First World WoW Problems

There's suddenly an empty slot in my inventory. What used to be there?!

It's still driving me crazy.

 One of my specs got buffed. Now I have to change all my enchants.

There's no way in hell I'm re-gemming.

 I got a bunch of new gear, but I can't put it on until I transmog it.

Look at those leggings. What a hot mess.

My Mythic cache mission had a 97% chance of success. It failed.

How they constantly break math is beyond me.

Every time I think I'm done, it just pulls me back in.

There's another level of this crap?!

-Avia.

No one even says "grats" anymore.

Recently, I found a website (still in development) that tracks your achievements across multiple games in one place and then gives you achievements for them.

They're not very attractive looking badges so far.

... y0, dawg.

For a company, it doesn't sound like a terrible idea, as in no one has claimed it yet and sure it can make money. Yet, I still can't help rolling my eyes just a little bit. It's become an industry standard to include achievements in games that serve a myriad of purposes from increasing longevity of the content to pushing the player to explore the game in ways s/he never would have tried, and no one can resist that feeling of accomplishment when a ceremonious notice pops up accompanied by a cute little picture.

But all of this is getting so meta, I'm not even sure what isn't an achievement anymore. Did my Sim get an achievement for going to the grocery store or did I? Does it even count if only people who play the Sims can see my Sims-related achievements, or do I have to collect all of my Sims/WoW/Cut the Rope achieves in one place to share with the gaming community at large and preserve for posterity? Is there even a purpose to life without achievements? I just earned my bachelor's degree, but I didn't get a pop-up and a cute badge. What was all of that time and effort for?

New business idea: IRL achievement tracking. Look for it.

-Avia.

That wasn't that hard. Oh wait... it kind of was.

It was an arduous journey, my friends, but I finally reached my goal of 12k achievement points... and then some. O_o In reaching far into the depths of my achievements tab for time-consuming and soul-crushing 10 point gains, I went a little overboard and found that my 12000th point felt like a major victory while the 50 points after were so effortless, I practically pulled them from my felhunter's ass. This leads me to believe that as impressive as my guild master's 13345 points are, a massive amount of nerd points is relatively easy to acquire; it just depends on what a player is willing to do/willing to invest time in/willing to call in favors from the past six years for.

For example, I never thought that I would ever be the owner of an "of the Four Winds" title. On normal, Al'Akir was the biggest cockblock of tier 11 that made me want to throw myself off a literal platform to my RL death rather than subject myself to it. But then one day, I finally sucked it up, the guild let itself be led by a competent strategist, and five other DPS carried me through phase 3 after I inevitably died to a lightning cloud. Suddenly, I was thinking to myself, "Hey! It's ok if people find out I'm a noob at 360° motion. Swallow your pride and thank people profusely!" Bam. 12k achieve points.

My friend says I should try for more to reach #2 in the guild, but there are obstacles, i.e. achieves that I, for many reasons, will not touch. For carebears like me, a major bottleneck is in PVP. Those achieves aren't even difficult, but for someone who /cries while a Horde ganks my alt, the thought of carrying a flag in Warsong Gulch makes me want to curl up into a fetal position and protect my core. I already harbor bad memories of all six mobs in the PVP encounter of Trial of the Crusader turning on me at once. Even in fake PvP, the lock dies first.

And then there are the RP roadblocks. The same friend suggested I switch from Frenzyheart to Oracles so I could get the questing and rep achieves, but I outright said no. In my humble leveling journeys of Northrend, I met the Frenzyheart first and then had to listen to the Oracles bash my new-found friends. Yes, they're a little brusque in their demeanor, but that's just their personalities, and you accept people for who they are. Then, when I had to choose between the two factions and saved Zepik's life, he told me he was so grateful, that he knew he could count on me, and that he'd tell his village to be nice to me from then on. He gave me a vote of confidence! How could I betray that?

There are some things in life that are worth more than a few nerd points. Like being true to your alignment.

-Avia.

The proof of a very productive winter break.

Just in time for back-to-school, I got my fucking legendary yeaaaahhhhh!!!

I know I'm months behind, but by the time it was my turn for final stage quest items, it was already patch 4.3, and my guild needed to move onto wiping in a new instance. For the past month, I had to organize 10-man normals on the weekends and carry people's alts to victory while collecting smouldering essences at an agonizingly slow pace. But after calling in a bunch of favors and perhaps doing some things that I'm not too proud of, I finally own one of the ugliest staves in the game, and I can't even transmog it. T_T Oh my first world problems.

However, I did manage to build a pretty sweet outfit around it. Though it's a rather stark contrast to my priest look-alike set, it is now blatantly obvious what class I am when I step into an arena for nerd points. I'm hoping that in my quest to break 12k achievement points, it won't matter too much that I only have 2k resilience and use a PVE rotation as I work through the only achieves that I have left and have been ignoring as Eredar-US's carebear #1 since 2005.

Unfortunately, I have a feeling that the "if you give me what I want, I'll stop killing you" argument will be less effective when I'm talking to another player. On the other hand, it never really worked on any mob either. Oh well.

-Avia.

Guild motto: Awesome on accident.

Yesterday, my raid group and I got the Not an Ambi-Turner achievement. ON PURPOSE!

Why the distinction? For my guild, one has to specify whether we meant to do something or we just fucked up so badly that we made a fight hard-mode unwittingly. Last week, we got Ragnar-O's, not because we're super badass and spit in the face of the hardest boss in the game, but because so many DPS had died by the last phase that we ended up with EIGHT meteors at the end of the fight. Even I think that's retarded, and I was there.

When BWD was current, we got Aberrant Behavior without planning on it because the melee didn't bother kicking any of the add casts. It was three minutes of "kick the fucking aberrations! The off-tank is going to diiie!" followed by "oh cool we got an achievement." It makes the ulcers worthwhile, I suppose.

If only more achievements were based on negligence rather than strategy or attentiveness. We've already given up on Do a Barrel Roll! without ever seriously considering it, because there is no serious consideration of that achieve for a group of 25 tunnel-visioning space cases like us. We've even managed to fail Only the Penitent every single week since the release of Firelands despite our pleading that the (virtually) uncoordinated stay behind just STAY BEHIND THE LINE FOR THE LOVE OF CENARIUS!

But alas.

Maybe next week.

-Avia.

All I have is PvP achieves left now. :(

Dancing all day every day.

Some achievements are tough, and some of them take a long ass time, but last week I finally got an achievement that was practically a year in the making.

Gurubashi Arena Grand Master.

Yea, I know. It takes no skill and two days to accomplish. In theory. But if you're the kind of person who gets easily distracted jumping around Stormwind and then looks at the clock to realize that you missed the chest by thirty minutes AGAIN, two days potentially turns into months of cursing at yourself every three hours.

Eventually, I had to start recruiting people, not only to come with me to do the PvP nonsense, but also just to remind me that it was almost time to head to STV, to which I always responded, "OH YEA!!!" Because god forbid I ever remember on my own.

Aside from being an unforgivably (lol) inconvenient achievement, it got worse the closer I came to being done, because by the end, I had 11 of those non-stacking quest items taking up precious space in my bank. This is during all the hype about transmogrification when I'm scrambling to find empty bank slots for lowbie belts in five colors and trying to keep my inventory clear so I can do more BRD coffer runs without stopping at the vendor. I didn't get in-game rich by leaving trash items to rot!

But it's finally done. I swooped down on the Gurubashi Arena for the last time with a whole posse to protect me as I looted my final chest. Wearing my PvP gear from last season with a whole 2k resilience, I started the channel that would open the chest and lead me to 10 glorious achievement points...

And then I got backstabbed by a level 84 rogue.

We owned him.

-Avia.