World of Warcraft Honor System Live 121
Available now from the World of Warcraft Patch servers, the Honor System has been put into production. The Patch Notes are available on the official site and besides the Honor System includes new art, bug fixes, and new live events in Kalimdor and the Gurubashi Arena. There will also be, starting in May, a "Children's Week" celebrated in Orgrimmar and Stormwind. "It is a time to give back to the innocents of war: the orphans!"
Re:It Will Be Interesting... (Score:3, Insightful)
I play on a carebear server, and that is the way it is supposed to work (but maybe with rude gestures sometimes instead of just salutes). I imagine on a PvP server, if the honor system discourages that behavior, then it will have worked as intended. I wonder if it will significantly increase PvP on the carebear servers too? I hope so. I also applaud the PvP toggle, so that you can turn it on and leave it on, if you were in a PvP mood. I hope it still has the 5 minute cooldown before you can turn it off after combat, though.
Re:Not looking forward to this... (Score:4, Insightful)
Having said that, I think it's perfectly valid to reward the hardcore players for their efforts as well. The gear and perks you can acquire in the PVP honor system are pretty cool, granted, but they're hardly essential to your continued enjoyment of the game. There are people out there who play WoW for 40 hours a week or more, and I think it's fully justified to reward people who put a lot of time and effort into the game with some unique items, benefits, and perks. Simply letting them get the stuff everybody else will eventually get as well, only faster, just won't hold a player's attention. Bear in mind that it doesn't actually take that long to reach the level cap at 60, especially if you're a dedicated player. Until now there hasn't been much of a mechanism to keep players engrossed once they've hit the cap. I think the new honor system should fit the bill nicely without any serious drawbacks to more casual players like us.
Re:It Will Be Interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, people level 50-59 are absolutely screwed. They're going to be hunted down mercilessly. A level 50 player is still green (honorable kill worthy) to a level 60, so that guy is gonna get ganked. Then the ganker is going to call in all his guild mates, and they'll camp him and take turns killing him so they each get an honor kill until the guy gives up and logs. Essentially, once you hit 50 you better either hide in an instance or only go outside with a full raid group until you're 60.
Honor with no Dishonor (Score:4, Insightful)
--There are rich rewards to be had for slaughtering any and all opponents of roughly the same level.
--There are no penalties for slaughtering any and all oppenents of lower levels.
While I realize that there was no discouragment before to stop this.. my priest still bears the scars of Stranglethorn Vale, what many fear this will lead to is roaming armadas of factions farming Honor points by killing everything in sight. I see this being the most likely outcome.
The server populations had already become overrun with NightElf and Undead stunlock rogues. There are more rogues than any other single class, as they are vastly overpowered for levelling and moreover singularly designed for wholesale murder (I used to play a rogue myself, before I retired him out of disgust for the easy win). Now, instead of farming instances and working toward saving money for great items, they can simply take the low road and farm players trying to simply quest and level a little.
Blizzard has done a major disservice to the player community, and I feel the ramifications of this will resound within the userbase as characters are dropped in favor of more rogues. They have already nerfed most of the classes into oblivion and back, this just justifies my belief that Blizzard developers do not play on live PvP servers and see what we see. I suspect that my time will be spent on a PvE server very soon.
Before you fire off a reply with a 'STFU n00b' or 'Cry some more' consider carefully how difficult it will be to run Molten Core, Maraudon, Dire Maul, Stratholm, and the like when you have effectively discouraged most other classes from levelling other than rogues.
Re:Not looking forward to this... (Score:1, Insightful)
"The little cartoon character which I control is now holding a cool-looking shield, and some of the numbers on the character sheet are higher" is not a reward, it's just an interesting event.
Re:Not looking forward to this... (Score:3, Insightful)
These are just ideas and I'm sure smarter people than myself can think of better ideas. They are already advantaged by more drops because they get more chances at them but do they have to have uber gear on top of the already excellent stuff they get?
Part of the reason why WoW was so great is because of the XP bar system. It's made so that even players who play very little still can catch up relatively easily to their friends to quest together. If 4 of my friends have awesome gear and I lag behind in terms of buffing items they'll find it sucks to group with me and I don't want that.
Honor System has "Rest XP" (Score:3, Insightful)
To balance this somewhat, the Honor System benefits from an offline bonus the same way Rest XP does. When you are logged out, you are slowly gaining bonus points added to your honorable kills when you are logged in, the same way you get bonus XP from being logged out a long time.
It can't completely compete with people who can PvP for 16 hours a day, but it's meant to help. You can still get to the middle ranks. If you really must have the top ranks of PvP combat, something we all managed to get along without before they were in... maybe you could use the money you make from working all day to hire some teenaged gamer to fight on your account for you while you're at work! ; -)
Re:Honor with no Dishonor (Score:4, Insightful)
You fail to acknowledge that perhaps this was the intended outcome. The game is desinged around player conflict. The non-PvP or "Normal" servers are designed for people who are not interested (or less interested) in this type of conflict.
You don't hop on a game of Quake and start complaining when people kill you, do you?
Re:Honor with no Dishonor (Score:3, Insightful)
And for every person who says nerf rogues, someone else will say nerf shaman, nerf priests, nerf paladins. Everyone thinks every class is overpowered, when the fact is you're either a good player or you're not.