On Obligatory Congratulations

Those of us who are in a guild of any size have all seen it many times:

[Guildy] has earned the achievement [Completed a Dungeon]!
Grats!
grats
congrats!
rats

[Guildy] has earned the achievement [Level 80]!
Whoo!
Grats!
*throws confetti*
*commits indecent exposure*
rats

[Guildy] has earned the achievement [1000 Fish]!
Grats!
grats
I'm sorry.
...grats?

It often feels to me like we're obligated to congratulate someone on whatever set of arcane accomplishments the devs have deemed it appropriate to grant an achievement. Sure, some are very obviously something praiseworthy (assuming that you're a devotee of the game, and not one who thinks it's a giant waste of time). Getting to level cap, while not the chore that it was in vanilla, still takes a fair amount of dedication. So does something like [Superior] or [Epic]. But something like [Professional Journeyman] seems much less so something that I want to congratulate someone on. Really, that's just part of playing the game. It's like getting an achievement for getting to level 2. It's hard to avoid it. But, yet, you still see the congrats roll out.



[tangent] For just a moment, I want to look at the profession achievements. There's one for training each level of a profession...but not one for maxing it out. Seriously, I get told how awesome it is for me to spend two seconds and 10c at the trainer to pick up a profession, but I get no acknowledgment for having made enough items to have gotten 450 points in it? I think that is something congrat worthy. [/tangent]

For a while, I actually had a character-shared macro for congratulations. The first iteration of it made fun of the fact that we congratulate on every achievement. It was something like, "Grats! (This congratulations has been brought to you by the power of macro.)" ...Yeah. I think it annoyed even me so much that I modified it after about four uses to just say, "Grats!" I even fell out of using that. It's almost as easy to type it out as it is to click the button. And uses less screen real estate. But just the fact that it's something that happens often enough and that I felt was enough of a chore that I needed a macro for it tells me that I found it a bit onerous.

Really, I think we've lost something when the whole guild gives you a grats for [Blow Your Nose]. It makes the grats for something like [The Fall of Naxxramas] feel much less epic and satisfactory.