School of Hard Knocks: Turby Gives You Moral Support

Before I start my babbling and rabbling about what could possibly be the most hated achievement in WoW, let me give you some motivation: It Can Be Done!

Would you just look at it!

School of Hard Knocks, is part of the meta achievement for the Children's Week events. It is hidden innocently enough amongst other simple achievements, such as hearthing with your child, or eating candy. This achievement is also so wrong in so many ways, and having saved this achievement as the final one that I needed for the Violet Proto-drake makes it that much more satisfying.

What's wrong with this achievemnent you say? *Chuckles*

In an ideal world, these achievements are "sound" at best. It requires the player to step up and do what you are normally supposed to do in battlegrounds, capture things and everywhere like such as. However, we live in far from an ideal world, especially within our gaming confines.

Occasionally, you may find that a person from the opposite faction is actually HELPING you with your achievement (so you can gtfo their battleground), but that could be rare, and you might as well play the battleground as it should be with slightly shifted priorities.

What's not okay with this achievement is that it requires what some people call "consideration" *GASP*. Most players tend to become so self-interested and tunnel-visioned that they end up preventing their own faction friends from completing their achievement. Though that is not their fault, it is the design of it all.

Let's take a look at each of the 4 objectives.

Arathi Basin: Claim a node. This requires you to (to be the first to) click on an unclaimed flag. The flag click is channeled and you must complete it before you get credit. This objective is simple but could prove to be a challenge if your entire team is spread out all around the map. The ideal scenario would be a small group would head to a flag and you hope that everyone else draws attention from you. OR, you slaughter your foes, and be the first to click the flag, that would be ideal.

How I got this on Truny, was that I ran straight to mines with a small group, slew all the enemies there while standing close to the flag, and clicked it! Turby did not have such luck, it took him a couple runs of AB before he was able to claim an empty flag. Since there are 5 flags around the BG and they change hands occasionally, do this one last.

Alterac Valley: Capture a Tower. This one is hit and miss, and when you think of it is absolutely horrible. Think of how many people are in AV, and think of how many towers there are. 40 vs 4. Given how AV is ran nowadays, most towers do not change hands. If you are lucky, you may find a large group of people exchanging claims. But don't bank on it. I was lucky enough on both my hunter and warlock to claim the first tower that they approached, this comes with a habit of always running to that tower and defending it from my young days.

Warsong Gulch: Return a flag. This requires the opposing faction to grab your team's flag, and drop it, having either been killed or if they are nice, cancelling their flag buff. WSG is one of the BGs where this achievement does not mix well, as self interested players will hang out in the flag room, waiting for someone to drop the flag. Out of boredom, I camouflaged up to the ally base and helped 2 random players click their flag by right clicking my flag buff (after having slewn one of their hunterse for my own achieve).

Eye of the Storm: Capture a flag. As of late, this is probably the single worst objective due to how it totally does not sync with the game play of eye of the storm. EoTs requires each team to CLAIM and DEFEND TOWERS, and ALSO capture flags for more points. What seems to be happening is that EVERYONE will run to the middle area where the flag spaws and start AOE'ing. NO ONE manages to get the flag and the game drags on and on and on and on.

The whole point of the battleground is ruined.

I think I was very very lucky with Turby, in that the group that I joined WAS playing EoTS normally, capturing towers, and also claiming flags. Or perhaps that one group had really really dumb alliance who didn't want to touch the flag at all. About six of us managed to capture flags one by one and return them to our bases with no one on our tails. I saved this one for last because I thought it was the easiest one, and for my hunter, it actually was the easiest one.

However, when I attempted to finish this achievement on Truny.....this was later in the day. And people started to emerge. Essentially, no one captured any towers, and EVERYONE just stood in the middle AOE'ing. I think I managed to grab the flag once, once we managed to slaughter all the AOE'ing mages, but we had no towers to go to, nor was there anyone running with me to re-claim a tower, as they were ALL guarded by the opposing faction.

I queued up with a friend later, and every group, same deal. I reckon it's all due to luck and your group. I shall save this last objective for later in the week, and perhaps my warlock will have a violet drake come Christmas time!

Turby the Orphan Keeper

PS: Also, I am not sure how healthy this achievement is for our orphans with us cursing non-stop???