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!

My thoughts on this world event:

I managed to do all of it solo, apart from the Bouquet of Ebon Roses, which I managed to duo with my husband’s level 80 Warlock. I liked that there was nothing required that needed a full group, or more. I enjoy logging on and just noodling around on my own for a bit

The PVP element was entirely achieveable, although I doubt people liked me joining an Arathi Basin fight, running for the Blacksmith, pitying my Fool and then AFK-ing out. I still don’t like that there is a mandatory PVP element to all these meta-achievements, and I think it breeds bad PVP behaviour, like mine.

Everything was very random – I spent the whole weekend logging in once every hour to see if I could get the items I needed. Thankfully I did (well, apart from the pet), but I’m sure there are frustrated people out there that didn’t.

It needed a lot of bag space, and I ended up with a whole load of leftover stuff. I did think about leaving it in the bank for next year, but last night I came to my senses and just deleted it all!

On the whole I enjoyed the event. Children’t Week next, and having had a peek ahead at the achievements for that I am not looking forward to it. It’ll be the PVP requirements that I don’t do, I’m sure.

I wasn’t needed for the raid last night. The last few raid nights we’ve had enough people for two 10-man groups, but last night there weren’t quite enough, so only one group went. It was a bit galling when my husband was invited and I wasn’t, but my guild is really good at making sure everyone gets a fair shot at the content, and there were healers online who’d not been in Naxx as much as I have, so I was pleased that they got the chance to go.

So as I was at a bit of a loose end, I made a start on the Coins of Ancestry. I found a great list of all the Elders on WoWWiki, and decided to follow it through and see how far I could get. By the end of the evening I had completed the achievements for the Elders of Kalimdor, Elders of Eastern Kingdoms, and the Elders of the Horde. As a bonus I soloed my Strat key whilst I was in there as well I still need to get into a couple of old world dungeons (primarily Maraudon), and then make a start on the Northrend stuff.

At the moment I’m feeling more positive about this series of achievements than I did about the Winter Veil ones. I know some people will find getting into the opposite factions capital cities harder than the PvP objectives, so again, it won’t suit everyone, but I’m hopeful I can get to be “Elder Tiniane”