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What is the Honour System

And more importantly, what does it mean? The basic mechanics, in oversimplified terms, go something like this:

• If you kill a “racial leader”, you get loads; a racial leader is the level 60+++ boss from the lore of warcraft. This is a rare event and belongs to the end-game content folk - see “The Importance of being 60” later on.
• If you kill a player more than ten levels below you, you get nothing.
• If you kill a player who is near your level, you get more honour points.
• If you kill a player who is above your level, you get even more honour points, up to some upper limit.

Now, that alone is mildly controversial for some. Detractors point out that if 20 marauding newbies find you, they can whittle you to death with toothpicks; the advantage is all theirs. For defending yourself successfully, you get nothing. On the other hand, just like in real life, sheep tend to stay sheep, and the number of incidents where this has happened is quite low (in my experience). More often, higher level characters will 'pick on' low level characters for sport - then find those lowbies ganging up on them in response; and even then, fear of higher level characters, especially for those for whom the lowbie character is not an alt - tends to keep them in check. The rules which deny honourable kills for killing characters more than ten levels below you protect the system against any situation in which high level characters can get a reward for actively or passively instigating fights against people who, on the whole, are probably an order of magnitude weaker than the higher level character. If a high level person gets owned by that marauding bunch of newbies, one probably needs to ask what happened that created that situation in the first place, in my opinion.

What Happened When Honour Kills Went Live?

Suddenly, there were rewards for killing players; ganking, which began as a mild problem, went through the roof; everyone killed everyone everywhere. Bodies lay strewn across Tarren Mill and the surrounding lands; and players of lower levels suffered no end of abuse in the Barrens and other locations... while high-level toons stormed their cities, wiping players who wanted to do nothing more than play to get to that level, found themselves unable to do so. Sure, this happened before, but it became a lot more prevalent afterwards.

Today, with general awareness of what the Honor System means having taken hold, you will routinely find high level characters passing low-level characters of the opposing side - without killing them on sight. Level 60 characters continue to kill level 20 characters for sport, but on a much smaller scale. The existence of a reward acts as a natural deterrent; where once people said "They are the enemy" to themselves, and wiped out the lower-level toon (who may be a newbie to the game), they now pass. They still think of the opposing side as the enemy, but with a reward system in place, those people generally no longer feel a strong need to take out characters many levels below them. For new members of the game and the world population, this can only be seen as a good thing.

PvP server populations, of course, are a more aggressive lot. Some came seeking a 'no holds barred' massively merciless experience that they didn't get from other games, even those that promised it. Others came, not wanting to live within the fuzzy and warm safety of the PvP servers that, quite frankly, allow pretty ridiculous things to take place in the name of protecting people from unwanted ganking.

There are two fields of thought on the general dichotomy of thought on the validity of raiding towns by those on PvP servers, however.

• Group 1: Those on PvP servers chose to be on PvP; that means “anything goes”, to some, and any hope of the system “protecting” them on a PvP server should be thrown out the window. The other option is the carebear, or PvE server, where the system tries to protect you from PvP the majority of the time - characters need to do something to initiate a PvP interaction. No “accidental PvP”, as a rule, on those systems. Let them go there.
• Group 2: It is possible for one to not want the ridiculous overprotectiveness of the PvE servers without necessarily wanting a continuous gankfest - I'm here to play Warcraft, see the world, read the storyline, and play a bit of interactive fiction along-side the rest of it. Things which pretty much make it impossible to do that are bad, even when they impinge on the freedom of the PvP system.

And so the people on PvP servers fell into two camps: Those who were strong believed that their strength allowed them to steamroll the enjoyment of other players; those who were weak were griefed and steamrolled repeatedly by the ambitions of the powerful. The powerful generally responded “If they don't like it, they can move to a PvE server”, unwilling to see that the game is still meant to be enjoyed as a world experience, and will not revolve, for all players, around a continuous cycle of zerging townships. The weak? They spent their time in instances, avoiding the gankers, avoiding the most heavily raided areas and all of the content and storyline that went with them. Those who were forced to operate in those zones due to the world's structure - the Barrens - lived under what, for some, felt like continuous raids and empty spaces where once quest-givers stood. For those in the Barrens, the hope of actually questing was over; all that was left was the grind.

Dishonourable Kills vs. Zerging

In order to protect townships from being zerged, and return the accessibility of the content to a sane level, the first major damage to be done to the mindset of “PvP means anything goes” was the system of “Dishonour”; perform enough dishonourable kills, and it wipes out all of your honour gains. Players who wanted to play the game, with an element of PvP but without the huge amount of activity that the honour system imposed on those players by their mere existence in the wrong location at the wrong time (which was pretty much all the time, at times), begged and pleaded for dishonour to do something big.

• Dishonourable Kills will be recorded when you kill civilians.

Players who wanted real dishonour sat around scratching their heads, wondering why - dishonour should have been applied to killing lowbies, in many of their eyes.

For a while, the zergs continued. Eventually, the zerging masses complained that their legitimate raid on town X was accidentally hitting everything that moved, including the civilians, which resulted in those civilians inevitably being killed by the zerg, and the whole zerg getting the dishonourable kill. The ones who wanted dishonour in the first place quickly realised that the only thing that dishonour protected was the town itself; it didn't create a safe haven out of them, just made them less likely to be completely and utterly overrun. On the other hand, it pretty much ensured that, at minimum, most of the quest-givers would be there, so if they did want to play the PvE elements of the game, the quests were there to get and complete without becoming a time sink.

And that was the only true gift of dishonour: The ability to ensure that some NPCs are more likely to be alive, and in an ideal world, to reduce the number of raids on towns with high civilian populations (and therefore, high numbers of quest-givers for the PvE elements of the game). To tune the frequency of raids, tune the numbers and position of the civilian population of the raided town.

The Rise of Battlegrounds; Zergs in Shackles

Then Battlegrounds came forward. Blizzard's real solution to the mass ganking and zerging was to create arenas, special areas, where consensual and constructive zerging was encouraged. The true zergers, who much preferred the free-roaming aspects of just hammering unsuspecting towns full of lowbies (for whom they get no honour for killing, but no dishonour; so get killed, alongside the civilians which do cause dishonour) rebelled against the structure and formulae of the battlegrounds. These battlegrounds solved two problems: Provide a constructive outlet for zerging tendencies in the hardcore player base (and thereby leave room for the “PvP means all out war” vs. the softer “PvP means not demanding consensuality”) while also solving another problem: That of the healer classes.

The healers always get stuffed. 'Tis the nature of a healer that nobody appreciates his work until they're on their deathbed, regardless of whether it's in-game or real-life; and then, should you not be healed in time, you ridicule them. (Yes, I'm a Druid. Surprise. ;) We balance out, in theory, the ability to heal ourselves and others, with our ability to inflict damage. For many of us, the trade-off means that while we're good at keeping alive, especially when in groups, we have an order of magnitude more difficulty killing off opponents.

Enter Battlegrounds, where there's something new:

• Capture the Flag battlegrounds reward the whole team with honour points for successful flag retrieval, and for winning the three flags that completes a round of Capture the Flag.
• Alterac Valley (the mass zerg ground) rewards the whole team with honour points for “teh w1n”. It also places honour rewards on various sub-goals within the map, allowing strategic control and mastery of the map to result in ultimate victory (or, alternately, victory by sheer out-killing of the enemy and calling upon the 'doomsday' rote to deliver a final blow; victory via zerg in its truest sense)
• Each gives you access to items that, like high-level instance zones, grant you access to unique items of power within the game that can only be achieved by performing those actions. E.g., “leet stuff”.

This solved a wide range of problems, in theory. We'll ignore the actual bugs for the moment that make it occasionally unplayable, or that people use to cheat their way to the top - we can assume that those are artefacts of any software development project in use by a population with something to gain from locating and using bugs to their own advantage; arguably, in fact, the reason these games seem so buggy is that there are so many people with such strongly vested interests in finding and manipulating the system - doing so unfortunately provides a reward.

The first problem this solved was a place to have mass PvP, or even PvP on smaller scales, with targeted goals, in environments that again became consensual. A place where the mass murder, shunned by the rest of the system and game world, was rewarded and even encouraged. A place that allowed conquering through strategy or through sheer bloodlust, but in a way that wouldn't leak through to people who didn't actually want to be a part of an unstoppable force.

Axiom 1: The Importance of Being 60

Part of the problem with the system is that viewpoints as to whether or not the system is “successful” falls into two specific categories of player: Those playing the game to get to end-game content, vs. those already playing end-game content make up the first set of players; those playing to get to end game content are below 60; many below half that. They need the cities in order to get to 60 and the end-game content that follows, and want to do so as quickly as possible, as most of them want to do things like fight dragons and see giant creatures made of fire. These people are, generally, in no position to defend themselves against the other set of players: Bored, end-game players for whom the game has become a way of sharpening their sword and honing their power for end-game content; raiding of cities and the like is primarily taken up by people in the “end game content” group.

The play of the one group inherently damages the play of the other if unchecked; those who rely on the content being destroyed by the other players on a repeated basis - or those caught up in that conflict and killed by marauding groups who are much stronger than they - are fundamentally different than the other group. The other group wants to use what they've worked hard for to have fun; often at the expense of those not in a position to stop them, in search of a worthy opponent who can. Low-level players fall into the role of crash test dummy while high level players seek each other out for destruction, flattened on the battlefield by the force of the battle around them.

The lowbie players don't think it's fun, on the whole, to get owned by the marauders; but the marauders, up until Battlegrounds, didn't have anything to do other than high level raids (which takes huge amounts of organisation) and, on the PvP servers, raiding.

Meanwhile, some content is designed to be 'stormed' by the level 60 folks; even though it's generally in lowbie territory. Racial Leaders are generally surrounded by high-level NPCs, but in most cases, result in high attrition of low-end players. The unique problem on this, of course, is the historical problem with Alliance racial leaders being well protected and hard to get to, and the Horde strongholds being less well fortified and full of holes and back-doors to make access more easy. Whether this is a planned part of the lore, a conscious decision on the part of the developers, or just bias is a complete unknown, and not even worth arguing about. Most assume some combination of “lore” (orcs are just dumb, and so put big, unguarded rear entrances on all their best fortifications) and malicious behaviour (they're all alliance scum over at Blizzard, and the ones who aren't don't have the power to prevent their managers from shafting their side), neither of which is a very appealing answer.

Axiom 2: The Importance of Being 13

The next problem is more fundamental: Some people are willing to dedicate an extraordinary amount of time to the honour system, and to the subsequent ranking. The stereotype is one of “13 year olds” who do nothing all day except play Warcraft until their eyes bleed and their ass is so sore they need to sit on an inflatable donut. Never mind that 13 year olds have school, homework, and generally, more social life than most of us adult Warcraft players...

The principal is the same: Some people will spend more time than an “average” player; as long as there are mechanisms that allow people to turn “time” into “honour points”, those people will always be at an advantage.

To get around corpse-camping, honour has diminishing returns; referred to by those “in the know” as DR. It applies to a range of things - spell effects, honour, etc., and it basically means that the more you do the same thing over and over, the less it works. When applied to Entangling Roots, a druid spell that 'roots' you to the ground, preventing you from running away (or, as is more often the case with the healer classes, allowing him to run away from you), the spell will work the first time; it will work less well the second time, and less well the third than that... and if you have items or spells that free you from the root, then the second root happens sooner, and with less effectiveness, until the root does nothing and the person is miles away (or, more often, the root does nothing and now you can't get away).

DR applies to honourable kills; the more you kill someone on a repetitive basis, the less you get - the rewards of killing the same player over and over vanish quickly, leaving those who are reward-motivated without a reward to motivate them to continue.

DR means that while corpse-camping still happens, only some of the people who could will do so. Those who are motivated primarily by rising through the ranks will not corpse-camp beyond the diminishing returns value; it wastes time that they need to spend climbing that ladder - you effectively become a time-sink, should they continue their behaviour. The other type are griefers - people who corpse-camp primarily because they think it's fun to watch you die over and over again. For those people, the reward is your death; the only thing the game could change would be to make you immortal, thereby removing the reward that is your death, or to make the other player mature - something which no game or device known to man is able to accomplish.

Battlegrounds, Honour, and the Axioms

And so we're left with Battlegrounds - which, because its goal is to suck in all those players who would normally be pursuing activities that impede the levelling of the population that wishes to *get* to the end content, does not implement DR. Battlegrounds is designed as the most efficient way of getting honour in the game. The bonuses of a win are big enough to make it worthwhile; the bonuses of the continued killing of other players is there even for the losing side, so it can be no worse than killing people elsewhere (except in situations where DR versus players applies - but the clever man can always prefer to join instances with fresh blood on a periodic basis; anecdotal evidence suggests that this even happens exactly that way, for exactly this reason).

The importance of being 60 vanishes in the battlegrounds, in theory, because it becomes the optimum place to have zerg-style combat against players who are not only capable of defending themselves, but actively willing and interested in doing so - an improved experience primarily because it guarantees a party on the opposite side who is willing to put up a fight. All we are left with is the importance of being 13 - having the will to dedicate a great deal of personal time and effort into climbing that ladder; and the Battlegrounds are the place to do it.

The Unstoppable Force: The Rule of 13

So let's call it the rule of 13: Any system which can be devised which allows players to level will always allow those who play more to level faster.

World of Warcraft is riddled with things that fight this fundamental truth, and attempt to allow a boost to “casual players” that isn't afforded to those who spend more time; in other words, a leg up to those who don't play often to take away the sting of the augmented reality of those that do.

One of these systems is the “Rested” bonus; log out in a city for a while, and when you come back, you'll earn 200% your normal XP for an amount of time that's based on how long you spent logged out, resting. Of course, if you're gone for a week, 200% isn't going to get you to where you would have been had you played every day; moreover, a smart man following the Rule of 13 can make use of this to level multiple characters simultaneously; assuring that he plays each character just enough for the other to always stay just within the rested bonus, and maximise their play by levelling two characters simultaneously, each at 200%, by playing half the time.

Another one of these systems is Diminishing Returns on corpse-camping; this prevents farming for honour from the same people over and over again, and successfully, one might add. However, for the casual gamer, developing and maintaining the skills cannot be said to follow DR; the person who plays more will be better at it. DR therefore does the most damage to those who can kill the most efficiently and with the least risk. It's a successful strategy for cutting down on the number of repeated kills and corpse-camping by those following the Rule of 13.

Even the sliding window calculations of the ranks - designed to ensure that playing for short periods of time doesn't cause a complete and instantaneous loss of rank, and ensuring that heavy amounts of work don't have inordinate effects on the calculation - can be abused by those following the Rule of 13. Fundamentally, a sliding window is just that - a sliding calculation taken over all of the values of your contribution points over a given period of time; max out all the values over the period of time, and you have the I Win button. Not easy to do, but someone following the Rule of 13 has the time to work out the details.

Everyone wants to be God

The problem with a ladder is that there's only room for one at the top. Given a game of a large number of simultaneous players, it stands to reason that a certain number of them will be pretty hardcore; a certain number of those will have enough free time to dedicate; and a certain number of those will do so.

Ranks on the ladder are based on a calculated, mystical sliding window of the number of contribution points - what I've referred to up until now as “honour points” for the purposes of simplification; CPs are granted on an honourable kill, for example, based on your contribution to the death of the affected player. Honourable kills for the week are collected, and your honour score for that week is calculated based on your contribution to those kills. That then is translated, through the magic of the sliding window, into a current honour score for the sliding window, and by sorting all players from the highest to the lowest honour score (as seen from the sliding window), the ranks are assigned.

The majority of players accruing honour are those who want to be on the ladder. There are 14 ranks, from Private (for the Alliance) or Scout (for the Horde) - any scum who happens to have more than a few kills under their belt ends up a private/scout. The rest are all rewards that fall on the ladder; the top position is held by exactly 0.1% of players on the server.

So, if you've got 3,000 people with a current honour score over zero, then you've got a maximum of 3 Grand Marshal players. Fundamentally, that means that it only takes 3 players out of the 3,000 to dedicate enough time, under the Rule of 13

The funny thing is...

That many of the people who are most angered by their lack of rank are those who exhibit exactly the same min-maxing behaviour as those with the time to follow the Rule of 13, but who themselves (either through laziness or simple lack of time) do not themselves spend the time necessary. The gripe that the few are slanting the system away from the many misses the point - it's a ladder, and by definition, that's how these things work - and that no system can provide a solution for this, save one that places no limitation on the number of people who can have a specified rank.

Anyone, ultimately, who is limited from this behavior, and from the Rule of 13, will ultimately claim they are nerfed or gimped by the change; any change which affects the "powergamer" will take "casual" gamers and those following the Rule of 13 alike - it doesn't matter what the change is.

No matter how you slice it...

So let's try another way.

Calculate the sliding window and provide ranks on the mean, not on the peak. Determine the 'point' which makes up the 'mean' of values, and line up the scores. Those with the top 10% of scores on the server get rank 1, etc. down to the halfway mark.

The problem with this is that there's too many people at the top - now there's no value in being there. Moreover, it doesn't satisfy the bloodlust problem - the problem that people who follow the Rule of 13 face is that the rest of the world doesn't just want their hard-earned place, they want them to somehow be punished for following the Rule.

Nothing will. The most you can do is grant the top n scores on the server the high rank, and hope that n is enough to cover all of the people who are madly following the Rule - or have separate ladders for “casual” and “non-casual” players - which won't work because the Rule of 13 can find ways to use that mechanic, again to the disadvantage of the “casual” player.

In the end, all it does is make more room at the top - it does not guarantee that the room will be populated by 'casual' gamers; nor does it ensure that 'casual' gamers will 'feel' that they are being rewarded for their true contribution when others (who are willing to 'work harder') can surpass them.

The Rule of 13 Wins Every Time

The rule is inviolable; he who strives, wins. He who works hardest gains the most. No matter how many game mechanics try to work around that fact, ultimately, it is inviolable; there is a strategy to overcome every game mechanic that attempts to penalise those who play more, and a strategy that those who follow the Rule of 13 can use with any mechanic that attempts to reward those who play infrequently.

Those with the time to min-max not just the numbers on their character sheet, but the rules of the game itself, will always find the ways to use those rules and the game world to their best advantage. I can see no way around this simple fact - and no programmer will ever be able to build a game world that people who follow that philosophy cannot optimise. That is, after all, the problem of real life - spend enough time getting good at any given thing, and you actually become good at it. Crying that other people study harder and blow the grading curve - which is fundamentally what everyone arguing over the ranking system is fundamentally doing, is missing the point:

So long as the grades are given to those who get the highest scores, those who put in the work will get the highest grades.

In Conclusion...

Congratulations to those at the top of the World of Warcraft ladder, regardless of your server - you have truly earned it, no matter how you look at it. And for the rest of us? The system has largely done what it indended: Gave us a place to go when we want to, but frees us to finish up the long and arduous task of levelling without ending up under the feet of those who wish to fight out end-game elements in the Honor System. And it's done so in a way that rewards us for defending ourselves and engaging in PvP which doesn't require that we live under the continuous tedium of mass ganking and zerging that was so common before the creation of Battlegrounds - a simple truth lost on those who have already hit 60, and who do not depend on the content in the world leading them on through progressive levels towards end-game content. Congratulations, also, to Blizzard, for a good compromise solution that keeps the most important elements of PvP while virtually eliminating the worst social aspects of it.

I have watched, in horror, as various people in Blizzard have tried to bring the trade-off into the attention of those who criticise the current system; and on the whole, people are unwilling to budge. Either the system is too harsh, and should be loosened to allow the behavior that was possible before Citizens went into cities and Dishonorable Kills existed (which is a boon for high-level characters, but limits the growth of low-level characters who are often forced to level in areas rife with this kind of violence and ganking) or who want some kind of restriction placed on those following the Rule of 13 (who, given the opportunity and the free time, they would likely be following themselves).

The system is "unfair". All systems are unfair - in that they are not perfectly fair. However, it is not maliciously unfair, nor is the trade-off that has been created a terribly unbalancing one.

Additional Comments

I've said a few other things on the subject in follow-up postings.

The Original Post: CM/Devs: Why I like BG/Honor System As-Is

Suggested Changes (based on my comments)

Suggestion 1: A Bounty System (Griefing Control)

Suggestion 2: World-Wide Battlegrounds Playoffs

Others as I spot them. If you notice one, feel free to drop it to me in e-mail, or post the response.