A new World of Warcraft achievement has one simple requirement: spend gold. The achievement in question, titled “Support Your Local Artisans,” requires players to drop 70,000 gold into the pockets of an NPC, with the only reward being 10 measly achievement points.
During this year’s edition of the annual Valentine’s Day-themed Love is in the Air event, WoW players can head to one of their faction-specific, holiday-only NPCs and donate a choice of either five silver, 500 gold, or 10,000 gold during each of the days that the holiday is active. To get the achievement in question, you’ll need to donate at least 70,000 gold to the NPC during the 14-day-long Valentine’s Day event.
What’s more is that the achievement is only available for 14 days out of the year, making it relatively rare. The addition of this unabashedly greedy achievement has many players in the WoW community disappointed and questioning the value of what gold is even worth in World of Warcraft anymore.
Players on the WoW forums, the game’s official subreddit, and on community sites like the WoW database Wowhead have all made their voices clear when it comes to this achievement. “I think it’s good to have achievements like this to make you realize ‘oh this isn’t worth it’ and break the urge to complete everything,” one commenter said on Reddit. “I had a lot more fun with WoW when I started considering what was actually interesting to do rather than ‘because it’s there.’”
“We could pay 1,000 [gold] (on top of being Exalted) for a title back in [The Burning Crusade] and now we’re here,” said another.
Some players have gone as far as hypothesizing that the achievement was merely put in the game to sell more WoW Tokens, with their theory claiming that Blizzard would hope for players to simply purchase the gold-giving token with real-life currency as a way to conveniently work around the 70,000 gold obstacle.
To the most hardcore of WoW players, 70,000 gold is a drop in the bucket that can be recouped with just a few days of extensive farming and crafting. But for relatively casual players, 70,000 gold could take a significant time investment to make back.
This achievement was likely added to the game in an effort by Blizzard to take some gold out of circulation, at least temporarily. There have been many instances in WoW’s history where the developers have used in-game systems—for example, the Black Market Auction House—to take gold out of the hands of some of the game’s richest and most dedicated players. By adding an achievement to the game where the only requirement is for players to spend gold, it could, by proxy, stave off increasing gold inflation rates.
WoW’s Love is in the Air event goes live today, Feb. 5, and the Support Your Local Artisans achievement will be available to earn for those with deep pockets until the event goes offline on Feb. 19.
