Another day in Tol Barad

#1 - Feb. 9, 2011, 7:36 a.m.

Why is it that we have to repeat so many achievements?

It's insulting that we have to repeat so many low level quests for achievements, what is up with this one though? We've just spent the last two months doing these quests! For many people, doing all of them.

What's the justification for this conversation:
Blizz, "do all this for some points"
and we reply, "ok, done it"
Blizz, "do it all over again if you want the points"

It's either naive or a lie to believe those that are exalted (and have been for a couple weeks +) haven't done most if not all the quests. If the quests weren't tracked - why not? All our other quest completions were tracked, how many dailies we do, our cooking and fishing dailies were tracked, why wouldn't the TB dailies be tracked? If Blizz doesn't care that we've done them all - which is, I'm fairly certain the situation - what kind of message are they sending?

I think this is a crappy way to treat paying customers. Unless there is some justifiable reason to give anyone interested in achievements a giant /one-fingered-salute, then I'm going to say Blizz you're handing us reasons to stop playing your game. Is this the final reason? No, it isn't; however, there are a finite number of mistakes any company can make before the customers say enough, and they've just used one up, and for what?

Bornakk

Community Manager

#7 - Feb. 9, 2011, 7:46 p.m.

Completing some daily quests again isn't a really big task for players who like to get achievements.

Bornakk

Community Manager

#22 - Feb. 9, 2011, 8:41 p.m.

02/09/2011 12:33 PMPosted by Maliphalo
Completing some daily quests again isn't a really big task for players who like to get achievements.

Most of the time, this is accurate. However, some realms do not exchange Tol Barad very often, which makes this achievement much more difficult. Feathermoon went weeks and weeks without the Alliance having access to the daily quests.

We made some adjustments to Tol Barad in the patch that should help it flip more often. We are continuing to monitor it and we'll see how it goes. I know it has already been changing a lot more on my realm.

Bornakk

Community Manager

#41 - Feb. 9, 2011, 10:07 p.m.

Please allow me to add my constructive feedback to this thread.

As others in this thread have voiced, I too enjoy achievement hunting but don't particularly relish the thought of having to re-do all of the Tol Barad dailies for this achievement. Having just reached exalted with Baradin's Wardens I was excited to be done with Tol Barad grinding, at least for the time being. As I was doing my dailies over the past few weeks and the announcement of this achievement being added in 4.0.6 was made, I kept thinking to myself, "surely Blizzard is internally tracking all of our progress on this achievement" - turns out I was wrong. My expectation was that the achievement would be awarded retroactively (as many were with the launch of the achievement system with WotLK).

Retroactive achievements are actually tricky as we need some sort of guarantee that isn't always easy to track. There were a lot of complaints about people not getting their achievement retroactively when WotLK came out as there were only so many ways for us to determine it. For something like this, it isn't really worth spending the time to try and figure out a way to track it when it doesn't take a lot of commitment to do again. Since you said you weren't planning to do the quests now that you are exalted, all you have to do is keep an eye out for the ones you haven't done so it will take less and less time as you get closer to the end.

02/09/2011 1:02 PMPosted by Precarious
The significant frustration here is the above-quoted insinuation from Bornakk (whose work I appreciate and respect) that anybody who likes hunting achievement won't be bothered by this added burden of redoing all the dailies. If the issue is a technical one; tell us that. If the issue is simply that the developers made an oversight and planned poorly; tell us that. If the issue is that you're adding another grind to the game to keep us playing and paying; tell us that. But don't tell us that if we don't enjoy more grinding of quests and content that we thought we were done with that we're not playing the game as intended or as the majority of players should.

I pretty much answered this above, but pretty much if it was something that was easy or important enough to do, we would focus on it. This achievement is pretty minor and not the kind that people will really gloat over having first, so you can take your time with it and just check in every so often to see if the quests you need are available.

02/09/2011 1:02 PMPosted by Precarious
This is certainly not a game-breaking frustration, but it is one of many small, incremental mounting frustrations. In particular, there seems to be a bit of a chip on the shoulders of the Developers and Community Managers recently which manifests in the attitude: "if you don't like it, you're doing it wrong". I know you guys have a hard job, and I appreciate the work that goes into this game that I pay money to enjoy, but I felt at least strongly enough about this particular issue to post a reply (something I rarely do).

We don't really like having to put players in this type of situation, but having the achievement makes more sense in the long run and we think it's more fun to have it than to not. Some people are making this out to be insulting and along the lines of something game-breaking and I disagree.

Not referring to anybody in particular, but a number of players have built up a strong "I deserve it" mentality that we have been battling. Not everything flows perfectly but people should try to look at the bigger picture before claiming we are out to get them.

Also, thank you for providing your feedback in a constructive way. :)