After years of complaints (nearly 14 years, to be exact), Blizzard has finally altered one of World of Warcraft’s most frustrating Achievements in order to make obtaining an exclusive mount a little easier.
The Achievement in question is the School of Hard Knocks. Since the game’s 2008 Wrath of the Lich King expansion (which is actually being re-released later this year), the Achievement has been required as part of a larger “meta” Achievement for the entire Children’s Week seasonal event, For the Children. That Achievement, in turn, was required for the What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been meta Achievement, which comprises various seasonal event meta Achievements. The reward for all this busy work? An exclusive mount: the Violet Proto-Drake.
Blizzard put out a hotfix on May 4 that at long last made it so School of Hard Knocks is no longer required as part of For the Children. School of Hard Knocks will still exist as an Achievement, but is simply no longer tied to any greater Achievement or rewards. The Children’s Week event is currently live in-game and will run until May 9.
So what made School of Hard Knocks so frustrating for mount collectors and Achievement hunters? It’s the fact that the Achievement requires players to specifically accomplish feats in PvP over the course of the one-week-per-year Children’s Week event that aren’t as simple as getting kills or winning matches. Instead, it requires players to do things like capture and score an enemy flag in a specific game mode or assault a Tower in the game’s Alterac Valley gametype with their adopting Children’s Week orphan in toe.
While PvP has been a part of WoW from the very beginning, it’s an entire side of the game that a large portion of the playerbase doesn’t often interact with. PvE players trying to complete the Achievement didn’t want to do PvP and didn’t know what they were doing, and dedicated PvP players often became frustrated with the influx of new, largely clueless players joining matches simply for an Achievement. As such, many PvE-minded players had simply given up on ever obtaining the Violet Proto-Drake.
The change to the Achievement is sure to be a crowd-pleaser and comes at a time when Blizzard seems more open to player feedback than ever before, having made major changes to unpopular systems in both patch 9.1.5 and patch 9.2 of Shadowlands. While it took a major disappointment of an expansion and a long laundry list of lawsuits and investigations to get there, Blizzard recently created a WoW Community Council to help gather more detailed player feedback.
WoW’s next expansion, Dragonflight, will introduce a new playable dragon race, the Dracthyr, as well as a new Dracthyr-exclusive class, the Evoker. The expansion does not currently have a release date.
Source: Gamespot
