Zarhym clarifies account-wide achievements

Ghostcrawler did a pretty good job explaining the upcoming account-wide achievements, but some players still have questions regarding both achievements and account-wide mounts, as well. Community Manager Zarhym (@CM_Zarhym on Twitter) further clarified the account-wide achievement and mount system earlier, as well as clearing the air about the question regarding account-wide reputation.

 Zarhym

We don't want to make reputation account-wide. We think that removes too much of the gameplay of having an alt. Harkening back to the blog, the goal is for players to feel free to play their alts. If you have a cool mount on character A, then that might be an issue. Being exalted on character A so that enchants are easier to buy doesn't seem like the same issue. (What I mean is, it's a short step from there to saying character A has better gear so you aren't going to play B).

We can understand where the desire to have reputations function in this way stems from, however. For this reason faction rep is going to work a little differently in Mists of Pandaria and, we think, will feel better for players with multiple characters.

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While we don't know exactly how faction reputation is going to work as of yet in Mists, it's nice to see that Blizzard is addressing the concerns of those with multiple alts. But the biggest question so far regarding account-wide achievements and mounts is what exactly the definition of "account-wide" is. Is it account-wide or Battle.net-account-wide? The wise floating skull cleared that one up for us, too.

 Zarhym

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Hey Zar. Since you're at it, could you guys poke around some of the questions asked on the comments of that article for us?

I'm wondering if it's "wow licence-wide" achievements or "Battle.net account-wide" ones, for instance.

For all intents and purposes, assume that the game doesn't really understand the concept of a WoW license. The account-level achievement system will all be based on the Battle.net account and not each individual WoW license attached to it.

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You heard it, guys -- if you have multiple WoW licenses under one Battle.net account, account-wide achievements will span across all of them. As someone with multiple accounts myself, this is a welcome relief. But what about account-wide mounts? If reputation isn't account-wide, how will that affect using a mount that requires a certain reputation to obtain? Zarhym's got more clarifications on that as well.

 Zarhym

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Will this affect reputations associated with mounts? Say my Paladin is exalted with Ramkahen and I bought both mounts. Will I have to be exalted to use these mounts on my other characters?

The best answer right now is we're not sure. We're still discussing some of these details and honestly haven't drawn final conclusions as of yet. So just keep that in mind as you read on.

For Ramkahen, you'll probably just need to buy the mount once by gaining the necessary reputation on one character, in order to unlock it for all characters on your Battle.net account. The challenge comes with the city mounts. If I have a dwarf today, I have to get Exalted Darnassus to buy a nightsaber. But if the nightsabers become account level, then I should probably just make a night elf rather than grind exalted on the dwarf. If that doesn't feel right, we could "fix it" by making the city mounts non-account level. Or we could let them be account level, but make you require the appropriate reputation to use them. If we did THAT, then it might make sense for all faction mounts to require a rep.

But again, the simple answer is we're not sure yet. :)

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Ever since the days of vanilla, WoW has always required exalted reputation with another faction in order to purchase that mount. And Zarhym's got a good point -- players could simply skip the reputation grind for those mounts and roll an alt to get the faction mount on all of their characters. That kind of defeats the purpose of a reputation qualifier, so I do see where this restriction is coming from.

These days, however, it's incredibly easy to gain reputation through the judicious use of city tabards and dungeon running. Honestly, even if Blizzard does limit sharing here, it really shouldn't be much of a struggle to unlock the mounts for whichever character you'd like them on. In addition to the internal discussion regarding faction mounts, Blizzard is also still discussing reputation-based titles like Diplomat and Exalted. We'll have to wait and see how those are implemented.

Regardless, the news is still very good for those with multiple alts and characters, particularly over multiple WoW licenses. I'll appreciate being able to ride different mounts on both the main I have today and my main from the days of vanilla, who is woefully lacking in the mount department.