Harder Knocks

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Let’s face it: School of Hard Knocks is terrible achievement.  I just got it on my fourth character in three years and I had to go walk around outside for an hour just to calm down from how angry and frustrated it made me.  I didn’t enjoy doing it.  I don’t feel a sense of accomplishment in getting it done.  The only satisfaction that comes from it is the fact that I am just a little closer to getting free super-fast flying.

To those who say “I got SoHK really easily!”: that’s great.  I’m happy for you.  Really, I am.  I’m glad you had a good experience.  I didn’t.  Neither did a whole heck of a lot of other people.  We don’t have your advantages or your luck and the game should not punish us for it by making us waste hour after hour doing something that makes us miserable to get one of the major meta achievements.

To those who say: “Achievements are optional, so don’t complain”: it’s true, achievements are optional.  That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be well-designed and fun.  An achievement as badly designed as this one has no business being in the game, even if it’s optional.  No one says you have to go into the restaurant on the corner, but if you did and they put broken glass in your hamburger you’d be pretty annoyed about it, wouldn’t you?

To those who say: “Achievements are supposed to be hard”: wrong.  Achievements are not meant to be hard.  Achievements are meant to be fun.  A lot of fun can come from overcoming a challenge, but the degree of the challenge has to be reasonable. Beating a dungeon or raid boss is a fun challenge because those encounters are tuned to make sure that, with good gear, skillful play, and coordination, appropriate-level characters can get it done. The rewards come from making an effort and solving a problem.  SoHK is a mess of griefing, aggravation, and dumb luck.  The rewards come not from your efforts and skill but from being in the right place at the right time with cooperative enemies.

Other achievements that were poorly thought out, unreasonably hard, or just not fun have been changed already.  There’s no reason for School of Hard Knocks to still be in the game in its current form.  None.

AFR #179 – Never getting out of here

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Yeah, that’s me– I’m the guy who can’t move on to the next zone because I can’t bear to drop the gray quests from my quest log.

And don’t worry, the AFR gang will be getting to Northrend soon enough (even if they have to leave Alaxia behind).

AFR #164 – Casual casualties

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All right, listen up, you tiny but vocal minority who have been whining about how Raid Finder sucks because it lets people who aren’t as hardcore as you experience raid content and that’s not fair because it takes away from your special snowflakeness and they don’t deserve it and they’re not playing the real game and blah blah blah-de-frikin’-blah.

Get over yourselves.  Raiding is not a reward you get for being extra super-duper leet with a cherry on top.  Raiding is part of the game and if people who never had the opportunity to raid before are now getting the chance to raid, that’s a good thing.  Fun is not some limited commodity.  If more people are having fun, that doesn’t make the fun you have in your regular/heroic/achievement/world-first runs any less real.

And don’t try to play the more-hardcore-than-thou card.  You will lose.  I don’t care about your world-first heroic run with achievements.  Somewhere out there someone is leveling from 1 to 85 without training any spells after level 5, without picking a spec or assigning any talent points, leaving exactly one area undiscovered in every zone, only doing quests that have a palindrome in the title and only killing mobs whose names can be typed using the top row of a Dvorak keyboard.  Why?  Because she can.  And you will never be that hardcore, never.

AFR #158 – The rarest spawn of all

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Those of you who’ve been doing Turkey Lurkey know what I’m talking about.  Human, night elf, and blood elf rogues?  No problem.  Gnome, undead, and orc rogues?  Not bad.  But dwarf and troll rogues?  Good luck!  They might as well be mythical creatures.

To all you rogues out there who gamely stood around waiting to be covered in turkey feathers, and to all you players who rolled up level-1 rogues and hung out by the feasting tables, we /salute you.

AFR #111 – PvPeace

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* Some restrictions apply.  Good will not valid in battlegrounds, arenas, capital cities, or if you are a lowbie-griefing douchebag.

 

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate, and happy hunting for your Let It Snow achievements!