The Honor Issue - Blue Tracker

#0 - Dec. 12, 2006, 9:57 p.m.

Posted by Drysc 12/10/06, 4:12:27PM CST

Q u o t e:
More than likely the prices will be adjusted for the current honor rewards sometime after the expansion releases to reflect their 'value' more appropriately when compared to expansion items.

That would mean the prices would be going down though, not up.

[edit]Changed original text to indicate that the prices, if lowered, would happen sometime after the release of the expansion and not right when it releases. I wouldn't want to mislead anyone in to thinking that they can save up for release day and spend their honor on newly cheapened items before running in to Outland. Likely that will not be the case.

Posted by Nethaera 12/12/06, 11:24:29AM CST

Q u o t e:
Now that the Before the Storm content patch has been live for the past week, we’ve had a better opportunity to track the rate at which players are accumulating honor, and subsequently how easy it's been to obtain honor rewards. In gauging these elements, we've determined that the effort required to obtain honor rewards is more trivial than we had intended. As a result, during today's maintenance we’ve applied a hotfix that reduced the amount of honor gained by approximately 30%. This change allows the honor rewards to be obtained at rate that better reflects the item’s in-game value.

The reason that we decided to reduce the rate of honor gain rather than simply raise the honor cost of each item, is to ensure that everyone’s time and effort participating in PvP since the patch is not diminished. As this change will only affect future honor accumulation.

A couple of things are being called out here on the forums:

1. The information Drysc posted. The question that Drysc was responding to was in the vein of whether or not the honor cost for PvP gear would ge going up. No, the honor cost for PvP gear did not go up. In a literal sense, Drysc never answered the question... he never said "yes, the honor cost will go up" nor did he say "no, the honor cost will remain unchanged for the time being".

What Drysc did say was that the honor cost may be reduced after the release of the expansion. However, when one reads the answer posted, it is implied that the honor cost will remain unchanged until after the expansion is released, at which time it may be lowered. If Drysc wanted to make this response clear and truly "wouldn't want to mislead anyone", then the answer to the question of whether or not honor cost would be going up should have first been answered, and answered in full.

Personally, I have an issue with the use of the word "prices" in Drysc's post. While the honor cost for PvP gear may not have changed, the "price" for attaining those items has in fact gone up. It now takes longer to attain the same gear that yesterday took less time to attain. Plain and simple.

2. The timeliness of the post. Drysc posted Sunday afternoon and it was taken that the "prices" would not be going up. On Tuesday, the "prices", in terms of time, went up. Some have contended that Blizzard didn't know on Sunday that they would be making this change on Tuesday. The servers went down at 7AM CST on Tuesday... roughly 38.5 hours after Drysc's post. I, for one, don't believe that Blizzard decided to make this change, decided on what the change should be, and acted on this change in that time frame.

So, what we have now are people paying to play this game who feel as though they are being mislead (at best) or intentionally lied to (at worst) in regards to the changes being made to this game. Some have even compared this incident to SOE's tactics. The bottom line is that bad information is not better than no information at all. That, more than the the change itself, is what people are mostly fired up about. People are less emotional about change --- which is a hard enough thing on its own --- if they don't feel as though they were mislead about the change.

And no, the wall of text didn't crit you... :-)

Drysc

#2 - Dec. 12, 2006, 10:12 p.m.

The comment made about honor reward prices being reduced post-expansion was worded carefully as the change is not set in stone. After the expansion releases there is a strong possibility that honor reward prices will be reduced as their relative value will be decreased when compared to expansion items. The wording used was carefully chosen to avoid being locked in to a promise of a change that is a couple months off, not to sidestep or carefully divert a question about honor gains as a whole.

The honor gain change implemented and announced today was a change that was developed within a very short amount of time; after the above statement on reward prices had already been made. In order to save the servers and battlegrounds from unneeded stress it was decided that we would announce the change during maintenance. The post made about reward prices not changing had already been made, and short of announcing the honor gain change itself the post was there to stay.

While the prices of the honor rewards are not technically increasing, the intent of that statement wasn’t to misdirect the question into a specific avenue where something positive could be said. We can’t prove what we know or when we know it, or that our goals are to build a positive community and not to use petty diversion tactics (although this post could be step towards that). You can and likely will draw your own conclusions from the statements made and this clarification, but I thought it important to at least attempt to provide some insight into the events leading up to today, however futile that may be in light of the change itself.

Drysc

#336 - Dec. 12, 2006, 11:13 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Seems to me this is being done to drive away some of the player base to provide server stability.

The decision to announce the change was made to be done during the maintenance so that Monday night wasn't "the last night" and everyone would attempt to PvP as much as possible. I thought the sentence was pretty clear, but I dare not edit it now for clarity.