News on the work, I’ll keep updating it in the next hours as I form up opinions.
Kalgan answers many questions about the criticized “Honor System” that is supposed to give World of Warcraft’s PvP a new depth. With the new informations it’s now possible to narrow and deduce a more precise model and see if and how they solved the most criticized parts.
My previous (strongly negative) comments are: here, here, here. Plus two solutions I suggested: here and here.
For how I undestand it the Honor Points should behave like a “fall off” on a equalizer display. Think to those colored bars on an audio equalizer that jump quickly as the volume increases in a moment but then “fall” more slowly, lagging behind. Or like drops of water splashed on a vertical surface: they quickly move up to then slowly glide down.
The biggest news: there’s a “rating system” that they are still keeping hidden despite it’s the main part of this puzzle. They never talked about a rating system before, nor they explain now clearly how it works. We just know that the total of honor points will be “rated” and this value will be compared and proportionally corrected with the current rating (weekly). The rank (so the relative reward) will then depend strictly on the rating.
(about honor “decay”)
This is a misunderstanding as to how the honor system works. There is no true “decay” there is only a percentage correction between your current honor rating and your new rating. This is because honor points behave more like a rating system.
Rank changes as a percentage of the difference between a player’s current honor rating and their current week’s honor rating. However, in order to give players a cushion for “off weeks” the correction is substantially faster when a player is increasing their honor rating than it is going down.
We feel that since pvp is inherently competitive in nature, the system that rates and rewards players should also be a competitive system and not another leveling system. A rating system helps make it possible for players that enter the game years after the system go live to “catch up” to other players.
The rest honor points system: Kalgan explains that each week a bonus pool will be reset for everyone. This means that *all* the players, catasses or not, will have a threshold of bonus points (probably letting you earn 200% of honor points, like the exp bonus currently in the game), once the pool is used-up the honor points will lose the bonus till the week after, when the pool is reset.
Now. What is the sense of a bonus given to everyone equally. Can it still even be considered “bonus”? While a catass will systematically take advantage of it, the casual player could even finish to not use it completely. So the gap increases instead of decreasing. This bonus doesn’t make it more thin, it works more like an “elevator” to bring quickly the players up till a set level to then leave them on their own.
The result is, once again, a confirmation of the two ladders. Till the sixth rank available for everyone, from the sixth till the last for the pure catasses.
The requested features that would make the system a bit more interesting are all dismissed at this moment:
– No guild ranking or involvement in the system
– No goals to accomplish outside the battlegrounds
– No public ranking system and ladders
– No dynamic rewards (like suriviving many encounters, fast kills and so on)
The biggest flaw is that in the whole game the guilds are still just a shared chat, a tabard and nothing else.
