Friday, May 1, 2009

Children's Week Achievement Fails, Is Nerfed To The Ground

WoWinsider reports that the dreaded "Daily Chores" achievement has been nerfed to the ground within hours of the Children's Week event going live. Instead of requiring players to do a daily quest each day for five consecutive days (it's unclear whether the intent was to do the SAME daily quest, whether the achievement is supposed to reset if you go for 24 hours without completing a daily - which some players believe it does and the devs never clarified), the achievement is now doable in minutes. Any five daily quests on a single day now complete the achievement.

People who have been attempting Blizzard's world event achievements have been begging Blizzard to actually test this achievement, whose non-holiday parent has always been plagued by bugs, since the meta-achievement was first announced. The original design was arguably a bad call in any case - a five-consecutive-day requirement in a seven-day holiday mandated that players who wanted the achievement MUST play on specific days in the middle of the week. However, apparently months of advance notice, including two lengthy PTR phases, were insufficient for Blizzard to get the testing job done. Having gone live with the achievement broken, Blizzard had no choice but to effectively gut the thing, since the achievement would have become impossible to complete if left in a bugged state over the weekend.

It's not like this sort of thing has happened before or anything. Ladies and gentlemen, the most successful MMORPG studio in the business, hard at work.

2 comments:

  1. I'm glad I noticed your post tonight since the actual achievement text in the game still reads that a daily must be done for 5 consecutive days.
    I'm pretty happy about it since I do have to be out of town all weekend.

    Now I'm hoping they nerf the Battleground one, or just remove it from the meta because I think its going to be tough.

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  2. I wonder what was the reason: bugs or the realization that requiring a five day stretch over only seven days is a pain.

    @Daria: It's not as hard as I expected. Just... make sure you have your orphan out or you'll have to re-queue a few times like I did. Overall it took me about 3 hours for the PvP. With an organized group it would be faster since you could coordinate caps and returns and all that.

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