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All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsBreakfast Topic: How hard are you working on guild achievements?
by Josh Rose 
Mar 10th 2011 at 8:00AM
The guild leveling system is both interesting and annoying at times. There are some fun and interesting guild perks, as well as some obscure ones. Whether fiercely gathering, fishing, cooking and crafting in an attempt to reach the guild totals, or running around killing every critter in sight, there is no shortage of work to be done to accomplish all the guild achievements and access all the guild perks. Some people dive headlong into them, and others just take care of their own toons -- and whatever comes is just a bonus.
The idea of having every race/class combo at 85 and at least honored with the guild to get an extra bank tab is frustrating. Seriously, how many dwarf mages have you seen running around? On top of that, the caps for guild rep each week leaving you just a few points shy of that next rep level can be disheartening. I have leveled a human hunter to 85 and am currently working on a dwarf rogue and gnome priest. Other guildies race-changed to worgen or the new race/class options, and we are down to being only a few short.
I have taken my main out and killed hundreds of critters, fished in endless numbers of pools, and between my alts, I skin, herb, and mine. My guild as a whole took the fishing to get the fish feast recipe as a major endeavor, as well as making flasks for the cauldron recipes, having everyone get their flasks made by elixir-specced guild members. My guild certainly teams up to push achievements hard.
So how hard are you working toward the guild achievements? Which ones are you focusing on the most? Is your guild teaming up to push out the achievements? Or are you busy being a lone ranger?
Filed under: Breakfast Topics, Guest Posts
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 3)
Rob Mar 10th 2011 8:29AM
We're not really. We did the fishing one for the guild feast, but that was about it.
The problem is, they're just flat out not fun. It's "go do this boring thing a billion times". In some cases, like the guild feast, the reward was nice, so we slogged through it.
Blizzard does this more and more I feel. They make the rewards worth having, but don't bother making the activity to get the reward fun. It's just all boring, monotonous grinds.
I must be on a downer today.
Namy Mar 10th 2011 12:02PM
You're right actually. They should have some more really random things people can do as a guild. Like get 20 guildies to fall from a height and live (has to be done within 2 sec of each other) or ummm I dont know, stupid stuff :P I have no imagination, but getting your guildies to all do something silly for an ach would be hell of a laugh ; )
Royal Mar 10th 2011 8:33AM
My guild is very large and active on top of it all we're achievement lovers.
When guild achievments came out we have been working to get them but making them into mini-games.
We had a group out killing critters and a group out catching fish. So it was a race as to who would finish first. There was a lot of friendly smack talk as to who would get there first and people trying to recruit others to join their cause. It was a lot of fun.
The most fun was the city attackers! We all mounted up and 20 of us flew into Orgrimmar's AH. The small doorway allowed us to get the 2500 kills we needed. Just keep LOS on the boxes cause a DK deathgrip meant certain death!
The system is something that still gives larger guilds an advantage but motivation helps. Our guilds the first week Cata was out went back and did all the guild runs vanilla through Wrath.
So far it is fun times had by all =)
Kurtis Mar 10th 2011 8:39AM
We're midway through level 19. We knocked out a lot of the quick-win stuff early on - classic and BC raids, etc. I haven't checked recently, but at one point we were in a 3-way competition with two Alliance guilds for top achievement points on the realm.
We've already got Classy Orcs and Classy Tauren. Of the rest, we're only missing a couple of classes each. I'm leveling a goblin DK - the highest one we had was 65; in three days of semi-focused time I've gone from 62 to 68.
Boom Mar 10th 2011 8:42AM
We got our fishing achievement late Tuesday night. Another guild member and I knocked out the last 90 flasks in a 2-3 hour long herbing spree yesterday evening. Switched my alchemist over to elixir master just to make it a little easier.
Gracandrea Mar 10th 2011 8:47AM
We got Critter Killer within two weeks of Cat coming out.
Our guild has gotten:
Classic Dungeonmaster
Classic Raider
That's a Lot of Bait
Critter Killer
Horde Slayer
And quite a few others. I held a fishing contest for two weeks and within a week we got the fish feast recipe.
Now we're working more on the flask one
Ice Mar 10th 2011 8:49AM
Honestly? We dont care. They come as we go, thats pretty much our unwritten motto about them.
We will keep doing what we did in wrath, not much has changed. Maybe use cool perks for "at raid instance" enchants for new stuff with guild perk that lets you place guild bank down..but we dont go for them like some might have.
My friends guild totally went nuts about them and started to recruit ton of people to "get levels that benefit us". Now they have 100+ members and "~80"(friends words) of them never/hardly have spoken on guild chat and they just play 2 hours and log off, giving XP sure..but not sociality. Is that what some guilds want? Why does everyone really care about the levels THAT much so that they will make guild with bunch of friends to zerg guild where hardly anyone knows eachother nor they care to know them. To be honest all benefits that solo player needs come with first 5-7 or so levels anyway.
We rather have people to get their own meat/fish and cook them with one person for 90 buff food than go fish 10k pools, same with flasks..rather have people to spend effort getting their own flasks (with guild alchemist tho so that we get the achi someday too) than buy mats everyday for xx amount of flasks to get cauldron with.. 7 flasks?
Achievements with benefits; they are so tedious and boring to focus on as small guild so we rather just get them someday than focus on them to not depress people further by "forcing them to go fish 1k fish for "benefit of whole guild".
Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?
No, says the guild leader; It belongs to everyone.
No, says the officer; It belongs to the poor guild members.
p.s sorry for trying to fit 4 subjects on one comment, again.
Deathknighty Mar 10th 2011 9:35AM
OMG!!
Imagine a Bioshock MMO!! :O
Miri Mar 10th 2011 8:51AM
There's 5 of us in my guild, and only my husband and I have any characters at 85...it's slow going--we just dinged lvl 3 as a guild, so achievements are probably going to take about 3 years to complete...
When my husband and I get tired of questing or leveling alts (we've sort of taken on the Classy achievement ourselves, so there's been lots of alts being rolled), we work on guild achievements. We finished classic instances, and now we're working on BC Heroics until everyone comes back from vacation and we can kick out the classic raids and ZA.
As a whole the guild has been working on the critter killer achievement, but other than that...it's pretty slow and quiet, lol!
Guild achievements have sorta fallen by the wayside as I work to gear up 3 tanks (1 @ BC level, soon to be blowing into Northrend, 1 @ Cata level, and 1 is like 5% from 80) so I can resume the tanking role for the guild lowbies (husband has the healing duties).
The guild achievements are somewhat frustrating for me because I'm an achievement freak, but I'm really big on being able to complete so much on my own. Having to rely on others will drive me insane (I'm the same way with work--I produce the best results on my own, but having to work with others screws up my mojo on projects). But honestly, there's no way I'm going to craft 25K flasks on my own...
Tokkar Mar 10th 2011 9:07AM
Bah! You kids with your guild achievements, guild levels and guild reputation!
Why, back in my day, we had to convince NINE DIFFERENT PEOPLE to sign our guild charter! Sometimes we had to bribe them with GOLD! And we were thankful for that!
Then we had to actually find people that we could stomach, kick the ones we didn't, and work as a team whether we wanted to or not! In six feet of snow! Uphill! In our bare feet!
Now you come along with your achievements and levels...sounds to me like you're compensating for something, you know what I mean? Like it's some measure of the size of your...ego. (Wink! Wink!)
But it builds camaraderie and shows teamwork, you say! Bah! Why back in my day, we hated each other's guts! And we didn't have ventrillo, we yelled across the state at each other and everyone knew it! And we were thankful for that!
Eirik Mar 10th 2011 2:10PM
Odd you should mention that. I fed my Ego so much that it developed super powers. Then it went to work on Doom 4 mods without me, and I'm left talking to my shrink about it.
Decipher that one, if you will.
achievwhore Mar 10th 2011 9:12AM
yea they do, they get allot of forum/blog attention cause of my points
Trilynne Mar 10th 2011 9:34AM
Right now our guild is racing to get 3,000 flasks before guild level 20. Unfortunately, until my math-minded hubby crunched the number for them, many people were buying flasks on the AH rather than having them done by a guild alchemist, which set us behind. But we're chug-a-lugging along. :P
Thanaxas Mar 10th 2011 9:49AM
There are 3 of us in my guild who are achievement junkies
The one that the 3 of us were trying for was the 55 Exalted reputations
But for the life of us, after triple checking the factions we had at exalted we couldn't figure out what we missed out (though we knew the PvP factions were out, we were also PvP averse)
I did end up farming Scale of the Sands on my own (as a combat rogue... solo, it was a slow process I can tell you that) just to complete it
When I finally grinded through the last 4 hours of rep farming I dinged exalted... and so did the guild. Course my other guildie was perplexed since she had that rep and was qualified to contribute (We were also the first 2 to hit exalted with our guild).
We figured out eventually that that was bugged to only check the reputations of the single guild member with the most reputations (me in my case)
We got the cute dark phoenix... but, till they fix it, it remains one of the least like a guild achievement.
Darkseid Mar 10th 2011 9:57AM
Honestly we're not working on them very hard at all. Frankly, there is no real incentive to do so. We're a small family guild, which means that we have NO shot at ever getting to a vast majority of the guild perks. So we mostly focus on leveling the guild and trying to get what few perks we can from our limited numbers.
What I seriously wonder though, is where Blizzards response to these guild issues are? Before all of this was put into place, pretty much everyone immediately asked the question, "what about the small guilds?"
Blizzard assured everyone that being a smaller guild would not lock you out of getting decent perks and that the perks you could get by being a super-sized guild were just that...perks. Not really that important.
But as we all know, thats not how this stuff has played out. We have seen people leaving small guilds for larger ones, just for perks. We have seen small guilds struggle just to make it to level 2-3, let alone 10-12.
Pretty much every concern players had about Blizzards interference in guild developement has played out badly. Yet Blizzard has remain mum on what they plan to do to level the playing field and fix the mistake that is guild 'perks'.
sezen Mar 10th 2011 10:00AM
my main's guild is fairly large, so i contribute here and there but i'm definitely not leading the guild achievement pack, as it were.
all of my alts are in the same guild, though, and i'm working diligently on guild achievements for that guild. i started a new toon with some friends so we'd have at least 3 running dungeons for all those guild dungeon achievements. i've also picked up some new professions for the same reason. some people are even rolling new toons to help complete the classy achievements :)
it's a really small guild, so we know everything will take much longer. but it's all friends, so at least we're having fun doing the achievements together!
Jane-Marie Mar 10th 2011 10:09AM
For the guild i am in some of the guild achievements are simply unrealistic (e.g certain professions achs) and we are very unlikely to achieve them anytime soon, if at all. Therefore, the only ones we are actually trying to get are related to making raiding a bit easier, so achievements that offer food and cauldron recipes are our main targets. The rest are nice to get but completely superfluous (and that is coming from a player who loves achievements).
To my mind, although when i first heard about guild achievements i was excited, the reality of them has left me a bit disappointed. I wish some of the achievements could be scaled dependent on the size of the guild, meaning the difficulty is the same for every player, but I guess that is somewhat hard for Blizz developers and would give the forums a lot to talk/flame/rant/discuss about. I suppose that method could also be open to abuse from unscrupulous guild masters.
Overall, I like the idea of achievements for guilds but like many school reports state, 'they could do better'.
Kendro Mar 10th 2011 10:28AM
Me and two other guild alchs pushed flasks out like made since Cata, and got the second cauldron like three weeks ago.
Sadly we still haven't gotten the fish achiev.
Other guild achievs though, we do work for, we have a good chunk the general pvp achievs, a handful of rbg achievs, arena achievs, general pve achievs, and most of the raid achievs.
We have like five achievement obsessed players in guild though. They're in the range of 10.5 to 12k, so ya, get a good deal of them taken out through their efforts.
Some of the achievs were rather fun though, I liked our efforts to get the world hk one. We did that with the kill horde in a capital one, and just sat in Orgrimmar in the afternoon before we started Cata raids, and just annexed a section of the city at a time. We wiped twice, but mostly because the horde started training Gamon over to us.
I'm hoping the guild quests in the future patches will be some fun event type things, and not grind fests.
Raginghobo Mar 10th 2011 6:56PM
Gamon for Warchief!
Helston Mar 10th 2011 10:29AM
It's currently 2:30am and I'm trying to help get the last 500k XP to get us to level 19 and cap us for the day. We usually cap, but unfortunately not today.