “bosses”? When did playing a game that is suppose to be fun and relaxing become a job in disguise in which we must work hard in-game to qualify for experiencing content in a game that we pay $15 a month for?

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