Why once difficult achievements sometimes need to be demoted

A WoW.com breakfast topic get me thinking about mounts recently. The topic discussed how getting a mount used to be a major achievement, whereas now we get our first mount at level 20 and our epic land mounts at level 40, neither of which requires an exorbitantly large investment. The writer of that topic asked whether we should go back to the days when getting a mount (especially an epic mount) was a real achievement, rather than being treated as a necessity. While I did comment on that post, I want to give the topic some more attention here.

As much as we may miss the days when having and epic mount meant something special, times change. Sixty is no longer the level cap, and there are no longer two levels of riding skill. New challenges have been added (like buying artisan riding skill, a.k.a. epic flying), and new challenges will continue to be added (like being able to buy an upgrade for all of your epic flying mounts that makes them fly at 310% speed, one of the features coming with Cataclysm). Achieving these new achievements is often contingent on achieving those old achievements first; for example, you need to buy journeyman riding (epic riding) before you can buy expert riding (regular flying) and eventually artisan riding (epic flying). This is where things can get problematic.

If you have been playing since before Burning Crusade, and you were one of those who worked hard to save up money for your epic mount (regardless of whether or not you got it), then think about all of the effort you had to put forward to get it. Think of all the time spent saving up money, all those days watching your gold slowly grow, until it finally reached that magic number: 1,000. Remember how good it felt? It's memories like those that make us nostalgic for those days and that make you wish getting an epic mount were the achievement it used to be. Now think back again. Remember all of that effort that you put in to getting your mount? Let's imagine that nothing had changed, that epic land mounts were still as difficult to get as they used to be. However, epic land mounts aren't the final goal of riding skill any more. There are now two more levels of riding skill that can be purchased after getting epic riding, and they themselves are also difficult to acquire. Anyone who wished to have a flying mount, let alone an epic flier, would need to put forth the effort to get the epic land mount first, then put forth the effort to get their regular flier--which, unless you were a druid, was no joke in the olden days of Burning Crusade, when dailies were only available to those with flying mounts--then put forth the effort to get the epic flying mount (which really wasn't a joke). Had nothing changed, the sum of all the effort would border on the effort needed to obtain Insane in the Membrane, and the number of people with epic fliers would probably be in the double digits.

This would have been problematic, for Blizzard designs the game under the assumption that most dedicated players have epic flying, and that most high-level players have flying in some form (epic or not). That's why the mounts rewarded by the harder meta achievements and the rare-drop mounts are epic flying mounts; if epic riding were as difficult to get today as it was before, those achievement mounts would probably need to be land mounts. Having epic riding be as difficult to obtain as it used to be would also create the problem of Blizzard being hesitant to design content with flying in mind. After all, only those who have epic riding can purchase flying mounts, so that would be a fairly small portion of the WoW population. And considering how rare players with epic flying would be, think of what would have happened to Netherwing: either it wouldn't have rewarded awesome drakes, it would have been highly under-experienced by the player-base, or it just wouldn't have existed. (For the record, my Onyx Netherwing Drake is one of my favorite flying mounts, so Netherwing never existing would have made me a very sad panda.)

In short, WoW is not a static game; new content is released, as are new challenges, and when those new challenges require the completion of previous challenges before they can be tackled, those old challenges need to be demoted to allow more players to take a crack at the new challenges. That's why things that were once points of pride sometimes need to be demoted, so that players can experience the new content even if they don't have the same head start as those who got there first.