The new achievement system that will be introduced with the 3.0.2 patch is going to make this game a bit more interesting. People will begin to do things just so they can have the achievement. In my opinion, this is great. It extends the game play and gives everyone something more to 'achieve.'

What is not great in the eyes of some is the potential and actual abuse from the system that will result.

Take for instance what happened when I created simple macro that did /lol, and spammed it for 60 seconds. I got a nice number of 258 "Total times LOL'd" written down in my achievements page, right there for everyone to see. This just opens up the door for abuse of the worst kind – lol abuse.

What do I mean by lol abuse?

Lol abuse is when you stand in the middle of Stormwind like I did and spam it just to get that big number. I can say that because at times I know I am going to be bored enough that I'll try to get over a million lol's in a year. Rapidly pushing my key will make this easy. If I wanted this to be even easier, I could make all my raiding macros /lol every time I used one of them. If I did this to my Devastate macro, I could artificially inflate my lol number a few thousand each night I raid.

The bottom line is that only you can prevent / engage in lol abuse.

After having committed the serious sin of lol abuse, I must say that I encourage it. My guild is considering (though my officers don't know it yet) requiring at least 20,000 lols to be accepted into our ranks.

So please get laughing, because we all need to 'achieve' huge meaningless numbers.

Tags: abuse, achievement, achievements, lol, macro, macros

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Humor