There have been a couple of additions to World of Warcraft that drastically changed the way we playe the game or how we experience the game world. In this series I’ll take a look on some major features that have made the game as a whole worse. Today we’ll start with a very popular gameplay feature: The ingame achievements.
“Blasphemy!” you say. “Achievements add so much to the game!” you say. Achievements are extremely popular and even I often go the extra mile for an achievement, so how can I complain? Most people like them and usually people who don’t like achievements are told to just ignore and not do them. Ignoring achievements is an option and a very good one. I applaud people who have the willpower to completely ignore them and just play and enjoy the game as if they didn’t exist in the first place. But I believe that most people who do achievements don’t really like to do them, but don’t realize it. Even I “like” getting an achievement, but I still think they’re a bad thing. I try to explain why 🙂

Achievements were unleashed upon the unsuspecting mass of WoW players with the Wrath of the Lich King pre-patch 3.0.2 on October 15th of 2008 (14th if you played in the US). It was a huge new feature and followed the very popular achievement system introduced by Microsoft for the XBox360 in 2005. Many people accused Blizzard of just copying the original and they’re pretty much correct, as there’s not much to hide about the fact that the WoW achievement system is more or less identical to the XBox counterpart.
At first I thought achievements were great. Depending on your progress in the game prior to patch 3.0.2 you started out with a smaller or larger amount of already completed achievements.