While having achieved my more than a decade in the making goal of obtaining the Headless Horeman’s mount has taken some of the edge off of the event… I no longer feel the need to queue up all five of my level 80s every single day for the horseman… there are still achievements to be taken care of.
Some achievements come more naturally than others…
When I left on at the beginning of the week I had found myself stuck behind an issue that seemed poised to prevent me from getting the meta achievement for Hallow’s End, which includes a title. I had hit the Sinister Squashling issue.
The achievement
To sum up, the problem is that since the Fall of the Lich King patch all pets and mounts are in a shared UI and shared across all the Wrath Classic characters on your account, so you can only claim one of each. But to get the Sinister Calling achievement you have to claim that pet, a drop from the Headless Horseman, something you can now only do once per account.
If, like me, you were running a bunch of alts through the Headless Horseman in order to get that mount, then it was quite possible to claim the Sinister Squashling on the wrong character and lock yourself out of the achievement on your main.
I quickly figured this out once I received a Squashling on my main and opened up a support ticket, to which I received a form letter in response from Blizzard indicating all the different place I could look up achievements like the forums or WoW Head or Google, and declaring the ticket closed.
Now, I have worked in support. I know the need to have a quick general response. I know people will open tickets without giving their issue even a moment’s thought. Surely the first person to even slam down a phone and scream “RTFM!” worked in a support role.
But I also know that a good portion of customers will ignore that informational response with an “I did all that” reply, even when they quite clearly haven’t. When the support person insists that you restart your device on the call even though you said you did that, it is because long experience has proven that at least half of customers are lying when they say that. We shape tech support’s responses with our bad behavior.
Then, of course, there are people like me who have explored all avenues, have literally “done all that,” and have described the problem in great detail, including how it is impacting my ability to get the achievement. I will literally do anything to avoid interacting with support, so when I finally do, I have to bear the brunt of all the ignorance that came before me.
So I re-opened the ticket with a, “No, none of that helps, it is a technical issue within the game…” along with a shorter version of my initial statement. Honestly, I feel like they ought to be parsing for “Sinister Squashling” and “Sinister Calling” before they send out the form letter, given how often it is coming up in the forums, but it is always easier to design a process in your head that you don’t have to support than to actually do that sort of thing on the fly when development implements a feature that suddenly becomes an issue a couple weeks later because they didn’t work out all the possible consequences.
And, after all of that bitching and moaning, I will give Blizzard support credit. They responded to my re-opened ticket in a way that directly addressed the issue at hand:
You did right contacting us, there’s an issue affecting the Sinister Calling and by taking a look at Wilhelm, I can confirm you were affected by it, so I manually added the “Sinister Calling” achievement to your character. Keep up with the good work, and good luck with your journey through Azeroth.
Sure enough, when I logged back in, I had the achievement.
Hallow’s End Achievements
Oddly, in something of a “belt and suspenders” move, they also removed the Sinister Squashling from my claimed pets. That wasn’t an issue. I had half a dozen on my five level 80s waiting to be claimed, so now two of my characters could get the achievement if I felt like putting that much effort into the whole thing. I do not. But I have the option!
Now I have just one more achievement in order to complete Hallow’s End; The Masquerade.
Just one achievement left
Unfortunately, that is one I am way behind on because it requires the cooperation of others. I need to group with somebody else and have them hit me with six more wands.
So far I have Bat
I am probably going to have to hang out in Dalaran in Trade chat looking for somebody to exchange transformations with. Unfortunately, I don’t even have all of those wands yet. I am still missing the Wisp want, so I can’t even trade one for one for all of them. We shall see if I can make it.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 