Honor System Is Worse: Lovely Work Blizzard

#0 - Sept. 5, 2006, 8:24 p.m.

I played more last week then I have or will be able to for a long time (school is back up and I CANNOT sacrifice my time). I racked up twice to three times the honor that I had made the previous week, a sum that had allowed me to rank up from halfway through Rank 7 to 1/3-a little unnder 1/2 through Rank 8 (in other words, with a third the amount of honor I gained a little under an entire rank). I understand that ranking requires higher and higher amounts of honor per week, but I thought it conceivable that I could reach a full rank by getting three times the amount of my previous week.

It was an experiment. I've been reading many doom and gloom posts about how the instant queues would directly make it even HARDER on casuals to gain rank, but wanted to see for myself if this was actually the case. I mean, Blizzard DID say they were making the honor system less strict and demanding . . .

Sadly it is entirely the opposite of that claim. I barely made half a rank this week on three times the honor of my previous week (much probably could be attributed to the honor bonus to AV this past weekend.) The fact that I will never again have that much time to devote to gaining rank means that my original goal of reaching Rank 10 and acquiring my full Blue PvP Set may never be realized. And this is the BLUE SET. A set that, even were I to undergo the arduous task of ranking further and getting it, would still be trounced by raid epics any day of the week. I mean come on, seriously. This is pathetic.

It is safe to say Blizzard's "designs" towards creating a more relaxed honor system as a band-aid until expansion has failed. Utterly and completely. Maybe they simply did not take into account just how much MORE honor AFK Bots and Hardcore players sharing accounts could rack up with instant queues. Either way it is still more broken then ever.

This REQUIRES further adjustment, Blizzard. It requires further adjustment LONG before the nebulous release of the expansion, especially since it has not even entered Beta Testing yet. Please, even if you dont respond to this post with blue text, take it to heart: this is simply terrible, especially for those who have come so far only to be denied due to unforseen complications to a suddenly oversaturated BG environent.

Drysc

#46 - Sept. 6, 2006, 3:53 a.m.

The impact the cross-realm battlegrounds are having is something we're keeping a close eye on. I do want to say that the cross-realm battleground feature wasn’t implemented to improve the current honor system. It was implemented to increase the availability of games, as well as a part of the future matching system. There was indeed a slight adjustment made to the honor ranking curve in 1.12, however with the coupling of the cross-realm battlegrounds it made it much harder to actually see any tangible change.

Much of what I have seen concerning the perceived impact the cross-realm battlegrounds has been based on a comparison of the honor system before and after the cross-realms battlegrounds. Everyone sees the amount of honor needed increasing by huge amounts, they see everyone else with huge amounts of honor, and it's going to require this huge of amount of time investment just to keep the pace they had before. In some cases the general time investment may have risen, however this would be no different than if some new incentive to gain rank was implemented.

The honor system provides a rank relative to the honor of those around you, and the huge amounts of honor that you may see are relative. As your honor requirements climb higher so are everyone else’s, and these requirements are increasing because the average honor gain has increased (or technically, the maximum honor gained), and everyone just shifts upward while staying relative to everyone else and the percentage of players allowed in each rank. The cross-realm battlegrounds have brought more people into the pool of players, which can be said without a doubt, but their impact is entirely relative. We see the change being extremely positive in opening the battlegrounds up to a larger audience of people that either weren’t able or weren’t willing to wait in the queues their realm had.

The idea of an honor system revamp approaching coupled with a rather intense change in the amount of honor coming into the current system, it can make perceptions of the current system skew further. I don't; however, believe that means the cross-realm battlegrounds have made the system worse in any way.