Hello

My name is Black Phoenix. Many of you may know me, but for those who don't let me introduce myself. My real, non-emo-sounding name is Timothy, I'm 22 years old and live in America.

I've always been a fan of role playing games, getting my start with early computer games such as Baldur's Gate, Never Winter Nights, etc... My personal experience with WoD only goes back to 2006, when I started playing just before the beta ended. I've been a member of the design team for just over a year now, and plan to stick around quite a bit longer.

But, I post this before your inquisitive eyes today not to bore you with personal details, or completely and utterly spill the beans on our upcoming projects (maybe next time), but to talk to you about one of the features we recently introduced on the player realms. Namely, achievements, how they relate to you, and what our plans for the future with them are.

How do achievements affect me now?

Currently, they're really only fluff. Confusing fluff, since they are still in beta, and don't work quite right, yet. Despite how rough they are at this point in time, they have a huge amount of potential, since it can provide you with a nice benchmark of your progress through the game. They also offer us the possibility to add more great features to the game like special titles for great feats or incitement for players to vote or recruit.

On the beta-status note, many of you have noticed that the level 2 achievement is not handed out immediately. Don't worry, you'll receive all level achievements you are eligible for the next time you level up.

Sadly, we will not be able to do anything like this for the dungeon or duel achievements you have missed, as the work involved with it is rather staggering to consider. So sorry, but I'm sure you'd rather us work on things other than handing out medals to every person retroactively.

How will achievements affect me in the future?

We have great plans for achievements in the future. Things like meta-achievements for completing story-lines staged across several dungeons. Or for completing that high level dungeon the hard way, rather than taking the easy route. Or maybe, changing the way titles are handed out.

We do plan on having both easy, almost mundane achievements as well as the harder ones. Most of these are added almost as much for pacing's sake as actual accomplishment. But of course, the rewards offered will be scaled in relation to the task's difficulty, so no medals for just hitting level 5.

Which brings me into perhaps the most important aspect of achievements. We can set some of the more difficult achievements to reward players with a medal, title, fame, or pretty much anything we want to reward you guys with. Don't expect to see any of this type of achievements until we reset Baradar though. It just wouldn't be fair to add these in and suddenly find that half the players who would normally be eligible for the reward can't get it.

A side note about titles, while I'm thinking about it. Current plans for the near future call for players to be awarded titles from achievements, rather than fame. We're also trying to change it so that players can select their titles at any time from a list of titles they've earned in the past. So if you're getting bored of being Ivan the Terrible, you can change it up a bit and try being Ivan, Runs with Wolves, and still have the option of changing back later.

Great things are ahead for WoD, so sit back, get your typing fingers ready, and enjoy the ride. :)

BP, signing out.