Token Female Gamer

It took me a while to get into the idea of Achievements in World of Warcraft, mainly because I disliked them so much on the console. Unlike the console version of achievements, which are essentially a glorified score board, the WoW achievements confer awards.

In fact it was one such award that started me on this crazy ride. My husband pointed out that one of the awards was a purple drake, a flying mount. As purple is one of my favorite colors I was immediately determined to get it.

Well I had no real idea what I was getting into. The Achievement is called ‘What a long strange trip its been’ and consists of eight sub-achievements. Each of those eight contains around ten achievements each. Not only are there at least eighty to complete, they are also dependent on specific WoW holiday events. These show up at only specific times during the year (game time in WoW corresponds to game time in RL), which means that to complete all eight holiday achievements takes at least a year. To top it all off the holiday events only last for about a week each. If you don’t finish up in that week your out of luck and have to wait another year. (Side note: The length that the holiday events run has been lengthened recently.)

After deciding, foolishly I might add, to embark on this achievement, the mad scramble to complete the various achievements in the allotted time began. Thankfully my husband decided to go along for the ride.

As it turned out we had to decide pretty quickly if we wanted to actually attempt this since it was the month of October, which has two holiday events. We only managed to complete one in time. The months following October are very busy with in game holiday events and so where we, trying to get everything done.

Part of the problem was the level requirement. Various achievements required you to be of a certain level to be allowed to even venture into the area that housed the goal. So the first few months were filled with hasty leveling followed by panicked weeklong achievement collecting.

But we managed. We finished this month after the Brewfest holiday. We are now proud owners of Violet Proto-Drakes. (Turns out that this is a super fast flying mount, faster then the usual fast ones, so everyone and their mom was trying to get it mainly for the extra speed. I just wanted it for the fact that it was purple. I’m such a noob!)

<3 TFG

Tags: achievements, hunters, levels, loot, mmog, pets, seasonal, world of warcraft

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 17th, 2009 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Computer Games, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.