The achievement system in WoW is pretty cool: A light show and grats from guildmates/bystanders, and sometimes a title/item. The problem is, the rewards are rarely of any value beyond aesthetics (mounts aside). In a game where your only choice for advancement is to work your ass off for minor item upgrades, I think there’s a lot of room for improvement in the achievements system. There’s really no reason that the rewards from achieving something to be so useless/ineffective.

A Solution: Cooler achievements, Cooler loot

Yeah, this one’s pretty obvious. If the problem is lack of rewards that affect your character, add rewards that do so.

Learn new abilities. For example, take the trinket for teleporting to respective sides in Alterac Valley. Maybe after so many kills/wins/losses you’ll gain the achievement “Don’t tell me where to go!” with a new skill in your general tab “Teleport: [Dun Baldar/Frostwolf Keep].” Another example might be a passive skill to add 1% to some gathering proc rate. Maybe killing bosses will give additional hate rating on a diminishing return basis: 10=5hr, 25=10hr, 50=15hr, 100=20hr, etc. Of course, you’d have to scale that by level, but it’s a solid example – call it “Not you again!”

Loot quest items in the mail. I’m not too hot for this idea – I’d rather see characters advance by ways other than loot – but it’s still a valid solution. Gaining certain achievements should send you a quest item that you could turn in somewhere to claim a reward. Maybe if you pickpocket 1000 items, you’ll get mail from Ravenholdt (another rant entirely) with a quest item that you can turn in for some cool gloves with a property to increase pickpocketing range (like the glyph). Get creative with it.

Access to secrets. Maybe there’s a secret room in Dalaran for people who’ve completed every heroic dungeon, a room where they sell discounted Emblem of Heroism items (like 10% discount). Maybe completing all the lore-related quests would grant you access to a library with all of the game’s books – nothing you can’t do anyway with legwork, but all in one place. Little secret locations /exclusive content that anyone can get to with a bit of work, but make you feel like the achievement was really worth the effort.

I’m sure that all the Blizzard folks can think of even more enjoyable rewards if they can get over the “achievement rewards should not affect gameplay” nonsense they seem to have in the rulebook. You can always disable the bonuses in arena if the character advancements are a threat to the (laughable) PVP balance.