Since February 5, the “Love Is in the Air” event has been running in World of Warcraft. This year, there is a new achievement where you are supposed to support local craftsmen. However, it costs quite a lot of gold and brings … nothing. Fans are confused.
What is this achievement?
- The achievement “Support Your Local Craftsmen” is an event achievement for the “Love Is in the Air” event.
- For the achievement, you receive 10 achievement points. Nothing else, at least nothing that is currently known: neither mounts nor other cosmetics.
- The event runs from February 5 to February 19. So you only have 2 weeks to secure the achievement.
Why do I need 70,000 gold? That is the requirement for the achievement. However, you cannot donate 70,000 gold at once; instead, you have to donate 10,000 gold over 7 days.
At least you do not have to donate the gold on consecutive days; you can space out the donations. Still, you only have a short time for the achievement. You can find the corresponding NPC from the Craftsman Consortium outside of Stormwind or Orgrimmar.
The event is also the only source for the Love Rocket mount, which now has a completely different name. It is among the rarest:
“Filter for People Who Are Foolish Enough to Pay a Token for It”
The decision to introduce such an expensive achievement has been met with mixed reactions. While 70,000 gold is not as much as it used to be and quite easy for most players to obtain, it is still a significant amount for 10 achievement points.
On Reddit and elsewhere, comparisons with the WoW token quickly arise. This provides game time for gold or gold for real money. For 20 €, you currently get 333,866 gold on EU servers (as of February 5).
This means you would pay around 4 euros for the achievement. On US servers, it would be even more expensive, as the token is traditionally much cheaper there. The historical low price there is only 17,907 gold (via wowtokenprices).
However, the idea seems to fit into Blizzard’s notion of taking gold away from players again. This came up earlier this year when a new vendor with absurd prices was introduced.
Whether the achievement really offers nothing other than the points cannot be confirmed 100% yet. At least so far, there seems to be nothing that is connected with it, and there are still several other cosmetics to unlock, such as roses that you can carry in your mouth and new mounts.
Other players believe that the achievement may become important later on, if only for fun. In 2 years, they might find out that you need this achievement to get a “secret toy that dispenses heart-shaped coins” for the “peasants” who didn’t have enough money.
That Blizzard is at least counting on players finding things much later would not be very surprising. From the previous expansion Shadowlands, for example, one of the last hidden items was only found now, 2 years later, and that was only because 6 people with a rare toy were sitting in the right spot.
