There’s been a lot of commentary regarding the Children’s Week achievements, and I don’t have much to add. I didn’t complete the meta-achievement, and the one achievement that prevented me from doing so was “School of Hard Knocks”. Unlike a lot of people, I already have incomplete World Event achievements, so that Proto-Drake is never going to be mine. Thus I didn’t even try to complete this one.

This particular PVP requirement was always going to bring out the worst in people. There are stories of people co-operating to get it done, and other stories of people deliberately setting out to kill anyone with an orphan out on the Battlegrounds. Personally, I have no idea how the Battlegrounds work, I don’t know where to go or what to do to “cap” or return a flag, and I wasn’t going to start now. One very kind Guildie who knows more about PVP than I do did very kindly offer to run me through the Battlegrounds and “show me the ropes”, but now that my playtime is more limited I have far more things I’d rather be doing with my online time. But the offer was very much appreciated

Perhaps my lack of Merrymaker title allowed me to be a little more relaxed about this one. I felt hugely frustrated at Christmas-time when I did fail to achieve the title. The main cause of frustration was the PVP element, which I did try for. So I do sympathise with all those who tried and failed for this one.

I do think, however, that if Blizzard were to remove the requirement for School of Hard Knocks it would make this World Event achievement trivially easy. Nothing else in here was difficult or time consuming, unlike the others. It could all be completed within a few hours. I suppose I am lucky in that I am a member of a guild that runs instances quite a lot, and I managed to join an Utgarde Pinnacle group that blasted through on Normal mode just to get the achievement. I’m sure some people found that one as difficult as I find the PVP.

I will still like Blizzard to find some way of making some of these achievements not require PVP. I’ll reiterate again the suggestion made by Renata on the World of Warcast podcast – how about making it a requirement to complete all but one of the achievements, allowing those who don’t want to PVP to skip the PVP one, and those who can’t PVE to skip the instance one? It seems that Blizzard are trying to make the World Event achievements span the whole range of WoW content, and there are a lot of players who do not want to experience that whole range!