It’s nearly a full year that I rant against this system and now everyone else finally finishes right into it, gladly or not. Again, as for SOE selling out, there isn’t anything “new” for me. I already commented extensively my point of view and I just regret to have put too much confidence in Blizzard’s designers. I decided to wait till the very last minute to see if they were able to understand and solve the basic problems. Pulling an ace from their sleeves. Well, it seems I’m still not jaded enough.
In a more recent post I was expressing the worry about the shady part of the Honor System, specifically the ranking (because, you know, the reward is the whole point as much “fun” is, or should be, the core of a game). Blizzard never revealed the actual mechanic about how the ranks are achieved or lost. So I waited them to actually announce the rules. I waited and waited, now the system is active and I’m still here waiting them to explain how the fuck it works.
How the fuck it works? Who knows.
They are keeping what matters hidden. But it happened the same with the “meeting stones”, I discussed them a lot before their release, for example on QT3 and all the players attacked me saying (and inventing) how they would have worked. What happened? It happened that there was NOTHING behind and those “meeting stones” were effectively *retarded* design.
So what about this honor system?
See? I saw that coming as well. We have a reward system but we do not know how it works. Speculations and nothing else. Wrong impressions. We know it’s “Catass For the Win” but we don’t know to which degree. Everything coming from Kalgan seems completely naive and approximate. I’d say again that they are hiding something, but it’s rather obvious now, even for someone tremendously gullible like me, that there’s nothing. It’s really that retarded.
A rather interesting thread popped up on the official forums:
We realize that the Honor system has been a very hot topic as of late, and that many of you are concerned with the effect it will have on your overall game play experience. As a result, the Community Team has requested a meeting with our lead designer Kalgan, who is responsible for heading up the Honor system. Below are a few of the questions we plan to ask. Answers to these questions should be provided before the week’s end.
Very good questions, go check them. They aren’t comprehensive of *all* the problems and holes in the system, but they are a good start. I’m really curious about how this Kalgan guy is going to answer because this time those questions are direct and not easy to dodge with some superficiality and empty propaganda based on thin air as the last time. I’m curious because here I really do not know what to expect. Is he going to admit that the system doesn’t work and they’ll need to rethink it? Is he going to dismiss the arguments saying that they are working on the problems the best they can? Is he going to say that it so absolutely wonderful so go spread the love? What I know is that this time we do not have some sort of promise of answers to explain and solve everything somewhere in a distant feature. There’s a term, on Friday evening we will probably receive them (if they do not pull an excuse like “due to the sheer amount of the questions we decided to posticipate the Q&A”), it will be interesting to check back, see how it goes and draw the conclusions.
On Q23 I defended my position saying:
If there is, somewhere, a designer that doesn’t care to dissect and analyze a system *before* delivering it to the players, he should be fired ASAP.
I’ll laugh my ass off if Kalgan will answer those questions with: “Hey, we just threw a bone to see what will come out.”
But, concretely, my early warnings were correct. What I described is now absolutely evident. Maybe the only objective consideration that everyone agrees with. The opinion is whether it is good or not, mine is that “it’s not”. The reason is that I liked what I was playing. I loved the PvP servers and I know that, now, what I loved is simply gone. Wiped. It was already something just hinted, a timid beginning of an interesting design idea and fun gameplay. Not so easy to spot and recognize as good. Now it’s all gone, havocked. There’s nothing left. Soon noone will ever remember that there was the profile of something new and different. The game just fell in pointless zergfest, or “fantasy Quake” as other have defined it. For some players this is a wonderful twist.
Should I start again preaching for PvP systems rewarding goals, building deeper structures and purposes, related goals, interaction with the environment? No, it’s pointless. I already tried to explain all that in the best way possible and the result is simply zero. There’s a Fantasy Quake and the players love it. There’s always the good excuse ready: “Hey, it’s the PvP server. What you were expecting?” Me? I agree, I’m gullible. I was hoping for something else but what I know?
The rest is a repetition of my comments on the forums:
The system instead is retareded for a bunch of basic design reasons that I won’t repeat. The basic point is that they should reward a goddamn *goal*, not the free ganking. They weren’t able to grasp this concept and decided to go after DAoC model without following it in its fundamental elements (the frontiers). It’s retarded and it makes no sense to “test it”. If they have designers they need them to work. Not demonstrate how clueless they are. This system is NAIVE. As naive was Blizzard approach on many other parts that they screwed. Meeting stones? Raid mechanics? Server balance? Population balance? 24h clock? Local server?
It’s true that the zergfest will settle down, and by a good margin, I believe. But this will mean that the players will start to spread around more and form smaller gank groups instead of concentrating on just a few chosen spots.
This will happen as the players will understand that these zergfest bring no points. Since this awful system doesn’t give ANY feedback it will take some time before the players will figure out how to grind it at best.
What you see *right now* is the result of players being clueless about what matters and what doesn’t. They only see honorable kills in the UI and the feastest way to pile up them is to zerg. As they understand the actual *value* of those points, they’ll also learn how to optimize the process. The zergs will disperse and the “professional ganking” and “stealth wars” will begin.
Let’s just say that what is happening NOW is the result of an awful UI giving wrong feedback. When this problem will be overcome by the players you’ll actually see the scope of the clusterfuck of a retarded PvP system.
The very basic point that not many have noticed is that the insane amount of zerging we have right now is produced by the lack of feedback. The players have absolutely no clue about how this rank system will work. I do not mean the abstract level of the design, I mean the concrete, personal level. The patterns that each player will follow while playing it. What they can see right now is a simple panel on their character window with the number of “Honorable kills”. That’s all they concretely have. It’s all the feedback that the game is offering.
The result is that the players are chasing that specific pattern. They check the honorable kills and want that number to rise, following exactly the pattern of well-known treadmills. The “zerg” is simply the most optimal pattern to pile up honorable kills. At the end of the day you’ll have the impression to have achieved something, but is this real? Is this going to change when the players will realize that it’s not working?
We know that these kills are just an illusion, the actual points will come from different mechanics but, again, the players cannot and won’t be able to receive proper feedback about what matters. The system is already broken at this level. With the time it may happen that the players will start to behave differently, realizing that in a zerg they are losing time instead of optimizing their gain.
But will this be easy to understand? The system won’t provide any feedback. without any kind of feedback it’s simply impossible to optimize a pattern and learn how to play. Another basic design rule. At some point the ranks will be distributed but the players won’t know “how” or “why”. They won’t know the specifics. It’s like a miracle. Peoples will get promoted while others will fall behind and feel frustrated because they didn’t expect that. It’s a blind game, you know you just have to grind it as much is possible and nothing else. No feedback, no gameplay. Just grind and time-to-sink.
The result could be actually good. The players could simply stop to tolerate such pointless system and reject it as something too alienated, distant, not comprehensible. They could just chose to ignore it and go back to play the other parts of the game where they can receive a proper and “readable” feedback.
Previous blatherings:
– (fears about) Emergent behaviours in WoW’s PvP (to vanish) – About the old PvP servers and their (now) lost qualities
– PvP honor system – In the toilet – About the worst nightmares being confirmed
– PvP honor system – Catass SUPREMACY – About the Kill On Sight becoming the trend of a pointless system
– PvP honor system – The rank system – About the “goodnight” to the casual players and the retarded rank system
– PvP honor system – An idea about dishonor – My suggestion for a dishonor system
– PvP honor system – How it SHOULD work – My ideas about how the whole system should be put together
– PvP honor system – Rated honor – More guesses about how the rank system will work
– PvP honor system – Latest critiques – About the inconsistencies in the Honor/Rank system
