Kor'kron 501st

I keep seeing posts on the forums about people wanting account-bound achievements. They no longer want an achievement system tied to particular characters. Instead, your achievements would be seen from every character. This would put achievements more in line with Xbox 360 achievements or PS3 trophies. Unfortunately, the argument I see is strange.

First, there are people who want it all tied together. They think that once you have the Firelands achievement, for example, you should never to obtain it again. No matter what character you’re using, you could bring up your achievements, see that you’ve completed the Firelands, and link it. The upside to this, of course, is that you won’t be forced to grind through things multiple times. In addition, you won’t be penalized by switching characters to suit the needs of your group.

Obviously a lot of people are against this. They think that each character should have to earn the achievements to have it displayed. You could look at the Firelands achievement once again. Having earned the Firelands achievement as a healer doesn’t say anything about your ability to tank. The same could be said about many other aspects of playing your character. You might know how to PVP on your Death Knight, but what about on your rogue? They’re different and should be treated as such.

I’m in favor of account-bound achievements. However, I don’t understand why people seem to think that the existence of account-bound achievement would remove character-bound achievements. I saw one suggestion of certain achievements being account-bound and certain achievements being character-bound. This is still flawed. Why not keep the base system the same way it is now. Every character has a set of achievements. An achievement earned on one character is not an achievement earned on another. This way, you’ll still be able to tell what was done on each character. However, on top of this system could be account-bound achievements. These wouldn’t be different achievements. Rather, it would display every achievement you’ve earned on any of your characters and, along with the date earned, list the characters that have that achievement.

With this system, we’d keep all the perks of the current achievements, but we could also look at every achievement we’ve earned on any character at a glance. Looking to join a Firelands raid? You could link both versions of the achievement, possibly showing that you’ve only done the first three bosses on the character in question, but you’ve actually completed the Firelands on two other characters. This gets 100% of the information across.