As everyone might have heard, World of Warcraft will be implemented with an Achievement point system come the WotLK expansion. Now while this might sound like a good idea on paper lets take a look into what havoc this is going to cause people in game.

Sadly like most MMORPGs, in WoW your character was judged one a few things (Most of which don't matter) like what your Rep was with a certain Faction, If you have an Epic Flying mount or not, if said epic mount was a netherdrake, what Race/Class/Spec you chose. But lets face it the two biggest things people judge each other on in the game is their Arena Ranking and their Gear, having a low arena ranking or not being in a full set of the newest PVP gear left most open for major criticism by the horde of morons who describe themselves as "Hardcore". If you were in above a certain ranking you were ridiculed with names like carebear and nub, if you did not have the "right" armor you were told to L2P or Learn to Play (God I hate that saying). Sadly when a game gets as big as WoW does, a certain elitest mentality roots itself into the minds of a portion of its players. Everyone who thinks it matters strives to be looked at as an Elite, looking down on everyone else under them from their mountains of gold and glory.

When the Elite mentality spreads through a game, people start to act different and refuse to do anything with anyone who does not think to the cookie cutter theory of how to do something. It used to be what gear you had, then arena ranking and now sadly the Achievement system will ruin anything decent that WoW had left. Soon people will ridicule others because they don't have X Achievements, or because their points are not as high as theirs. Achievement Points will become prerequisites to joining parties, raid groups or guilds. Those who are not Achievement oriented will be looked down on as "Casual Scum" and will be subject to even more abuse than they were receiving because they wanted to do something other than Arena when they logged on.

Maybe what I am saying is a little over the edge, maybe I am thinking about the worse case scenario. But seeing as what Gamerscore does to some people on XBL I have a feeling it is going to be far worse than originally thought of on WoW.