Shared Achievements?

With Mists of Pandaria, account-wide achievements will indeed become available at the Battle.net account level, and many achievements will be shared among characters. A wide array of achievements will certainly be covered, including achievements that relate to everything from raiding and PvP to maxing out professions and assorted fun challenges. We really love the idea that players will at last be able to proudly display proof of the full scope of their adventures around Azeroth, regardless of which character they choose to play on any given day.

While we are still working out the details regarding how various specific achievements will interact with the new system, once we have a bit more information to share with you, we’ll certainly let you know.

While we’re still working out many of the details regarding account-wide achievement functionality, I want to clarify that we plan for the system to apply to all achievements -- not just those added in Mists of Pandaria. It’s intended to be an overall change to the current achievement system.

Our goal is to make it so that you feel like you only have to get an achievement once. We think the time and effort you put into achievements should be evident regardless of which character you’re playing. The update will be implemented at the Battle.net level and, as such, would apply to all of the attached World of Warcraft licenses on the account.

02/07/2012 05:45 PMPosted by Atamynn

Could this account-side logic be applied to Heirloom equipment in the future, such that we can send the items across realms? I understand the programming in the current model would be a complete devil, but if the Heirlooms are ever fixed up to be given to the Battlenet account itself, could they be assigned to a given character/realm via the account options?

In terms of Bind on Account items, we believe that using the mail system to transfer heirlooms from one character to another is less than ideal. We’d like to work ourselves away from that sort of item distribution model, and have some design goals in mind that would change the mechanics of how heirlooms are distributed in-game.

We think it would be wonderful to simplify the system so that, for example, you might have a constant heirloom page across all your characters that you could peruse and select from at your leisure. Conceivably, we could do something similar for pets and mounts.

As always, these sorts of design ideas are constantly being evaluated. I just think it’s worth pointing out we’re not currently aiming to create a system that would allow players to mail heirlooms across realms or accounts. We believe that would be a sub-optimal design, and we have better solutions in mind for the future.