#0 - March 12, 2009, 6:52 p.m.
The current version of the "0 death" raid achievements need to stop, or be altered in a way that makes them a personal thing instead of a group achievement. As someone coming from a guild with 2 pre-nerf M'uru kills and many pre patch KJ kills, I feel I have a pretty good idea of what difficult is, and what ridiculous is.
These achievements were obviously intended to require great performance from a raid. The concept is good and it's realistic. However, there are so many environmental issues that can ruin these types of achievements easily, that they become annoying rather than fun.
Look at Naxxramas right now. We have had 4 months to work on this zone. We had something like 2 months where the zone was basically unplayable due to the popularity of the expansion and the resulting lag. We have issues with bosses such as Kel'Thuzad randomly resetting aggro which can ruin this achievement through no fault of the players. (although care can be taken to deal with this issue to help prevent deaths)
We also have external factors such as disconnecting Internet, server crashes, server lag, general Internet lag on the user's end, etc. Any of these can cause a wipe/death and none of them have anything to do with skill.
The last expansion has brought us the "bring the player" mindset, and yet we have achievements where we are basically required to remove players from the raid if they have Internet stability issues. Let me tell you how nice it is to remove friends from a raid, who are great players, but simply disconnect occasionally.
The last issue I wanted to discuss is the failure of these types of achievements. Whether you are in a very strict guild or a very nice, and easy going guild, there are going to be angry players every single time this type of achievement is ruined for any of the above reasons. I pity anyone, on any server, and in any guild who happens to be the poor soul to be the first death. I feel even worse when it's due to lag or disconnects.
Overall, it's a good idea, but I don't see how this could be implemented in a way that would represent skill and not luck with connection quality.
I would like to see this changed to a personal achievement. This removes the blame from the raid members for non game related deaths, sticks with the "bring the player" attitude that Blizzard is promoting, and basically relieves a lot of stress in an environment that is supposed to be challenging your play skill, and not your quality of Internet service.
