Project Lore

The last few weeks, I've become quite the little achievement whore. And since my main character wasn't around for the grand days of Vanilla WoW and the Burning Crusade, she has plenty to catch up on -- questing, rep, professions, dungeons and raids. In fact, some of my guildies with the same state of mind have started running old school achievement content on Fridays. it has been lots of fun - not only to see the content and old loot, but also to get that shiny message popping up saying that you've earned an achievement.

I also have a few alts, none of which have hit 80, and I've come to realize something: While I may love achievements on my main, I really don't care about what achievements my alts do or don't have. Sure, there are plenty of achievements that I'll get along the way if I level the way that I plan to, but other than those, I won't go out of my way to earn anything special.

It's a weird state of mind. I guess I think of it this way: If I've done the achievement once, I've already achieved it. Why go through the hassle again on an alt, unless it's something that I need to do to reach a completely unrelated goal in the game? We need to have a way to track achievements on multiple characters - not to tell us our total number of points, but instead the number we would have if we added up all the different achievements we've gotten altogether.

But I also can see another point of view: if you care about an alt enough to get her to level 80, why not also experience everything else that the game has to offer through content that grants achievements? And then there's the other point of view that, before I hit 80, I pretty much lived by: It's not the number of achievement points you get that matters, but instead the quality of the time that you spend in-game. Essentially, if you're having fun, who cares about those arbitrary numbers?

I guess what changed my mind is the fact that earning achievements has transformed into one of the funnest aspects of the game for me, so it's what I've started spending more time on. Perhaps if I had a crazy character that had essentially "beat" the game, my mind would change. But for now my main, Locomomo, is tasked with the burden of achievement whoring. My alts, on the other hand, can relax.

How do you feel about achievements on alts? Do you play with a different point of view in mind than the three I listed?