One thing that I believe is currently lacking in today’s version of World of Warcraft is the absence of personal achievement with feeling/meaning. The current achievement system attempts to create a system with goals to strive towards however the rewards from a majority of these achievements feel meaningless. I believe this is due to the lack of visual items obtained from the achievement system. Yes, there are visual rewards such as mounts for pvp seasons/ collecting goals, pets for pet battle achievements/ collecting goals and of course ‘Titles’. These are all good and fine but I think these type of rewards could be expanded further into the achievement system, here are a few of my suggestions.
Unique Armor Sets/Items for Personal Achievements:
There used to be a time where you could walk through your capital city and at first glance see that someone was a good player. They were wearing the BiS gear for the tier, the top armor set for pve/pvp or had the best available weapon in game for their class. Transmog, while some would argue is a great system and provides players with another in game hobby of collecting all the unique sets, unfortunately took a lot of this feeling out of the game. Sure, you could choose not to transmog however most players this day do. Mists of Pandaria attempted to revive this with Challenge Modes, providing unique sets for your achievements. Legion brought the mage tower, providing unique weapon skins for your artifacts if you could beat the solo challenge for your class.
What if these systems were further applied to systems such as Raiding or Mythic Plus? The current rewards for clearing heroic/mythic raids provide an achievement and/or a title that end up just being a entry ticket for pug groups. What if beating the last boss on mythic difficulty provided an additional armour set on top of those dropped in the raid, purely cosmetic for the select few? What if in addition to the mount from challenge achievements within raids, you got a weapon appearance? What if “chesting” a Plus 10 for each dungeon, rewarded a unique armor set like challenge modes? I feel something along these lines would give the player more of a will to continuously strive to be better by offering some unique, limited time reward at the end. Something that makes them visually stand out amongst the crowd rather than having some small title or linkable achievement?
Visual Rewards for Professional Achievements
Professions in general have been lack luster as of late. Most people switch professions based off whats currently making the most money or what would benefit the group the most on raid night. The achievements for professions are very lack luster and provide near no satisfaction the player once you’ve “maxed” it. In Mist of Pandaria, cooking had several different schools of cooking, mastering and maxing every school rewarded a unique title and i remember when i finally got this title I had a deep sense of satisfaction.
Why has this almost disappeared? What if maxing your profession rewarded you with a unique title or tabard? Or collecting every pattern in the game rewarded you with a unique cape, kind of like how Runescape rewards skill capes for maxing skills? I think little visual intensives would entice players to go after these rewards, make them more engaging and give them a greater sense of satisfaction and completion.
Make Achievement Points Worth Something
Currently when you unlock an achievement the player is rewarded with some meaningless reward of points. They have no value, the amount of points rewarded doesn’t seem to make sense and its hard to put a feel factor on how many you have. Its almost a meaningless reward as I feel just listing total number achievements unlocked would be a better number to judge ones accomplishments. Why is it in the game?
What if the points achieved were almost like another reputation for personal achievement? The harder the achievement, the more points rewarded and the better incentive to do those achievements? What if a vendor was added for your achievements allowing you to buy with gold different mounts, pets or weapon/armor appearances for reaching a certain achievement progress? These rewards would be purely cosmetic and give players something else to strive for knowing that if I unlock so many achievements I have a visual character reward to show off to my friends at the end. This system wouldn’t necessarily have follow the reputation system by the book but maybe just at certain point levels you can go and unlock a neat little visual.
Conclusion
I think visuals in WoW are important. Blizzard has one of the best, if not the best, art team in the business. Using this to their advantage, I believe they could add some serious visual rewards to their on going system to give players something new to strive for without having to add new content. Looking through an achievement book and just seeing names of things you’ve supposedly have “achieved” is boring. Seeing new/rare visual items that make you stand out from the guy standing next to you is exciting. It provides players with an incentive to go obtain something no one else has, reward them with a physical item/trophy for beating something they worked extremely hard for that they can show off to their friends. There are many other achievements that a system like this could be applied to but these are just a few that I’ve named. The more physical/ visual non game impacting rewards that can be given to a player will only further increase their interest and incentive to play the game.
If you have continued to read this far, thank you and let me know what you think! I think this could be something that could provide additional value to a game that I think could use it! ![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
Thanks!
![:smiley:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/smiley.png?v=6" ":smiley:")