What achievements do you think have run their course and should be removed from World of Warcraft?

It’s Children’s Week in World of Warcraft. Aside from new Battle Pets, it’s known for having a horrible achievement: School of Hard Knocks.

If you aren’t an achievement junkie, you can be forgiven for not knowing what this one entails. You grab an orphan and run four different battlegrounds — performing a specific task while your orphan watches. You must do this to complete the meta achievement, For the Children, which is part of the grand meta achievement, What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been, which awards the Violet Proto-Drake mount.

This achievement is hated. Why, you ask? Let me explain.

1. Regular PVPers hate this because the battlegrounds are overrun with people who have no idea what to do and who wouldn’t be in the battleground except they have some objective which isn’t winning the battleground.
2. The amount of griefing in battlegrounds jumps by a force of at least 5. Some people feel compelled to make life miserable for people just trying to get an achievement done, even if they really do not like said achievement.
3. People who hate PVP but want to collect a mount are forced to do something they abhor.

Having spent a weekend helping guild members with this, I’ve seen all manner of extremely poor behavior. On occasion, you’ll find a group of the other faction willing to stand around a flag — Arathi Basin, for instance, capturing a node and letting the other team capture it — until everyone with an orphan out has done that part of the achievement. I did mine in 2011, and I got by with a little help from the Horde, since I’m Alliance.

Nowadays, I would wager 85-90% of the player base has this done or doesn’t care. I watched as people willfully griefed their own teammates because they tried to do a step. The amount of verbal abuse heaped upon people for daring to try was astounding. Hey, those of you who love battlegrounds: I get it. I really do. You don’t like the new players in these battlegrounds. They aren’t invested in winning. They just want to get this done. It’s one week out of the year. Could you cut them some slack and help them get what they need? Then, they won’t be in your battlegrounds anymore, probably ever.

I would like to see this step of What a Long, Strange Trip completely removed. At this point in time, it serves no purpose other than to antagonize the player base. I’m firmly against Blizzard forcing people who do not like PVP to do it. You should play a game because it’s fun. This makes the game an ordeal and colors the whole WoW experience, not to mention angering those who love PVP. It’s not fair to them either.

So the discussion questions for today are: How do you feel about School of Hard Knocks? Should it be removed from the game? Are there any other achievements which don’t work anymore and which could be removed?