There really isn’t some big hint in this post.  But you never know where you’re going to learn some little something.  And lately I’ve really changed my mind about achievements and it leads to this post in an interesting way.

I’m a big Terry Pratchett fan.  The Discworld stuff is hilarious.  Pratchett’s influence on my writing is probably less than obscure for any of you who have read much of his work.  If you haven’t read Pratchett I highly recommend the guy.  You’ll laugh yourself silly (considering you ever get out of the game long enough to read any more).

Well, in his book “The Truth,” his hero (anithero?) becomes the first newspaper man in Ankh-Morpork, the big metropolis of Discworld.  One bit of sage advice he gets from the Patrician is to be careful what you report.  “People don’t want news,” he says “what they really want is olds.”  The point is that you need to report on things people already know about because really NEW things freak people out.

What people want more than anything is recognition for accomplishment.  Since most people never really accomplish anything noteworthy sometimes you have to give them a way to recognize themselves.  Achievements do both of these things.  People like to see their name in print, and stuff like titles works just fine for that.  But for those who are competition oriented, they might very well find a bit of extra motivation by comparing their achievements to others.

So this is a little bit of olds.  Every time we do news people freak out, so hang in there with me for some good olds.  The key to doing olds is to put a twist on them so they look like news.  Therefore we arrive at the premise.  It may be time to rethink how you feel about achievements because they really are olds, and you like them more than news even if you don’t know it yet.

I haven’t paid a lot of attention to achievements overall on my druid and there is a really good reason why.  I follow my own advice (most of the time unless I’m having serious thinking issues like last week as some of you know) and Mr. Hotstotrot was speed-leveled to 12, then dungeon power-leveled on a RaF account to 62 or so.  Then it was questing in a group of 3 all the way from there to 80.

So I hit 80 with like 50 achievement points.  It’s really bad.  My true original main was a night elf hunter and that one would have probably something like 10,000 points if they had existed in BC.  But since my main was new (my metaphor is beginning to mix I know) it was frustrating to even look at the achievement panel.

Combine that with the fact that my first toon to 80, a priest had done almost all of the heroic stuff, and cooking, fishing, and so many other achievements that it merely added to the frustration.  Why bother, right?  I began to feel like another pop phrase you see from time to time: “I was put on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things – right now I’m so far behind I’ll never be allowed to die.”

But I changed my mind over the last couple of days because of two dungeon runs.  We’ve been hearing that people are pretty frustrated with the state of raiding in WoW compared to the original.  40 man raids on KT were absolutely BRUTAL at level 60 in T1.5  or T2 gear.  And many guilds went after the guy for months on end before they got him down.  After a kill, it might be just as long again because there just wasn’t enough gear to go around to make things all that much easier.

Compare that with Naxx now.  Hotstotrot went from quest greens to full T7.5 in about 3-4 weeks.  In just over a month he is now 9 of 17 best in slot, and one trinket away from the “epic” achievement.  And everything that isn’t best in slot is like #2 or #3 on the list.   Getting full T3 would have taken much longer than that even for alts in whatever power guilds were out there in pre-BC.

But I now feel that achievements have added a level of suspense you just can’t get after you have things on farm status.  And I have two good examples to back it up.  Achievements have been called a cheap way to spice up a game going stale, but might they instead be a brilliant way to make “olds” into “news?”  Well that’s right up my alley.

So there I was – in an impromptu Naxx 10 man late late Tuesday night.  We decided to do the timed run on the spider wing and we did it with 3 minutes to spare and not one death along the way.  Kinda sweet, “undying anyone?”  We laughed at first, but when “the safety dance” achievement triggered and not too long later as we were standing at the dead bodies of the Four Horsemen with no deaths and only Saph and KT to go something really changed in the team.

Ive never seen people focus like that.  I mean, even when we were first wiping on those two it was more like getting over the frustration of dying than a focus on winning.  Now that we’ve won so many times that our expectation is to win, the mental shift is striking.  When you add PRESSURE to win with excellence it’s a whole new thing I’ve never really seen in the game.

Well the rest of the story is that we didn’t get undying (MT computer fail in a void zone – ouch), but I have to tell you that the feeling in that raid was awesome.  We were having more fun, were more excited, more focused, more NERVOUS, than at any time in the last two years I’ve been playing.  It was way FUN again, and I thought we were already having fun.  A farming run had turned into the best bit of emotional rush I can remember since whacking Malygos for the first time.  And that was more relief than excitement.

Then last night we did 10 man OS with 8 for the “less is more” thing.  We thought we would add a little more spice and do it with a drake up at the same time so that those without “twilight assist” could get that one too.  We didn’t pull it off, but instead of leaving with just a few bits of gear none of us really needed, we at least got “less is more” out of the deal, and again, we were laughing and cutting up the whole time.

So in two days I’ve gotten over the thinking that achievements are just a gimmick.  Now I know they are a gimmick, but the weird thing is that it’s a sweet gimmick.  I’m not sure it makes me love the idea of chasing achievement for achievements sake (even though I do run around like an idiot doing explorer from time to time when I’m dual boxing doing scans and what-not at the AH)  but what I do know is that every single “same-old same-old” boss fight in the game that we’ve done 50 times already has another level or two we can shoot for.

That little twist can really make a difference in your raiding experience.  And since there are so many achievements in current raids, it’s unlikely you would run out before Ulduar hits, and also unlikely you will do everything there before we (finally) get to beat our heads in on Arthas.

Some achievements force you to change the way you approach boss fights completely – It turns out that “Momma Said Knock You Out” makes the Faerlina fight about 100% easier than having to do the MC thing.  And most heroic level achievements actually FORCE you to play better to boot.  In order to do most of the dungeon achievements everyone on the team has to execute to perfection.  Working on achievements in dungeons will make your whole team get a LOT better.  So don’t tell me achievements are fail.

In other words, achievements, while I can’t say they are my favorite part of the game, have certainly proven to have an irreplaceable effect on how much fun the game can be if you let them.  Now I’m looking at them as such a cool part of the overall experience that they are on par with professions or the AH or any number of cool bits that the game just wouldn’t be the same without.

So in the end achievements are the way Blizz made Havelock proud – they made news out of olds.  They are useless and trivial and way more fun than almost anything else in the game.  And that’s why achievements are a truly Dominating way to re-experience all those olds in a completely new way.