So I'm here watching the finals of the U-20 Women's World Cup on ESPN3 and I decide on halftime to hit GiantBomb for a bit. That's when I see the current achievement event on the site:

Next Class

You'll earn +5000 bonus XP if 6000 users complete this set this week. Sponsored by Best Buy™.

Lord in heaven, really? Now the achievement system in Giant Bomb is itself flawed, as it makes people do things that offer nothing to the community, a point that one of my favorite bloggers on the site, Symphony, makes a point of in talking about why she backed out of doing user reviews. However, sponsored achievements go one step further. In particular, I have a concern with the “Late Night Cram” achievement.

Last Night Cram

Here's a clue

Procrastination is made easier with the right tools. Click this link to check out Best Buy's Next Class of laptops for your college needs.

Now if you don't understand the issue just yet, allow me to point it out. The achievement unlocks by clicking the link to see a full-page advertisement. In summary, Giant Bomb, as an organization, has decided that it would be a great idea to tie receiving advertisements to your XP. If you ask me, this is beyond slimy.

Now some of you may say “why can't you just ignore that stuff?” and fair enough, it's easy to brush off, but there are people who won't be able to resist the allure of quick XP. We already see forum spam from people trying to get quests done on the site. What happens if Giant Bomb decides to put in a quest along the lines of “extol the amazing goodness of Drank. Talk about Drank on the off-topic forum!” We know the off topic forum would then be full of idiots going off about Drank, or just mentioning it in the header of unrelated posts. Or how about an achievement for downloading a toolbar? Even if I didn't partake, it becomes entirely possible that I might be subjected to mail spam, viruses, or other random nastiness because an associate of mine put some obscure eastern European company's toolbar on their Firefox program for the “ Think Russian!” achievement. Of course, it's easy to assume it won't happen. I'm sure most of us, however, didn't think they'd be handing out XP for clicking on ads.

I just hope this isn't the start of a new and shady era here on the Bomb.