A Sense of Achievement

Blizzard has just announced another feature for Wrath of the Litch King, Achievements. This is, in essence, a statistics and records page that rewards you based on meeting certain objectives. To begin with there will be around 500 different achievements that fit into one of three types and about eight categories. Each achievement will yield you points and in same cases a title, tabard or vanity pet.


The three types are:
Simple – a one off task
Progressive – a staged achievement that has rewards at 5,10,25,50 etc
Meta – may require you complete a set of achievements

The categories include:
PvP – There could be a lot of variety here from winning specific numbers of matches in a row to loosing duels to Rogues
Dungeon and Raid – Rewarded for downing instance/raid bosses
Professions – Based on reaching each new tier of a profession, perhaps also the ownership of patterns I can see it know “Squiggle – Supreme Shirt Maker”
Quests - Completing a set number of quests and hopefully also completing significant quest chains
Events – Achievements relating to events such as All Hallows
World exploration – How much of the world have you seen?
Reputation – Based on your faction reputations
General – The fun and silly ones

There will also be a Feats of Strength section that shows old world achievements such as old PvP ranks and acquisition of rare mounts. This will yield no points and as with all the achievements will be rewarded retroactively.

Achievements looks like an solid and highly entertaining addition to the game. Being able to see what percentage of the map you have explored, how many arena matches you have won in a row or which instances bosses you haven’t downed yet is probably just the tip of the iceberg. There are all sorts of statistics, relevant and otherwise that Blizzard could track and it would be interesting to know. Then we could do things like have guild competitions on who can kill the most rats/blood elves/etc or all roll a new toon and see who can explore the most of the world in 10 minutes. If they include PvP kills by race I can already see the gnome hunting score boards now. The really fun ones like giving out ten hugs will be the best; hopefully they have some truly absurd tasks there like taunting opposing faction leaders or killing sheep.

I do have a couple of concerns, mainly what they are going to do to clearly differentiates achievements from quests and what the points will be used for. These will probably be answered in beta testing so we will have to wait and see.