(Video by the awesome Wowcrendor, who has the knack for boiling down Warcraft sociology into its most hysterical elements).
It’s that time of year again: Children’s Week. One of Blizzard Entertainment’s many recurring seasonal themes in World of Warcraft. (See Joystiq’s breakdown for a nice overview)
As with most seasonal events, Children’s Week features a list of different achievements you can obtain on your characters, each of which carries different requirements. This culmonates in a meta-achievement for completing a collection of smaller ones. Doing so awards your character a title; in this case Matron/Patron (depending on the gender of the character).
By and large I love these themed events. They frequently inject some light-hearted silliness into the typical gaming experience. Yet there are also elements of it that are just evil.
Number one offender in Children’s Week, indeed out of all seasonal achievements in my view, is School of Hard Knocks, which requires characters complete a number of objectives in player-versus-player (PvP) battlegrounds.
This is horrible game design, and I’ll tell you why. PvP requires teamwork to be successful. The battleground teams that work together do well; the ones that don’t, don’t.
What Hard Knocks does is splinter the group into a free-for-all by injecting personal goals into a fundamentally team dynamic. It also introduces non-PvP’ers into the world of PvP in the worst possible way – by emphasizing that their priority there is the achievement rather than the victory in the battleground (personal needs over group success).
Not surprisingly you see a lot of flaming, trolling, and outright nastiness emerge during events like this. PvP’ers resent the period because it wrecks the experience for them, and non-PvP’ers hate it because they don’t like PvP and get treated like crap for being selfish. It’s a no-win situation that I’m amazed has been allowed to go on as long as it has.
I love achievements and I love PvP, but this is a time when I sit both out. If you need me I’ll be fishing in Nagrand.
It’s a frustration achievement but it can work sometime, on occassion i have done a battleground where people took turns to get the achievement and one by one we all got it through cooperation. It not often this happens mind you.
True – in fact I remember getting the WSG portion of it one year under the same conditions. The Horde players were all waiting by their flag to get the return and one by one the Alliance players would grab it and wait to be killed until everyone had credit for the flag return
When you get those groups it can be fun, but it’s unfortunately not something you can plan for.
Having said that, I wonder if you could use the BG challenge option for this (can’t remember the name)? Not sure what level it becomes available, but if there were enough people in a pair of brother/sister Horde and Alliance guilds (e.g. same people, different factions) perhaps there’s a way to coordinate things that way. Though it might be a violation of the TOS…