f13.net

So as one event ends another begins.  A few things to note:

1) The "Daily Chores" achievement text is wrong.  It was bugged on test so they changed it from 1 a day for 5 days to "any 5 dailies."  You can get this in a single day now so long as you have your orphan out when you turn in all 5.  Just combine it with the Argent Tournament/ Hodir grind you're already doing.

2) The PvP achievement sucks ass.  You my be the one that clicks the flags in all instances, it's not an aura effect.  This has the twin problem of fucking all battlegrounds as tons of people who only want their violet protodrake flood them without a clue as how to do it successfully, and pissing them off because if you really want to be a dick about it you can click first even after you've got the achievement.   WSG is currently fucked on my BG as both sides camp the flag room waiting for the 1-2 people who just want to run a BG stupidly throw themselves into the meat grinder.  It also means that if you thought people weren't defending the flag in AB before, you ain't seen nothing yet.   

The PvP achievement is the most ass-sucking achievement in any of the holidays ever. It may break my will to play, and I've been happily achievement-whoring along for the last month. Curious I went into a WG this morning, and it was two rooms of completely-turtled defenses waiting for the other group to get tired and give up. About one or two players on each side venturing out with orphans every five minutes or so to see if the other guys were willing to allow a flag capture and getting ass-raped in five seconds. With Eye of the Storm, JESUS: every single player in the middle frantically trying to click the flag, then the person getting being nuked into porridge in a nanosecond. So so so so bad. I wouldn't mind something that took you into a BG, but christ on a cracker, these are awful.

The BG achievement has me pretty pissed, and I've been religiously working on my violet protodrake since Winter's Veil.  Here's hoping that Blizzard removes it from the requirements.

I figured that WSG and EotS would be damn near impossible.  AB I can eventually do due to paladin hax (crusader aura.)  The AV achievement... eh... doable?  Eventually.

I'm glad they fixed the 5 days in a row nonsense.  Not that I couldn't do it, but I imagine it's a problem for some players.

The AV achievement strikes me as doable. AB I already did, that's easy enough. (Just be first out of the gate to the farm/stables).

WG and EoTS? Fuck a bunch of goats. Going to be eye-bleedingly horrible to try and do, even with premades that know their shit.

WSG was easiest, really.  Since you do have everyone turtling and some poor sot does try to capture the flag, just hang in the FR and don't be one of the guys trying to kill.  Stand on top of the sacrificial lamb and furiously right click.  You'll eventually snipe the flag for a return.

EotS will be a clusterfuck of epic proportions. I haven't even bothered trying yet.

I did 2 dailies with my orphan out last night and the achievement was stuck at 0/5. Did they fix it today or something? The wording was exactly the same as the regular 'do a daily 5 in a row' quest when I checked it last night.

I managed to bang out the BG achievements last night (and we actually won most of the games) so at least I don't have that hanging over my head.

Every time Blizzard puts out a new holiday with even more grind/random BS/cockstab than the last I become ever more grateful that my dislike of the achievement system and the holidays in general has caused me to ignore them.  Blizzard designers can take that Violet Protodrake and shove it where the sun don't shine.

I feel bad for the players that want one but honestly if you've played WoW since BC or Pre-BC you had to know this was coming.  The whinning and horror stories of guild members and forum posters that spawn as each new holiday arrives definitely fuels my desire to continue ignoring this crap in a very Schadenfreude sort of way.  Realizing this makes me think I might be the kind of person who might actually enjoy EvE or Darkfail, which is really quite scary.   :ye_gods:

I think they fixed some of the bugs--the Hearthstone achievement wasn't recording properly either until a hotfix early this morning.

Remember, at our core, MMO players are WHINY. It isn't really as bad as we make it sound for the most part. For all the QQ about Noblegarden, I knocked the entire meta out in about 4 hours in one night. That's not really a lot of time to spend on something by MMO standards.

I was primed to cry up a storm about the BG achievement for Children's Week, and again I managed to knock that part out in a single evening - heck the only BG I had to do more than once to get it done was WSG, and we won the extra games so I got a bunch of honor and marks to turn in for more honor, so it is too hard for me to complain about that much. I just wish there was something in Strand for it, that's my favorite BG.

You beat the rush is all, its going to suck complete cock for the next 2-3 days.

Tip: speed enchant your boots for the race up the AV towers.

Alternatively, be a paladin.   :awesome_for_real:

Learn2dash

[urhttp://www.wowhead.com/?item=2820]Nifty Stopwatch[/url]

Learn to paste urls!   :why_so_serious:

Or a DK

I only managed to do the AV one so far. WSG was fucking awful, the morons who were there for the achievement couldn't even manage to LET THE HORDE PICK UP THE FUCKING FLAG BEFORE KILLING THEM. I really want the title because it cracks me up, but I doubt I will get the PvP achievement at this point. :(

It'll cool down in a few days.


Or just do it at like 8am server time if you are REALLY desperate.

Worst case scenario we can probably just do a 10 person premade, all sit in the flag room, etc.

EoTS is the worst, easily.

When I did it yesterday, WSG was much harder, but I imagine the EOTS flag is going to get zergier. It helps to be a class that can live through people chasing it pretty well.

WSG will just happen on it's own eventually really.


EoTS, I eagerly await reports of entire teams going to the middle to cap the flag, then finding out you need to capture a tower to score.

I had to run EotS twice precisely for that reason; the other team had all of their guys camping the middle and we couldn't touch the flag, so we just four-cornered and won like 108-3000.  I have no idea what the Alliance team was thinking, they just held the flag and the centre of the map for the entire frickin' game.

Already happened in a few I've been in--100% both teams in the middle, then someone starts screaming for someone else to go cap a tower.

Yeah I tried right after posting this morning and had the same thing.  Me and 2 other DPS guys trying to hold one node as the Horde swarmed us - while having the flag and sitting on it.  The rest of the team was sitting in the middle asking why the flag wasn't respawning.  :awesome_for_real:

My one EoTS, we just held one tower and the middle. We had like a dozen flag caps that game. We lost, but not really.  :heart:


-edit- Almost forgot, if you have AE Knockback on your spec, now is the time to play EotS! Tossing 9 Horde into the abyss?  :drill:

So I got it, and felt deep self-loathing and bitter dislike for Blizzard of a kind I have not felt in WoW for a long time. Way to go: in the name of fun, they stick something in the game that makes the experience loathsome for virtually everyone trying it, and justify it by saying it's only for a week. It is a perfect example of negative incentivizing, of prodding players to do something bad and destructive to a game mechanic. WSG groups where there are achievement-oriented people just have two groups that sit there and don't move for 10 minutes. Then if you're *lucky*, there are enough players on both sides who understand game theory (the economics kind) and start to play Prisoner's Dilemma with the optimal strategy. Meaning, you send over one sacrificial victim, he dies. Then they send over one, he dies. Continue until everyone is achieved. If you're unlucky, which is most of the time, one group tries to just rapidfire get off all its achievers, so they turtle and turtle and turtle while the other guys continue to come over. Eventually the other side says, "Fuck you, douchbags" and turtles up, back to sitting on your asses waiting for the heat death of the universe to finish. And this is completely foreseeable--the moment I saw that part of the achievement, I could see what would happen.

EoTS is a little more under your control, e.g., if you have a decent group, you form a gauntlet around the flag, hold one base, and just rotate the achievers through one at a time while letting the other side splatter themselves against the gauntlet in their desperation to get the flag. Then you abandon the flag and take four bases. Maybe the other guys get a flag or two off, fine, who cares. But WSG even if you're in a premade, it's damn hard to smack a full-team turtle down--it takes both sides agreeing to actually play the game or contriving to finish the achievement.

AV is just a matter of being there at the first, sprinting out the gate, mounting first, and capping a tower. Not too hard to pull off. AB doesn't require anything other than normal AB play (thank god).

But still: really, fuck Blizzard. This is easily the most annoyed I've been with them in a long time.

I keep running into strange little peace pacts in WSG and AB. It's kinda funny.


More then a few games I've been able to walk to the Horde flag room, do a few emotes indicating we all want the orphan achievement. Then I pickup and drop the flag 10 times, while a horde representative goes to our flag room and does the same.


Once everyone has their achievement, we go back to the normal hell that is WSG where instead of both sides turtling their own flags, we instead turtle the enemies flag.  :awesome_for_real:

 :pedobear:

Since there's only like, four towers to cap in AV, and forty players trying to tag them, this has led to some of the fastest matches I've ever seen, as people don't dick around on the bridge or waste time with whatever they were doing normally.  Towers are capped as soon as it's possible to reach them.  Nobody retakes them.  Basically, everyone runs the path to the general, waits for a minute or two there for the towers to flip, and then downs the general in about ten seconds.  Game over.  If AV wasn't giving such crappy honor these days, I'd be running this all day.

People still retake them in my BG. Leads to hilarious shifts in population as people make the mad dash for the cap.

It's that stupid PvE Troll Boss in the middle of AV all over again!

I've lost two games so far 2000-0 this way. Somehow I managed to get the whole achievement just today though, and I usually almost never cap bases or recover flags (squishy mage lets other people wear the INTERRUPT ME sign).

Battlegrounds utterly unplayable. Fuck these achievement whores and their precious "I'm poopsock enough to care about this but not actually good enough at anything to get it except by drinking every beer for a year and fagging up battlegrounds this week and god knows what else!" drake.

They removed the Beer Drinking requirement.

It's hilarious that you can recolour a mount and legions of people will grind for a year to get it.

So far my experience is that these changes have actually made AV more playable. All other BGs are sucking hard.

How do you recolor a mount?

To be fair, the achievements seem to be grinds for four hours over one week at semi-random intervals over an entire year.

I got this done last night, the worst parts were WSG (two matches) AV (two matches) and praying for a UP PUG (I hate PUGs.  The guild DK that came along to DPS managed to do more dps and damage than the entire rest of the group together.  Yay guildies.)  The rest was fairly trivial

Noblegarden was far far worse, in my opinion.

Blizzard do that for you. You just have to do the in-game grind. Both parties win! :wink:

He means a palette swap.  There's other color protodrakes out there, so in his estimation you're insane if you do all these over the year for a mount.

Not that I'm not insane, but I do it for the titles and the mount.   It really is less of a headache than it appears, except for the pvp achievements. Those prove painful on some battlegroups.

It also is rumored to be uber-leet speed like the phoenix or the gladiator netherdrakes!

What did we learn from the xbox 360? People are easily addicted to doing something if it gives a little ding at the end. The drake is a much bigger carrot than "nothing!" that people are willing to go nuts for with achievement systems.

Hell, I don't even bother with the seasonal achievements, and I still find it nice to have a little golden bar pop up randomly telling me I did something.

Got the EotS one on my second attempt. Mind you, that was in frost presence with bone armour, icebound fortitude, and anti-magic shell all up at the same time + imp. unholy presence, so...yeah.

(Also undead so had WotF if needed as well)  :awesome_for_real:

The Army needs to invent a system of ringing bells and flashing lights. It'd solve their recruitment issues immediately.

I can see it now. Millions pouring through the bases collecting an entirely new spin on "kill ten rats".

The outrage that only one class gets flying mounts would be epic, though.

Called ranks and medals, they are.

The violet proto-drake isn't just a recolor, it is a 310% speed mount I believe. Those are pretty hard to get for anyone not in a cutting edge raiding guild or really, really good at arena.

Got all the pvp achievements done in one night. While I'm sure the first day was a huge cockblock there were only a few people per bg with orphans out so its clearly going to get less obnoxious as time passes.

Get ready for the world to be filled with them come november then.

No skin off my back, I just want to go faster, I don't care if everyone else can too!

Pfft, flying mounts!

Like all achievements, I'll be doing the easy ones and skipping anything that looks remotely painful.  Finished out the Valentine's Day one and I think that's the last one do that for.  As an aside, people asking me to respec to help them complete an achievement can just pick between my main and off.  I'm not redoing my action bars for one second off my fucking earth shock.

Of course, skipping mains and lapses in my subscription have made these holiday achievements a moot point anyways.

My battlegroup was being slaughtered by organized leet twink guilds all night in WSG. Yet, when one blood elf paladin ran in and grabbed the flag, he stopped, saw I had the orphan out, and dropped the damn flag right in front of me.

I was amazed! In gratitude I ran over to his side and using emotes clarified my intent to grab and drop the flag a gajillion times till everyone in his group had the Frenzied Defender award.

I didn't have that much trouble doing any of them in the end, but I hated every second of the WSG one because it created a completely awful experience for everyone. The people who liked BG PvP hated what happened, the people who liked achievements hated what happened. It took about ten minutes of sitting there for the Alliance and Horde players to develop an understanding: you send one person down, we kill him, then one of us will go down, repeat until everyone's done, then we'll actually play. Every once in a while, it would interrupt because a PvPer would get bored and kill someone before they took the flag or because one or the other team would try to get a "two-fer", e.g., not reciprocate with a sacrificial lamb.

Yay, I'm a Matron!

But yeah, the BG achievements I was very vocal about. I was the worst of the bunch, to be fair - I was a speed clicker, and I would /afk out of the BG as soon as I got them, wait 15 minutes, then go about getting the next one.

WSG was pretty hilarious, to be fair - 9 horde with their orphans out in the flag room, and one guy running out midfield by himself. I just managed to click the fastest, so then I AFKed out of that one. Eye took me a couple tries, until I got some backup from some other players on the team to actually capture it. AV was pretty hilarious - I followed a Paladin with Crusader Aura up to the first tower, then he was busy getting shot by the archers, so I clicked the tower. AB was also basically just running ahead with a Paladin behind me. No achievement took more than a few minutes, with the exception of eye.

However!

On the flipside of the coin, I needed to do a legitimate Warsong Gulch later, and it was a pain in the ass. Thankfully, only a few people had their orphans out, so I actually did manage to win it.

Oh! Pro tip, by the way. If you're going for the 25 Tabards achievement, you can buy the PVP tabards, and with the new '2 hour resell' system they have in place, you still totally get credit for them without wasting any marks, if you then immediately turn around and sell them back.

For every story like that, I'll give you 10 where some asshole without an orphan races me to a node in AB, and caps the flag an instant before I can  with my orphan trailing behind me.  And then gloats about it.

I really hate some of the people who play WoW.

As an interesting side note:  Did you know that using a Dark Iron Boot Flask actually Changes your characters gender!?

Appearently it does not simply change your appearance, but completely changes your gender flag.

I found this out when I went for the Iron Council achieve of downing them while under the effect of the flask.  My character is a Matron (female Tauren Druid), and when i pop the Flask, I lose my Matron Title, and gain a Patron Title for the duration of the effect!

bizzare.

A similar thing happens if you're a male, and you fly into that village where you are transformed into a blue valkyn (or whatever the hell they are.)

If you pop the blood elf orb from Magister's Terrace after the boot flask you turn into a fancy lad.

It took me about four goddamn hours in EotS to get a flag capture; the middle of the battlefield was a seething pile of retards all grabbing at the flag, so it took that long just to lay hands on the thing.  Once I had it, the capture was easy.  Everything else was smooth sailing, no problems.  That being said, WG and AV were both easy solely because the players were blatantly defying the spirit of the battlegrounds and cooperating with the opposing team to share the achievements.  I plopped down in a tower in AV and just kept recapturing it for the Horde to get the achievements; the flag room was packed within minutes by a whole platoon of orcs /hugging me.  It was a little disturbing.

I'd known all year that this achievement was going to suck, bad.  I'd been dreading this week, and am just glad that the shitty part is behind me, leaving just smooth sailing to my spiffy dragon thing.

The scary thing is that I've won the stranglethorn fishing contest, and went through the 200 arena fights for the murloc pet.  I'm perfectly willing to go through hellish grindfests for prizes, and when even I'm like, 'Holy fuck, this is a terrible idea.' you know that Blizzard screwed up, badly.

Got my title tonight after pugging normal-UP. Yes, the boring pve run was the only thing holding me back.  :grin:

Even on normal the Skadi gauntlet has a tendency to suck in PUGs so I can't really blame you.

I got in a pug for heroic UP with a couple of guys who called everyone else "jackass" or "jew."

Have I mentioned how much I hate some of the people who play WoW?

Achievement done, time for a break. 

This the one that broke me. I don't care about the drake anymore, I'm just not going to play the game this way. I really really hate putting pvp into these achievements, so I just give up on this one. It's not fun.

I managed to get the pvp stuff done right away, on the very first day the achievements were out. WSG was surprisingly painless, and in EOTS... well, I play an elemental shaman, so I just removed the entire horde group from the flag area with a thunderstorm, grabbed the flag and ghost wolfed to a tower. :drill:

Still, playing BGs for the next few days was significantly worse... I probably should've taken a screenshot of 12 alliance zerging the center area and me+two others trying to fight off the horde from our last node. Then we died, the node turned, and the zergers finally realized that you kinda need a tower to cap the flag... kek.


-- Z.

Funny, this is the first world event achievement that *hasn't* been too onerous to bother with for me. Maybe it's because PvP is the only part of the game I consistently enjoy, but getting rewarded for running around Outland (pretty!) and then doing some BGs struck me as pretty cool, unlike collecting a million fricking eggs/candies/elders/whatever. Different strokes, I guess.

Most of the other achievements have been about collecting silly trinkets or clothes and exploration. I like all that stuff because I'm an explorer/achiever type. What's I'm not is a killer type, but I could have dealt with these pvp achievements if it wasn't for every BG. I've boycotted WSG for the last 2 years. I will not run it ever again.

So yeah, you're right about different strokes, but I don't care about mounts at all so this doesn't really bother me much.

The experiences related in this thread with regard to the BGs are completely different from mine.  I waited a couple days, then did it.  In the non-AV BGs, there were consistently only 1-2 people on my side with their orphans out whether I was playing during prime or off-peak hours.  I got AV and AB in one attempt, I think two EOTS games, and three for WSG.

For all of you people talking about how absolutely HORRIFIC EOTS and WSG were, were you trying to do the achievement on day one or what?

For some, the idea of setting foot in another BG is enough to make them say fuck it.

I tried for it yesterday and EotS was beyond horrific.  On my server's battlegroup, Horde in the 70-79 range in EotS consistently had at least a 2-1 advantage in numbers and usually had at least one group of 79 twinks.  It almost always took around a half hour just for the BG to start and most of the time the Alliance side would have between 5-7 people.  I had to try 24 times before I finally got that stupid flag.  That was the single worst experience I've had in WoW.

I do lots of battlegrounds, I just don't care to pick up eggs and all that other dumb shit for a year. So I ran my orphan around, finished all the quests in an hour, and got my turtle.

I find it amusing that the people talking about this as easy were pvpers to begin with.

Btw, before you start I don't think pve grouping should be an achievement either. I think world events should be solo crap.

I finished all my quests in an hour. I didn't do any achievements. By and large I ignore WoW holidays, but a new pet for doing a few simple quests is a good deal.

I haven't really done pvp in ages, and found the battleground parts mildly annoying, but nothing too horribly bad.  Even on a battlegroup where I never saw anyone try to help out with the pvp achievements at all.  People on my side were pretty much after the same thing or pissed off at the people with orphans focusing on the task they need to accomplish, and the enemy tended to be doing their damndest to prevent us from getting the achievements even at the cost of victory.  A couple times in Eye of the Storm some hordie would grab the flag and run off with it, just hanging onto it even when they had 2/3 bases and not capping it, just so nobody has a chance to capture it at all.

My only real complaint about the battleground achievements is that they forced people to focus on things that were not conducive to victory.  If they'd simply been 'win one of each battleground with your orphan out' I would have been fine with them.

In that sense, the AB and AV ones weren't that bad... capping towers and nodes is a GOOD thing, and after someone caps one and gets the achievement, they might as well stick around and guard it until it turns.

But yeah, the WSG one was obnoxious (an achievement to reward flag turtling? srsly?) and the EOTS one was just a lemming fest...


-- Z.

Yes, I think everyone would have been fine with that too.

It's a form of griefing by developer to have a quest that requires people to piss everyone else off and work at cross purposes to winning the battleground in order to complete the achievement.

Whoever is making the decisions with regard to the recent holidays and Argent Tourney is/are highly incompetent.

I think its definitely a fair point that this really blows in the non-80 BGs. I'm not totally sure whether the achievements themselves are to blame or if its mostly just that the non-80 battlegrounds are shit to start with, but its something I hadn't thought of until now anyway.

Sub Cap BG's are just shit, achievements or not. Between populations, twinks and wait times, just a heaping pile.

If things have stayed the same, the 70-79's should be terrific. We used to accrue honor to the cap in the old 60-69's, way faster and a far more balanced experience than being a fresh 70 in shit gear.

That was significantly motivated by the availability of welfare weapons at 70. I haven't checked out the 70-79 brackets on my shaman yet, but I'm guessing the changes to honour rewards have made grinding the lower brackets less appealing.

The populations are very uneven at any given time for the sub cap BG's now. Not uncommon to spend half the game outnumbered 2:1.

With the new honor rewards they added in 3.1, it's actually worth doing for a bit at least. And with the crafted lvl 78 resilience gear, you don't have to 'twink' really hardcore to not suck.

Ditto.  The crafted 78 gear is really nice for the most part considering that you used to walk into BG's with essentially either questing greens or raid gear and find out really quickly how effective you were.

Yeah, they buffed those level 78 blues with set bonuses in the last patch, too. I just replaced the last piece of mine not that long ago.