[Collection] Mount achievements

Community WoW Community Council
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In a recent interview with Fandy there were some mentions of what they should do regarding mount collecting achievements because it is hard to keep everyone happy. So I’d like to give my feedback regarding that and what I’d hope to see going forward.

I’d like to give a quick background on what got me into mount collecting. It was the 200 mount achievement for the armored dragonhawk during MoP. I thought it looked amazing and at the time I wasn’t raiding or big into pvp so this became my carrot. It took many months for me to get the mounts for it but once I did it was one my favorite moments in the game. I think it is important to have those carrot on a stick moments with rewards that make people want to go get them.

There was a point made in the interview that mount collectors are not happy because the last achievement added many mount collector achievements got it upon logging in and wanted the next one. There is a point with that since most hardcore collectors are always farming and near the cap. But at the same time the time between the 400 mount achievement and the 500 achievement added in 10.0 was 4 years. There was such a big gap between the time added for achievements that causes that situation.

Personally I am a little over 800 mounts collected now. I understand that I am in a more niche population and that you would have to play for years to get to that point. That said, I still think there is a better middle ground if hardcore players are over 300 mounts ahead of the 500 achievement added in 10.0.

I’d like mount achievements to be at least somewhat closer to where pet collecting is right now. The latest pet achievement is 1600 and the top collectors are nearing 1700. With most hardcore collectors being over 800 I think at least 700 is a good spot at minimum to add for achievements. At the next expac launch perhaps 800 since I am sure more mounts will be added.

Those are my thoughts on it. Again, I understand that I am part of a niche group but even counting that it does seem like mount achievements have been lagging behind heavily over the years. (Also I suggest that sick Stormcrow mount in files since MoP as one of the rewards).

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I agree, I think with the amount of mounts added to the game recently, serious mount collectors feel like the achievements are lagging behind. New mount collectors see huge jumps to work towards goals. For pet battles we have the Raiding with Leashes achievement series which I think was a great addition. I think if something similar was done for the different mounts in the game, it may help as well. Awake the Drakes was a cool achievement and pushed collectors to farm for specific mounts. Couple ideas

Mountsmithing I (series)- collect all the following craftable mounts
Hall of mounts - collect all class hall mounts
Sea of mounts - collect all under water mounts listed
Raiding with collars I (series) - collect the following raid mounts

I’m sure both long time collectors as well as those new to mount collecting would appreciate expanding the mount collection achievements.

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Fully agreed! I myself am at 606 and I know plenty of people well past 700 and even a friend at 900+. I think it would be AMAZING to add more than just 1 and have a few new mount achieves. I personally love having achievements where I’m not maxed out on cause seeing the bar fill up as I collect gives me some more incentive!

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Maybe they start adding achievements along to Raiding with Leashes where the goal is to get the mounts within the scope of the expansion or piece of content rather than total number.

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Those are good ideas to add achievements like Raiding with Leashes or something like Awake the Drakes. I liked how the latter was done with collecting a certain amount of dragons got you another dragon skin. Fun little collection achievements like that help give direction and an area to aim for.

Also having it like Raiding with Leashes achievement it could be like collecting a certain # amount of mounts within an expansion to earn another mount. Then having mount rewards for those as a way for getting mount colors that are in the files but not obtainable by players yet like the many waterstrider skins for example.

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Thank you for bringing this up as it hasn’t really been discussed much on the CC forums since 2021 and definitely worth revisiting. Linking the last discussion below as there were suggestions on there.

Yeah, this has been a lot of our experience for the past 9-10 years. It’s even worse now with all the mount bloat we got in Shadowlands, especially during the Korthia patch. I got inspired to start collecting mounts in Cataclysm and 300 was the first “log in, get achievement, log off” for me.

Agree, I’m inching toward 900 unique on a character and I’m over 950 overall (counting both horde and alliance). Having the highest achievement in Dragonflight being only 500 feels like getting gifted a VHS.

This is an absolutely lovely idea. Or even more like “Awake the Drakes” where we can collect the following boar mounts, wolf mounts, coursers etc.

:wink:

Yes! Exactly. I love the incentivization of building a collection. We have plenty of addons and 3rd party sites, but that little dopamine hit from collecting and then achieving in game is so good.

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I have to agree with this,
I posted a thread about the quest version of these achievements awhile back noting that we havent had a new quest one since Wrath, some top questers are at 5x the highest one, and it would be really great to have some of these to work towards again, I remember being quite excited when I got the 3000 quest ach

There isnt a great way to compare these things but I agree with the sentiment of mount, quest, etc ones being closer to how the pet ones are, the top pet one is very challenging
as evidenced by the completion % of the highest count of each type
Quest: 67.3%
Toys: 3.5%
Reputation: 2.8%
Mounts: 2.5-2.8% (diff factions)
Pets: 0.3%

Im not saying I want it to be that people cant achieve it, but getting the top quest one in particular is aloooot easier than getting the pet one, would love for it to be comparable for all :slight_smile:

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I’m happy a new mount achievement was added, also got it on login. Maybe at least an expansion adding a new one wouldn’t be so bad. I’m not sure how many people fit into the mount collector categories for having a high amount also. Some of the newer mounts I find less interesting, a beautiful rare mount is still more exciting than a plain one in 6 colors.

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When the mount criteria are updated. The other trackings for other categories should be done so in a way that provides longevity to all. Fashionista - Mounts - Pets (pets was done so recently which was great) - Toys.

I don’t know if there are behind the scenes protocols that need to be adhered to that the rest of the gaming population aren’t aware of. Such as limiting the amount of achievements available for specific patch releases throughout an expansion. If there are, bringing those to light at least answer burning questions as to why these achievements haven’t been made readily available for the masses.

Even a post regarding the clarity as to why Blizzard hasn’t or won’t update them. Even if people disagree. It goes a long way to foster conversation with the player base. I understand not replying to every thread / people expecting an answer to everything from lowest issues to world first bugs isn’t a priority.
A couple lines of text from Blizzards puts the conversation to rest for some time. As opposed to mounting unrest that spans years+.

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I’ve said it here before but mount count and other collectable count achievements just seems like a no brainer thing to always iterate on for every expansion. Why it hasn’t been, who knows?

There are a number of different game systems and pieces of content that just seem like they should get updated every expansion. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. It is weird.

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Was going to make my own post about this but saw we had this thread going so I’ll join in here.

I don’t buy into the “achievements shouldn’t be too out of reach for new players” reasoning as to why mount collecting achievements lag so far behind the mount totals of collectors. Many avid mount collectors today are easily in the 700-800+ range, but the most recent achievement is only 500 usable by a single character. However, if a new player was to start collecting today, on a random horde character, (alliance has ~5 more mounts over the years) you still have over 740 obtainable mounts you could begin to amass.

Often we here from the devs something along the lines of “We don’t want to overwhelm new players.” However, new players can’t see achievements tiers beyond the one they are currently progressing.

Starting off a little history of these achievements: the first 4 tiers of mount collection achievements were added with the very release of the achievement system in Wrath. Collecting 10/25/50/100 mounts were the original goals, and each awarded their own mount for reaching the milestones. By this time, not including new mounts that came with the start of Wrath, there were already ~98 available mounts to an average horde player.

The fifth and sixth tiers of the achievement for collecting 150/200 mounts, were added in patch 5.1 and 5.3 respectively. At the time of its release, our example horde character had over 220 mounts obtainable without including any from MoP itself.

The seventh and eighth tiers for collecting 250/300 followed a similar cadence of 2 patches between them, releasing with 6.0 and 6.2 of Warlords of Draenor. This is where collectors started to continually exist above the top level achievements. When the highest award is earned at 300, collectors could be pushing over 380, not including mounts that are no longer obtainable.

Surprisingly, with Legion adding over 100 mounts to the game, there was no achievement added for collectors at all. The next 2 tiers: 350 and 400 arrived simultaneously with the launch of BFA. Again, mount collectors were nearly 100 mounts past these achievements, logging in to see 2 new achievements, and then having nothing else to aspire to.

This brings us to present day Dragonflight, where Blizzard has broken a pattern: there was no 450 mount collection achievement. From 50 all the way to 400, the achievements were regularly spaced at every 50 mounts. But “Thanks for the Carry!” jumped straight from 400 to 500. This is doubly disappointing because there is still no chase goal. I logged in, and I had 200+ mounts more than this achievement required. Should collectors just sit and wait for 2 more expansions for the achievements to catch up to current collection levels?

What improvements / QOL changes would I make if I could?

  1. Add the 450 and 550-1000 mount achievements at increments of 50. I know there’s a trove on unused recolors and unreleased mounts that collectors would love to see like the Honeyback Hivemother, Stormcrow, etc.

  2. Ditch the current “usable on a single character” nonsense and make it an account-wide total that is clearly displayed in your mount journal. It cleans up a messy outdated metric.

  3. Addition / return of a section in the statistics page under the Character tab. I don’t recall if it was “wealth” or “gear” that showed your mount count, but the whole section was silently removed in shadowlands and it was one of the only ways to check your “usable on one character” count if you had exceeded the achievements.

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Been putting a decent bit of thought into this topic lately, and Im curious on other perspectives on my thoughts,

Difficulty:
The biggest “downside” to adding more of these I have heard is them being to difficult for casual or new players, buuut? we have achievements for beating mythic raids of the current raid tier, obtaining top tier pvp ratings, as well as (Feat of strengths) that are called “Cutting Edge:”
so I kinda feel like that ship has already sailed to some extent?

Counting:
Mounts:I totally agree with what others have said about making this account and not
usuable by a single character, in my time in collecting discords, I dont recall ever
meeting someone who focused on mounts in this way, there is probably some out
there, but a vast majority are all mounts

Quests:
I tried to do some testing on the incorrect calculation of these achievements
recently, but the only thing I managed to sorta confirm is that
some Candy Bucket quests that are repeatable yearly, do still incorrectly get
included in the count, slight delays in the update of the criteria count of the
achievement make things very difficult to test on the player side

If anyone can think of any negatives or downsides, Id be curious to here them!

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I’ve been having a blast with TWW, but looking at a mount collection tracker website just reminded me: we’re in a new expansion and there’s no new collection achievements. According to DataForAzeroth, ~10% of players have more than 500 mounts. Let’s get this caught up and add (the skipped) 450, 550, 600, 650, 700, maybe even fill it out all the way to 1100 and future-proof it with room to grow :smiley:

It’s long past time to follow through on all those “We hear you and we’re listening to our players” sentiments. This is an easy slam dunk. Achievements that reward already-existing, unused mount recolors surely shouldn’t eat up any considerable amount of dev time.

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AND WHILE WE’RE AT IT LET THE OTTERWORLDLY OTTUK SKYRIDE
Please it is my favorite mount.

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With 11.1 on the horizon there is still no new mount achievement in sight, at least not with the initial PTR build.

Looking at current statistics on DataforAzeroth the pet Mister Muskoxeles is given at 1800 pet achievement title and is required to get the Knight of Feathersworth title. I decided to compare the amount of people with 1800 pets and 600 mounts.

(Numbers recorded at time of post)

Number of people with at least 1800 pets: 2,259
Number of people with at least 1600 pets: 11,573

Now let’s compare this to the last mount achievement added which was 500:

Number of people with 500 mounts: Unknown because DataforAzeroth only shows the top 100,000 people.

Number of people with at least 557 mounts: 99,999.
Number of people with 600 mounts: 77,725

Now let’s go a step farther compare the amount of people with the pet achievements to see what equivalent mount achievement it would be:

2259 People = 1,022 mounts
11,573 People = 870 mounts

So if mount collecting achievements were on a similar pace with the 1800 pet achievement we should have an achievement for having 1000 mounts right now. If there was a mount achievement at least on par with the 1600 pet achievement it would be an 850 mount achievement.

I would like to know the design philosophy as to why this is. I recall in some interview in the past that they wanted the achievements to be reasonable to get which initially I would understand since the amount of people with 1000 mounts is less than 2500 players. But at the same time if that is the case why is there a 1800 pet achievement? So it seems to be some kind of difference in perspective between pet collecting and mount collecting that I don’t think myself or other players understand.

Obviously my personal stance on this is that mount achievements should be added for the last few hundred up to 1000 for it to be on par with pet achievements or at least 850. Currently it is still lagging behind at 500.

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800 Days…

Happy New Year!

It has been 800 days since mount collectors have seen a new mount collecting achievement. Dragonflight Pre-patch (October 25, 2022) brought with it, “Thanks for the Carry!” which rewarded players who had collected 500 mounts usable by a single character. Approximately 200 mounts have been added to the game since then. (I will never NOT mention that the 450 collection was skipped and broke the pattern of an achievement every 50 mounts from 50-400.)

Looking beyond that, the previous mount collecting achievements: “No Stable Big Enough” and “A Horde of Hoofbeats” released with 8.0.1 (BFA pre-patch), back in July 17, 2018 or 6 and a half YEARS ago. These achievements unlocked at 350 and 400 mounts respectively. Since then, the game has released nearly 500 obtainable mounts.

This also isn’t just a small portion of the player base. According to Wowhead data:

  • Thanks for the carry (500)
    23% of profiles have completed the alliance version of the achievement
    20% of profiles have completed the horde version of the achievement
  • A Horde of Hoofbeats (400)
    30% of profiles have completed the alliance version of the achievement
    27% of profiles have completed the horde version of the achievement
  • No Stable Big Enough (350)
    34% of profiles have completed the alliance version of the achievement
    30% of profiles have completed the horde version of the achievement

Another important note here: TWW would be the perfect time to change the clunky “Usable by a single character” to a simplified “Warband Mount Collection”

Now, I won’t be all negative, and give credit where credit is due since Blizz has added both the mounts I name-dropped in my September 2023 and September 2024 posts. with the 11.0.7 update – the Stormcrow (now Thrayir) and the Honeyback Hivemother, as example mounts that had previously gone unimplemented for years.

Maybe I’ll drop a suggestion that the next mount collecting achievement reward should be something we haven’t seen before, like the dragon isles duck from MRGM’s April Fool’s Twitter post:

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According to dataforazeroth.

There are 99,999+ players that have completed a total of 14414 quests.
Which is much higher than the 3,000 quest achievement available now.

Almost time for a mass update!