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?
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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.
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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.
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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.