How many achievements is too many?

Ah, achievements. Some of them we love. Some of them we hate. But you can’t argue that they didn’t change the way we play the game back when they were introduced in Wrath of the Lich King. Personally, I find it hard to remember a time without them, but maybe that’s because I’m not currently playing Classic. There’s just something viscerally satisfying about seeing that notification pop up on your screen, especially the sound effect, and getting a “Grats!” from your guildmates.

That said, there sure are an awful lot of them. I don’t know about you, but I used to be quite the collector back in my young whippersnapper days, and the addition of achievements were like chum in the water. When I took the time to grind out Insane in the Membrane, some of my guild friends officially, and lovingly, dubbed me an achievement wh0re. Frankly, though, I’m not sure I could do that again these days, and not just because I’m Old now. There are just so many of them these days. With your average console game, getting 100% of the game’s achievements is a tough, but doable challenge. But with over 40,000 achievement points available in World of Warcraft, typically in ten-point chunks, that’s a lot of ground to cover. Can you imagine being a new player in Dragonflight, getting your first achievement, and wanting to chase that rush to 100% completion, only to find out it will take you literal years of work? Talk about daunting.

Still, there are players who have done it. The first recorded instance of a player collecting every achievement available at the time was back in 2014, in Mists of Pandaria (the original, naturally, not the remix) by a player going by Xynpko. It happened again in 2018, when a player named Xirev acquired all the achievements available during Legion. And then Annie Fuchsia did it once more on the very last day of Shadowlands. There may be others that I’m missing, but suffice to say it’s a small roster. The task clearly isn’t impossible, but for a game system that’s designed to get you wanting to earn ever-more achievements, one could certainly make the argument that there are just too many of them for that to be feasible.

What do you all think? Is the Sisyphean nature of the task part of the point? Or should the newer players be given the chance to achieve their dreams?