Who didn’t see this coming? Come on.

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.

I’m actually surprised because I expected a MUCH more significant “nerf”. Even if I also know that this relatively easy phat loot is going to last just another few weeks (a transitory, deliberate “carrot” to keep bored players interested after the delay of the expansion release), as things will change considerably when the level cap will be raised (I suspect that the level 70 PvP items will have much, much higher prices).

I actually hate the way they did this. If something doesn’t work as designed then you block it as quickly as possible. You warn the players right away and inform them that things were expected to work in a different way. You don’t let the players exploit it for a week. I HATED when in DAoC there was a design mistake with the spellcrafting that allowed to craft powerful cloaks for a very low price. EVERYONE in the game rushed to craft hundreds of cloaks. People on the forums asked continuously to Mythic if this “exploit” was tolerated or not, but Mythic never cared to answer, while just everyone kept exploiting at will.

And I was the rare “righteous” player who had faith in Mythic to stop all that. I didn’t made my own cloak because I thought Mythic was going to fix the problem. Instead when the problem was actually fixed they just said that cloaks couldn’t be anymore spellcrafted, but all those that were made in the meantime were tolerated. And I was happily fucked. Because I don’t like exploits and I expect them to be fixed promptly.

And I HATE that even in this case Blizzard DIDN’T SAY A FUCKING THING (actually they did say something, see the edit below) before they went and patched the issue. Of course, think what could have happened when the players discovered that it was the golden week of honor points with a +30% bonus.

If anything it’s just another demonstration that Kalgan cannot get his shit right. He just cannot.

EDIT: More drama. This whole thing just doesn’t convince me. I think it’s not over yet, expect more. Cosmik also has a good summary. For two days the blogosphere is resurrected!

EDIT-2: Comment stolen from FoH:

Premades were plowing over pugs all day. They probably got 50k-100k honor last week. I wouldn’t be shocked if some got even more than that. I’m sure there were some hardcore catasses that got that much just joining pugs.

So basically they nerf honor because of those people. The problem is those people just got the honor they needed for pvp loot so this nerf doesn’t effect them. Blizzard just nerfed the fuck outa casual players or other players who can’t/won’t join a premade pvp group.

Yeah, that’s actually similar to what happened to me in the example from DAoC I brought.

The message is clear: when you see something odd… EXPLOIT THE HELL OUT OF IT TILL YOU CAN.