PVP Question

[Phred]

That and their instance designers are some of the most unimaginative fuckwits I've ever seen.

Guess you never saw EQ's insances then. Or COH's. WoW instances are overflowing with creativity compared to either of them.

[Dren]

That and their instance designers are some of the most unimaginative fuckwits I've ever seen.

Guess you never saw EQ's insances then. Or COH's. WoW instances are overflowing with creativity compared to either of them.

Yes, what instances have you seen that are so wonderful?  I really do want to know.

[Merusk]

What if it was more like DAoC's "I Remain Standing" score.  You take how many Foozle Points the person has earned, divide it by the number of times they were killed in PvP.  Add a bar for entry, like "Must have earned over X Foozle Points".

In this case, Foozle is Honor.

For DAoC it was a weekly thing.  I see no reason why it couldn't be a perpetual thing for WoW.  That way the person with the best win-to-loss ratio is at the top of the heap, not the person with the most time.

See, this would have made infinatly more sense.  Anyone with ANY experience in online RPG-PVP would have sussed that out compared to the current system.  However, I at times wonder if the breadth of 'pvp' experience Tyren (the lead dev) has is limited to RTS and FPS games.  It seems like pure 'kills' or 'wins' are more important than being effective in the group.  In fact, if you're grinding for honor points and are any good at all, joining a group only hurts you because your honor is divided among the group. 

[Hoax]

While I most certainly do agree if the honor system was setup in such a way that it rewarded skill instead of timespent we would still have a thread similar to this bashing it.

Because under a skill system the barrier for entry to get to rank 11+ would be being in pvp+ guild, with top tier gear and the time to sit in a queue already grouped, ventrillo, organization, and just steamrolling all the poor unorganized PUG's (that'd be most of you guys) to create that great win/loss ratio.

[cevik]

Because under a skill system the barrier for entry to get to rank 11+ would be being in pvp+ guild, with top tier gear and the time to sit in a queue already grouped, ventrillo, organization, and just steamrolling all the poor unorganized PUG's (that'd be most of you guys) to create that great win/loss ratio.

I think the sad truth is, when the sample size is large, you are going to be no better than average.  If you just admit your mediocrity and deal with it, you can have fun at these games, but if it constantly eats you up inside that you aren't the number 1 person out of a group of millions, you'll end up spending your life bitching on forums about how fucking crappy the system is because you didn't get teh win.. *shrug*..

[HaemishM]

Seriously, and don't take this as an insult, what's wrong with having game objectives that are only acheived by a few people?  Not everyone should be able to be Grand Marshall nor should anyone be able to beat every part of the game. 

Nothing is wrong with it, IF the rarely achievable game objectives are reachable with SKILL as opposed to just assloads of time. I'm not saying these players aren't skillful, they would have to be. But just having better skills than those high ranked players isn't enough. One must actually put in goboodles and gooboodles of time (which is like asstons squared) just to even hope to do so. Meaning, once again, time played > all else.

[Yoru]

That and their instance designers are some of the most unimaginative fuckwits I've ever seen.

Guess you never saw EQ's insances then. Or COH's. WoW instances are overflowing with creativity compared to either of them.

Yes, what instances have you seen that are so wonderful?  I really do want to know.

Are you talking about creativity artistically or in the actual mechanics? I'm talking about the latter; WoW's art team does pretty well within the constraints of the engine.

I never played EQ, fortunately. I did play COH and they were pretty bad, gameplay-wise, and occasionally frustrating (e.g. hunting for the last glowy in an Oranbega map). COH at least had two objective types in its solo/small-group instances (objective hunt and dude killing); I hear there may be more diverse types of objective hunts now and some neat side-stuff (e.g. prisons), but I couldn't stomach the grind the last time I resubbed.

Of the WoW instances I've been to (all except MC and BWL; I've read a good deal about MC, not so much BWL), the formula has been:
10 put in bunch of stuff that you must clear to eat up time
20 put in boss that drops phat lewtz
30 goto 10

A friend of mine has told me about one encounter in BWL (Razorgore) that sounds kind of neat and interesting, but that content is gated off and requires 39 other people. From what I hear, the boss encounters in MC are more detailed and fun than the stuff you'll see elsewhere, and a handful of the ZG bosses are on the borderline between fun and annoying.

When I say they're unimaginative, it's not because they can't design a decent encounter (which the above shows they can; they just choose to gate most of it off), it's because they fundamentally conceive of a dungeon as entirely 'clear trash'-'fight boss' sequences. The latter can be fun, but I complain because the purpose of the former seems to primarily be to eat up time.

I expect the answer is that trash mobs are a cheap and easy way to add 'length' to a dungeon; I'd like to know what the amount of development time required to produce a decent boss encounter is vs. placement and development of the trash leading up to it.

Because under a skill system the barrier for entry to get to rank 11+ would be being in pvp+ guild, with top tier gear and the time to sit in a queue already grouped, ventrillo, organization, and just steamrolling all the poor unorganized PUG's (that'd be most of you guys) to create that great win/loss ratio.

Actually, thanks to the bonus honor for BGs, the best way to get high ranks is to join (or get friendly with) a big pvp guild and steamroll PUGs in AB, /afking out if the battle setup prior to starting seems to be in your disfavor. A coworker of mine has done the joining part and was describing the latter two parts over morning coffee not 15 minutes ago. He sat somewhere around 100,000 honor this week. The catasses in his pvp guild rake in over 300,000 a week. Excelling in the honor system requires (primarily) time and (secondarily) one out of fifteen people with organizational skills paired with fourteen people who generally just do what the one guy says.

[Merusk]

Because under a skill system the barrier for entry to get to rank 11+ would be being in pvp+ guild, with top tier gear and the time to sit in a queue already grouped, ventrillo, organization, and just steamrolling all the poor unorganized PUG's (that'd be most of you guys) to create that great win/loss ratio.

I think the sad truth is, when the sample size is large, you are going to be no better than average.  If you just admit your mediocrity and deal with it, you can have fun at these games, but if it constantly eats you up inside that you aren't the number 1 person out of a group of millions, you'll end up spending your life bitching on forums about how fucking crappy the system is because you didn't get teh win.. *shrug*..

You don't see those of us in BF2 bitching about it, though.  It's more tolerable when it's a true representation of skill vs a representation of time to catass. I know I'm mediocre at best in terms of skill, however I'm relegated to the bottom of the heap because I don't have the time to invest.

[tazelbain]

> /afking out if the battle setup prior to starting seems to be in your disfavor
why isn't this massive loophole fixed?

[Threash]

Seriously, and don't take this as an insult, what's wrong with having game objectives that are only acheived by a few people?  Not everyone should be able to be Grand Marshall nor should anyone be able to beat every part of the game. 

Nothing is wrong with it, IF the rarely achievable game objectives are reachable with SKILL as opposed to just assloads of time. I'm not saying these players aren't skillful, they would have to be. But just having better skills than those high ranked players isn't enough. One must actually put in goboodles and gooboodles of time (which is like asstons squared) just to even hope to do so. Meaning, once again, time played > all else.

There is very very little skill involved in wow pvp compared to twitch games.  The only skill that matters in battleground pvp is organization, which is very handsomely rewarded.  Time is not all it takes to get high ranks, you need to WIN also.  Obviously the guy losing 50 times a day will be ranked higher than the guy winning 5, but hes still going to be far behind the guy who won 25.  At the highest ranks the honor you get for kills is mostly inconsequential, anywhere from 75% to 90% of your honor comes from the bgs bonus honor so joining a GOOD group will never harm you, even if you are the uberest most "skilled" pvper evah.

This ideal pvper that doesn't have lots of time but can kick ass that deserves to get high rank but can't because of lack of time is pretty much bs. 

[stray]

This ideal pvper that doesn't have lots of time but can kick ass that deserves to get high rank but can't because of lack of time is pretty much bs. 

You play too many mmo's, I guess.

[Threash]

This ideal pvper that doesn't have lots of time but can kick ass that deserves to get high rank but can't because of lack of time is pretty much bs. 

You play too many mmo's, I guess.

I guess just enough to know that there isn't much skill involved in them, yeah.

[HaemishM]

This ideal pvper that doesn't have lots of time but can kick ass that deserves to get high rank but can't because of lack of time is pretty much bs. 

I don't care if this guy doesn't exist. I KNOW I'm not the guy, as I could probably best be described as 'sucking monkey balls at PVP' myself. But I'd like the opportunity, if I was so skilled to be able to be that guy, even if I don't have 3 bazillion hours to devote to the game.

But then, I'm not really talking about MMOG's anymore then am I?

[Threash]

The problem with going with anything that rewards your kill/death ratio or whatever passes for 1v1 "skill" in wow is that the classes are not simply balanced with 1v1 pvp in mind.  In group pvp it doesn't matter if you play the healer role die a lot and get zero kills, you still did your job and if your team won you still got the same reward as the bad ass warrior you kept alive long enough to get 25 killing blows.  As a rogue im glad the paladin healing and buffing me is getting as much honor as me, if he wasn't he sure as hell wouldn't be doing it.  In group pvp skill DOES get rewarded, winning does matter a great deal, solo pvp skill does not mean as much when every johny wannabe hero gets torn down to pieces by an organized group.  This isn't bf2 where everyone plays basically the same guy.

[stray]

Just wanted to update somethin' about my friend real quick (for illustrative purposes):

Last week I posted his stats as

Standing  Name     Lvl     Kills              Rating
------------  --------    -----    -------------      --------
391st       Oo        60     6,770 - 2     11,631


And in one week, he moved to

204th      Oo         60     16,065 - 3   18,864


10,000 kills in a week (and over almost 150,000 honor), moved up over 100 in Standing etc..

But he only jumped 1 rank to First Sergeant. Wtf?


No matter how you slice the importance (or lack of importance) of "killing", you can't deny that that's just *a little* fucked up.

[Cheddar]

Makes sense to me.  There should be limits in place to how fast someone rises in ranks; I would be upset if I spent months PvP'ing and then one day got knocked down in rank because someone catassed his character with his friends 72 hours straight or something. 

[Sairon]

It can never be skill based unless there's penalty for dying, and if there's penalty for dying I'm beting A LOT of people will play like total pussies.

[Threash]

Just wanted to update somethin' about my friend real quick (for illustrative purposes):

Last week I posted his stats as

Standing  Name     Lvl     Kills              Rating
------------  --------    -----    -------------      --------
391st       Oo        60     6,770 - 2     11,631


And in one week, he moved to

204th      Oo         60     16,065 - 3   18,864


10,000 kills in a week (and over almost 150,000 honor), moved up over 100 in Standing etc..

But he only jumped 1 rank to First Sergeant. Wtf?


No matter how you slice the importance (or lack of importance) of "killing", you can't deny that that's just *a little* fucked up.

If you do AV and join the raid every single kill each and everyone of those 40 people get counts as a "kill" for everyone.  You can easily finish an AV match with 2k+ kills, most of which got you 0 honor since killing someone 4 times in a day makes them worthless.  Kills.  Mean.  Nothing.

He jumped almost 2 ranks (10k,15k,20k rating  each would be a rank, he went from 11k to almost 19k) which is pretty good for the amount of honor and standing he got.

[Lantien]

The honor system is a real pain to keep track of, because there’s two systems in place that appear to work totally independent of each other.

I.  Gaining Honor:

You gain honor anytime you kill a flagged opponent.  The point value of killing an opponent is based on their level, and their rank. Therefore, killing a level 60 Grand Marshall is worth more than killing a level 60 Marshall.

However, almost every time you PVP, you won't do 100% of the damage to kill an opponent.  Therefore if you're PVPing ungrouped, you will recieve honor as a fraction of the damage that you dealt.

For instance, if you were solo, and you did 30% of the damage (some other person did the remaining 70% of the damage), you'd recieve 30% of the total honor point value.

If you were in a 5 man group, and your group did 80% of the damage (some other person not a part of your group did the remaining 20%) of the damage, you'd recieve 80%/5 of the total honor point value, or 16% of the total honor point value, split evenly regardless of how much damage you did versus your teammates (this is to give healers a carrot, of sorts). You also have to be alive when the enemy dies to gain faction.

If you're in a 40 man group, the same mechanic goes into play as the 5 man group, just divided over 40.  Note however, that if you're out of range, you won't gain any honor split amongst the group, and they split it 4 ways, instead of 5.  I have no clue what "in range" is, however.

There is also a diminishing returns effect, which is built in to remove cheating.  The first time you kill an enemy, the enemy gives you a full 100% of the availble honor (factoring in splits for groups, etc, is still in effect).  The second time you kill an enemy, you can get at most 75% of the available honor. 3rd and 4th give you 50% honor and 25% honor, respectively. From the 5th kill on, you get zero honor. Note: the Honor notification in-game when killing an opponent does not take this diminishing return into account. The diminishing returns effect allegedly resets in 24 hours.

You also can gain bonus honor for accomplishing a number of different events.

* Winning Arathi Basin, Warsong Gulch, or Alterac Valley and turning in 3 medals.  Note when you win, you get 3 medals.  When you lose (noted below), you only get one medal.
* Losing 3 times at Arathi Basin, Warsong Gulch, or Alterac Valley, and turning in 3 specific "loser" medals
* Capturing banners at Arathi Basin, Warsong Gulch, or Alterac Valley.
* Killing Faction bosses, like Thrall or King Bronzebeard. However, due to the difficulty of reaching said faction bosses, coupled with the odds of accidentally killing a civilian, you likely to not be a part of these events.

If you kill civilians (usually marked in white), you lose a bunch of honor.  In the lower levels, it's usually enough to drop you a rank.

- So, to use a complex example:

There are 4 of you in one group, and one tag-along, non-grouped Warrior.

You see Jimbo the Mage, and kill him as a group.  Let's say that the Mage gives you 50 honor points a kill, and your group does 50% of the damage, and the Warrior does 50% of the damage (damn execute).

Your group would get (50/2)/4 honor points per person, or each person would get 6.25 points (no clue how rounding works.  However, assume it works like reputation rounding). The Warrior would get 50/2 honor, or 25 honor.

Jimbo resses to full life, you spot him and kill him again.  The Warrior also tries to sneak a kill, and gets only the execute. As a result, your group did 80% of the damage, and the Warrior does 20% of the damage. This time your group gets ((50*.80)*.75)/4=  7.5 points apiece, while the Warrior gets (50*.20)*.75 = 7.5 points.

Things I don't know:

- Is a level 55 Knight worth more than a level 60 Sgt Major? (Ie, what's the function of the level of your opponent, and the rank of your opponent in determining what the honor points available are)

- If a enemy resses, and you corpse camp it at > 100% life when it resses, do you gain full honor, or a fraction pro-rated at his/her existing health when it ressed?

- How close you have to be to gain honor for a kill. You can be in range, and do absolutely zero damage to the mob, and be credited with a kill, if your group/raid kills it for you (again, to help out healers).

- How does healing factor into this?  Let's say you do 40% of the lifebar of a Priest, then run to kill a warrior.  The Priest heals back up to 100%, then a wandering Shaman burst damages and kills the Priest from 100% to 0%.  Assuming you were in range of the priest's death, do you get 40% of the honor, 0%, or what?

Consequences:

* In places like Town raids (Astranaar, TM/SS, Crossroads) and Alterac Valley, places where you have a lot of kills over and over again, After a certain point, you don't gain any honor.  As a result, for those sort of places, honor gain actually isn't all that efficient.

* If you're very good at staying alive AND doing lots of damage, there's no real incentive for you to group up, because you're having inefficient classes leach honor from you. However, sometimes this is a good thing, if you can keep alive even longer.  This includes groups like Warriors and their own personal healers.

* Dimishing returns can really bone you.  For instance, if you get a weak lovetap on a enemy before he dies the first time, you've screwed yourself out of subsequent honor.

* Classes that die fast, like Priests, and to a lesser extent, warriors, tend to get the shaft on Honor gain, because they are dead before their opponent is.

* Paladins, you guys 90% of the time can't DPS. Keep your damage classes alive with healing; you're usually grouped, so you'll gain Honor.  It's okay.

* High Honorable Kills =! High Honor. If all you do is 40 man town raids, odds are that with efficient killing in AB, you can get more honor.

II. Gaining Rank:

Every day, Blizzard displays how much honor you've gained for the day. After 7 days, determined by the maintenance schedule, you get a cutoff and a value that's your honor for the week. From there, everyone who's gained honor this week are tabulated. 

There's a minimum cutoff in play to eliminate stragglers.  This cutoff isn't determined by honor, but by your Honor Kills. Blizzard states that this cutoff is 25 HKs.  So, if you kill 20 Grand Marshall/High Warlords for the week, even though those are the highest value targets, your honor for the week will still automatically be 0.

However, there is a clause that states if your server is really active in PVP, the minimum cutoff value may be higher than 25 HKs. There's no way of knowing what this cutoff value may be.  However, as long as you get 25 HKs, you're guaranteed to get or keep rank 1, which unfortunately gives you nothing.

After removing the stragglers, a recalculated honor value is determined, as a function of your honor for the week, plus a modifier based on your level.  For instance, if you're gaining insane Honor, but only Level 20, there's some fractional value put on your honor, which makes your honor for the week MUCH smaller.  The closer you get to level 60, the closer that modifier approaches 1.

After that, whoever gets the highest honor gets Standing 1 for the week.  The next highest gets Standing 2, etc.

A flat value is placed on getting each standing. If you get Standing 1 by 100 honor, or 100,000 honor, you still get the same Standing 1 point value. There's some talk that what that value is is determined by how much honor your side gets, but I honestly don't know.

All these values are collected in aggregate over time to form your Rating, which you see on the Honor web site that Blizzard has.  There's talk that there's a rating decay put into play, but I'm not sure what that value is.  There's talk about the guts of the rating mechanic at FOH, if you're willing to wade through.

As you move up in your ratings, if you reach a certain value, you rank up.  For instance, to reach the top rank, you need a rating of 60,000 or higher. There's a percentage cutoff for reach rank.  For instance, there should be x% rank 14s, x+y% Rank 13s, x+y+z% rank 12s, etc etc.  However, at this time the numbers of people reaching the high ranks are so small, that we're not even remotely close to having those cutoffs triggered.  So basically, if you make the rating value for your rank, you will get your rank. The restriction just doesn't exist because not enough people are PVPing enough for that to even matter (Yes, 8 hours of PVP are not enough folks!).

Consequences:
* There's no way of knowing what the high value will be for the week, unless you constantly ask around the high level PVPers what their honor gain is so far.  Most likely, if they know that you're snooping, they'll decline to disclose that value.

* As a result of the above, to reach the high level of PVP, you must PVP all hours of the day to get as much honor as humanly possible.

* Your opponents in the honor system aren't the enemy, they're your own side.

* Even if you beat out all people on your server by an order of magnitude, the most you can do is Standing 1.

* If you really want the high level stuff in the honor system (say, rank 8+), get to level 60 first.  The modifier value hurts.

III. Wrapping it up:

Q. As a result, what's the key to high honor?

A. Due to the lack of diminishing return, the key is to do places like Arathi Basin, or Warsong Gulch. Do them with a premade group, preferably with Teamspeak. If you win enough as a group, you'll start to outdistance people who are playing in pickups, with lower rates of success, even if those folks are better than you.  Teamwork > individual skill, apparently.  Although over time, teamwork morphs into individual skill. Then just play forever.  Never stop, never stop.

Q. Is it better to be on the side of high population, or low population?

A. Assuming equal skill, it's better to be on the lower population side.  More enemies mean fewer diminishing returns.  In addition, it also means you have a shorter queue length.  It means you play more games.  If (and only if) your team is good, that means you're "winning" at a faster rate than the pickups.  As a result, you're widening the gulf much faster. While this won't affect standing too much, this does mean that you have a better cushion against off days, or days you don't feel like grinding.  Plus, it means you get faction for doing AB and WSG much faster, which means more rewards, which will improve your surviability.

Q. So why do good teams /AFK quit against good teams?

A. As mentioned above, you're not competing against your opponents. If you play a good team to a stalemate, you may get 50-60% of the honor bonus compared to a short game against some PUG (Pick Up Group). Why "waste" 30 minutes against a good team, when you can get the same amount of honor for 10 minutes against a pickup?  Especially if you're on the lower population side, you can get into another game in as fast as 5-10 minutes in the queue.

Q. How broken can this system get?

A. http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/pvp/index.html?r=Tichondrius&faction=a# (not my server)


Q. Man, doesn't this system suck?

A. ......

Q. Are things getting better?

A. Yes and no.  Allegedly, someone pointed out that Blizzard expected some percentage of people to make Rank 14 (purple weaponzzzzz).  However, after a few months of the honor system, we're well below that percentage.  As a result, they've made it easier to move through the ranks. Some of you stuck on the middle ranks may have noticed that with less work, you're ranking up faster. At least, that's what I've noticed. (Disclosure: I'm a Knight-Captain currently.)

Sources: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/pvp/honorguide.html
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/pvp/pvp-article-part2.html
http://www.fohguild.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=11

If I've botched any of this, please let me know.  This was very off the cuff, pulling data that I've known before.  There's a high chance I've misinterpreted something.

[HaemishM]

It can never be skill based unless there's penalty for dying, and if there's penalty for dying I'm beting A LOT of people will play like total pussies.

You mean like /afking or quitting the battleground when a real challenge comes into the instance?

[Cheddar]

Shitload of words

Well written, and helps make sense of the madness.  Thank you for taking the time to type that out!

[HaemishM]

Lantien, if ever there were a more depressing expression of the fart in the wind futility of WoW PVP honor points, I've not heard one.

[Rasix]

I miss singling you out in PVP, Lantien. 

edit: word omission. yay.

[MrHat]

Two things to what Lantien said:

1:  After Stone Guard (First Officer Rank 6), all items you can get and use are 58+.  This is insanely stupid because it's quite easy to get Rank 7.

2:  I thought I read somewhere that diminshing returns didn't apply within battlegrounds.

Solutions:

1:  Cross Server BG's.  It's as easy as adding another line to the tooltip.  Name, Guild Name, Server Name.

2:  Lower level, high rank items.  I was shocked to find that there's basically no more point to me ranking up until I hit 58.  That's just stupid.

[cevik]

* Classes that die fast, like Priests,

You people apparently play priests wrong..

[Rasix]

* Classes that die fast, like Priests,

You people apparently play priests wrong..

(shield + heals) - (easily dispelled buffs/shield + cloth + number one target on the battlefield) = die fast.  Get a shaman and a meleer on a priest and they die in seconds.

[MrHat]

I do take personal pleasure when the priest dies while I'm running away from his psychic scream.

I <3 Purge

[cevik]

(shield + heals) - (easily dispelled buffs/shield + cloth + number one target on the battlefield) = die fast.  Get a shaman and a meleer on a priest and they die in seconds.

Okay then how about this:  Alliance pvp's wrong.. :)

[stray]

Alliance has Paladins....And if they're smart, they'll play them as Priests.

[Lantien]

Thanks for the replies!  I hope this helps people.  There's still a lot of values I don't know, and honestly don't care to know.  But at least you get a rough idea of how weird the system is.

Lantien, if ever there were a more depressing expression of the fart in the wind futility of WoW PVP honor points, I've not heard one.

I dunno, it's not THAT horrible. Like I said, I've worked to a "mid-level" ranking, and all I do is PVP most of the night, except for weekends when I do MC. Granted, my server is PVE, but it's not a bad way to steadily grind. There's a lot broken in the system, and just downright cheesed/gamed, but you can carve out a niche in the lower ranks.  Just don't bank on getting your epic weapon.  Seriously, that's what MC/ZG is for.

I miss singling you in PVP, Lantien.

Rasix I miss you, our server is all wonky now. Most of the great PVPers have quit because the system is so grind-y.  Battlegrounds have pretty much destroyed what overland PVP there used to be, putting the advantage squarely on the horde side. When you get a really short queue + decent players + a propensity for premades, your learning curve is shortened, big time.  The big PVP guild allegedly is a bunch of guys from SE Asia, who are just animals with teamspeak/webcafe, we can't tell. Your old guild is still chugging right along, I still see some of your bigwigs floating around Arathi Basin from time to time.  Tell Grimmy the Alliance will take him more seriously if he doesn't pick fights that he's got an 80% chance of winning.  Also, virtually every high level alliance guild has split up and reformed due to drama, it's fantastic.

In addition, I traded up from a reaper to http://www.thottbot.com/index.cgi?i=27740. With 20% crit, I'd be happy to reintroduce your Rogue to PVP.

Two things to what Lantien said:

1: After Stone Guard (First Officer Rank 6), all items you can get and use are 58+. This is insanely stupid because it's quite easy to get Rank 7.

2: I thought I read somewhere that diminshing returns didn't apply within battlegrounds.

Solutions:

1: Cross Server BG's. It's as easy as adding another line to the tooltip. Name, Guild Name, Server Name.

2: Lower level, high rank items. I was shocked to find that there's basically no more point to me ranking up until I hit 58. That's just stupid.

According to this FAQ (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/pvp/battlegrounds/faq.html), diminishing returns does apply.  This makes Alterac Valley a terrible place to get honor, but a good place to get AV faction. I have no clue when this doc was written though.

Honestly, due to to the way the modifier gimps your performance in PVP, I have no real sympathy for sub 58s trying to grind for Honor. They're trying to alleviate it, but still.  It's not that hard to get to 60, play with the big boys.

You people apparently play priests wrong..

Cevik, I'm glad to see you around again!  Priests are a mixed bag.
 If you're a shadowpriest, disregard what I said.  However, Shadowpriests bring surprisingly little to the table from a Group PVP perspective. As a result, you're really trading a ranged hitter spot for a Shadowpriest, as opposed to trading a healer for a shadowpriest, due to the inability to heal others. I'd put Feral specced druids in the same boat, especially those that can't shift often due to high mana cost.

If you're a holy priest, if your team isn't paying attention and they're too far away, a good rogue on assassinate duty will obliterate priests.  Especially when they're drinking. If you're an alliance priest, throw in Will of the Forsaken to take away your only getaway system. You can't discount the fact that the class that's best designed to kill you has one extra way of cancelling your fear.

I don't know if this is a result of that, or if my server just sucks, but the horde priests seem to show up a lot more than the alliance priests.  The best alliance priest? A shadowpriest, go fig.

Alliance has Paladins....And if they're smart, they'll play them as Priests.

A-freaking-Men.  However to be fair, most Paladins are wannabe warriors who also want to survive long time, and they play like it on PVP.  As a result, you have Warriors with double the surivalbility, and 1/3 the burst DPS fumbling around, being generally not-useful.

[Merusk]

(shield + heals) - (easily dispelled buffs/shield + cloth + number one target on the battlefield) = die fast.  Get a shaman and a meleer on a priest and they die in seconds.

Okay then how about this:  Alliance pvp's wrong.. :)

Yes.

Most groups I'm in they focus on the Shaman or the Rogues, ignoring the Priests or Mages entirely.. thus instead of one or two people dropping to the rogues before we turn on them, everyone dies, even in 2:1 or (this was really embarassing to witness as I came up on the flag being assulted) 3:1 situations.

[Koyasha]

Two posts from Jarlop on the WoW forums that seem spot on in explaining the ranking system:

Edit 1: Figured I'll put a summary of points here:

1) Unless you're in the absolute top 1 ( at most 2), you'll never see rank 14, ever, due to 20% decay to beat before gaining any grounds.
2) Unless you keep pvping more and more and more, you WILL hit a glass ceiling due to your playtime, again, due to 20% decay
3) The ceiling in 2) used to be that most people will never see rank 7+ (by design), now (post 1.8) most will never see rank 10+. Most being dedicated PvPers who do nothing but BG when they log on


Edit 2:

Thanks to Zeldyan From Alleria on the PVP forum for correcting my understanding of decay IF you did not beat 20% of your original ranking points, you will only lose up to 10% or 2500, whichever is less. My original post was wrong, you never lose more than 2500 rating points, ever.


I don't know how many have sat down and figured out the exact system of ranking points and ranks, but I thought I'd post it here for people to read. Forgive me if any of this was already proven wrong by others.


With the web site ( https://www.worldofwarcraft.com/pvp/index.html ) that showed us what is our overall standing and "rating", I wanted to see how far my given play time can get me in this pvp system, and being a system analyst, I thought, what the hell, it'd be neat to figure it out.

Let me quickly explain what the numbers on that page means:

Standing is your overall standing on your server for your faction, Lifetime kills is the total number of honourable kills you have ever

received, rating is the famed ranking points you have. This ranking points is that "hidden" number behind that nice little progress bar you have on your honour tab.

Please note that this ranking points is NOT your honour points get (and wiped) weekly. I will explain the relationship between the two in a little bit.

The ranking points above determines two things: your overall standing and your PVP rank

Overall standing is pretty straight forward, it's just from highest ranking points to lowest.

Your PVP rank is simply a lookup table (a quick check on the ranking website would show you this):

60k - rank 14
55k - rank 13
50k - rank 12
45k - rank 11
40k - rank 10
35k - rank 9
30k - rank 8
25k - rank 7
20k - rank 6
15k - rank 5
10k - rank 4
05k - rank 3
2.5k- rank 2
00k - rank 1*

*To make rank 1, you actually only need 25+ HK, from what I have gathered.

"So all I need to do is get those ranking points, cool! So why does it take months and months of 18 hours / day of honour farming to get to

rank 14?!"

I'm glad you asked that. You see, to make sure people do not stay on top of the rankings, Blizzard decided to add a weekly decay rate to your ranking points. After doing some cross reference analysis using multiple data points over 3 weeks, I figured that (at least for rank 3-6, but should be constant throughout the entire spectrum of ranks), the decay rate is at 20% of your ranking points. If you do not get more than 20% of your previous week's rating points, you will lose up to 10% decay or 2500 ranking points, whichever is less.

Taking myself as an example... I currently have 16562 points, if I pvp less and only get 2000 pts this week, next week I would lose around 3312-2000 = 1312 ranking points. If I do not pvp at all, I would lose 1656 (10%) points. That would also mean I would go down to rank 4 (14906) if I don't pvp at all.

In otherwords, if I don't want to gain any grounds, I have to gain at LEAST 3312 points to remain exactly where I am ranking points wise.

That is why the higher the rank, the slower you gain ranking points, you need to first get MORE than 20% of your current ranking points...

before you gain any grounds.

"Ok, so far that's good, I'll have to beat decay... so how the hell do I get ranking points?!"

Here's where your weekly honour comes in in a few ways.

First, your weekly honour determines your weekly standing.

Then the TOTAL honour on YOUR FACTION determines the POOL of ranking points available to everyone.
Then your weekly standing would determine how much of that pool you get.

So if your side pvp'ed /very/ heavily and your weekly standing's 400, you'd probably get more ranking points than if your side pvp'ed very lightly and your weekly standing's 200.

What does this all mean?

Taking myself for example: prev week my ranking points was 13359, and I decided to pvp much more heavily, and scored a standing of 76th last week. My total ranking points moved up to 16562. Given 20% decay on 13359, that means I actually got 5875 ranking points (decay ate 2671).

If I keep getting the same ranking points, that means my max total would break even at 5875/.2 = 29374, just shy of rank 8 (30k).

The biggest evil here, as you can see, is the 20% decay, which is laughable as blues stated "casual players would find it they would be very viable in the pvp honour system". I was NOT casual last week.. casual is 2-3 hours a night, and that was my previous weeks (standing around 300-400) doing nothing but pvp. Even then, my max achievable is at MOST rank 4-5, meaning I won't be able to get /any/ of the pvp gears

even if I worked week after week after week unlike grinding instances. I'm not talking about epics, but just let us get to rank 10 as casual players instead as the gear is not a lot superior to ones you find in high level (non-raid) instances... the amount of time required

to play each week is just not balancing out with the rewards vs pve time invested.

I hope folks found this an interesting read.

Patch 1.8 came along, here're the changes:

First a few new facts that I found out (and was like this before 1.8):

a) PVP Inactive people actually lose 10% OR 2500 ranking points / week, whichever is less. If you were active, you still lost 20%.
b) It turns out, if you had a weekly standing of 1 on your server and faction, you get a flat 13000 ranking points, this was not changed at

all in 1.8 as well.

Now, onto 1.8 changes:

I was under the misconception that with the new marks of honour in 1.8, total faction and honour would increase, which in fact did not. I dont remember, but I believe the actual bonus honour from winning a AB match dropped from 1.4k to 1.1k (please correct me on this one, I'm working from memory and it's not the greatest :-p).

One thing that I was lucky regarding 1.8, I actually pvp'ed very heavily (for my standards) in the week right before release, and got 88.9k honour and recieved a standing of 61.

So since I've been keeping taps on this, I figured it'd be good to see how things changed... I logged in and saw myself 1/3 into rank 6! Considering I was only 1/5 into rank 5 the week before, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. I figured at most I'd be almost to rank 6...

So I got to work with the ranking points tabulation I've been keeping, and found the following result (before decay, obviously):

With standing 61, I got a total of 8545 ranking points
With standing of 66, 8358 ranking points was achieved
With standing of 125, 7366 ranking points was achieved.

This is quite a significant boost for the data points I keep checking, since it means they've increased ranking points available to top X number of standings. Compare this to 5875 ranking points for standing 76 before 1.8, that is a very significant increase.

"But this increase could have had been an increase on pvp activity too!" you say?

Of course it could have! That is why I kept track of the honour points associated with the standings too! Brilliant!

1.7:

Standing 76 with 71k honour = 5876 ranking points.

1.8:

Standing 125 with 48.6k honour = 7366 ranking points.

So it's very obvious they increased the ranking points rewarded for at least top 125 standings, if not more.

"But they could have decreased decay to 15% or less!" you ask?

Ah... you sceptical you... that's why it's always great to have multiple data points. By comparing relative ranks, ranking point deltas, I have eliminated this possibility. More precisely, decay has to remain at 15% - 20% for the observed data to exist.

So... how can I say they did not decrease decay?

Go back to b) above. I kept track of the top pvper on our server and faction. Pre 1.7, standing 1 rewarded 13000 (well, 12999 with my rounding being a little off) ranking points... 1.8, same 13000 for the top dog (new top dog, good thing I kept tabs on top 2 people as I knew the top dog was going to stop pvp'ing in the previous week that he would have achieved rank 14).

So while blizzard DID increase ranking points rewarded for most people in the higher standings, poor top standing didn't get any more increase... and it kind of makes sense within their framework. I will explain in a bit.


Soooooooooooooo.... what this all means:

It means for the same amount of effort, you'll probably recieve 2-3 ranks higher than you could have pre 1.8.


Now onto the actual design blizzard has in mind:

Blizzard designed the pvp ranking system in a very simple manner: They expect you to pvp for the same amount of time over a period of 10 weeks to achieve your highest rank possible, and they achieve this result by spreading the ranking to take 10 weeks. No burst ranking up for you!

Here's the reason: 20% decay of your previous week's ranking points.

Let's say, I'll pvp all my time online and get 90k honour, and let's assume, for the sake of simplicity, I'll always get the same ranking points: 8500, and let's assume I start from being a complete pvp newb with 0 ranking points:

My max rank will be rank 10 (40k required) with 8500 / .2 = 42500 ranking points (where my 20% decay = weekly gain).

Here's the progression:

Week Rank Pts PvP Rank
1 0 Rank newb
2 8500 Rank 3
3 15300 Rank 5
4 20740 Rank 6
5 25092 Rank 7
6 28573.6
7 31358.8 Rank 8
8 33587.1
9 35369.6 Rank 9
10 36795.7
11 37936.5
12 38849.2
13 39579.4
14 40163.5 Rank 10
15 40630.8
16 41004.6
17 41303.7
18 41542.9
19 41734.3
20 41887.5
21 42010.0
22 42108.0
23 42186.4
24 42249.1
25 42299.2 Still Rank 10


Yes, I love MS Excel for these things.

You would see a similar pattern if you had a weekly standing of 1 every week... at top rank-3 or so, it will slow to 1 rank every 2 weeks, and generally last rank will take 5 weeks. Total of 14 weeks.

More fun, want to see the progression of someone who's top dog every week from newb to rank 14? sure you do:


Week Rank Pts PvP Rank
1 0 Rank newb
2 13000 Rank 4
3 23400 Rank 6
4 31720 Rank 8
5 38376 Rank 9
6 43701 Rank 10
7 47961 Rank 11
8 51369 Rank 12
9 54095
10 56276 Rank 13
11 58021
12 59417
13 60533 Rank 14
14 61427
15 62141
16 62713
17 63170


So why does it take less time (13 weeks as opposed to 14) to get to rank 14 if you've always been top dog?

13000 / .2 = 65000, rank 15. You are actually working towards rank 15 with 13000 a week, so it won't take you 5 weeks to get from 13 - 14 as it does for a lower standing person to get to their last rank. Interesting side effect, no?

Hence why my earlier statement "it makes sense".



If you're still here, which I doubt most still are, I really wish that blizzard makes it easier to rank up to rank 10, expecting people to 100% pvp for 10-14 weeks to get to their highest rank is stupid. The rewards for rank 10 pvp set is just much inferior to running ZG/MC raids all the time for 10-14 weeks.

To make it easier, they'll need to make it so that decay's down to 10%, and ranking points awarded would be a LOT lower for lower standings than expected 11+ ranks. I want to propose a solution, something like "10% decay until rank 10, then it's 20%". That'll let a LOT of people get to rank 10, then everyone would lose rank 10 right after because their weekly ranking reward would be less than that extra 10% decay.

Removing decay would also make everyone a rank 14 eventually, so no go there, and I agree.

One way is to increase the quality of the PvP rewards (let's not even discuss the grind for reputation here), other is to make it easier to rank up so risk vs reward matches the Vision (tm) (that one's for you old EQ folks out there!).

I do have faith in Blizzard doing the right thing eventually, but hopefully not so late that the majority of the causal player base decides to leave the game because they realized it turned into a grinding exercise that they have 0 chance of seeing the fruits of their labours before months and months of doing the exact same thing (pvp ranks and BG faction... look at WSG and AV, AB will be like that when the next "great" BG comes out).

And a calculator to help you figure out what ranking you'll plateau at.  Do your average PvP thing for two weeks running, note down your rating and punch it in, you'll get your approximate maximum rank, assuming you continue to PvP at about the same relative level to everyone else on your server and faction.

http://www.matrixws.com/wow/pvp.php?week1=21&week2=20

[HaemishM]

It shit like that what makes me not care about my ranking as more than a passing fancy.

[XMackenzie]

Thanks for the informative posts Lantien and Koyasha.  Interesting (and scary) to know some of the magic behind the curtain...  Fortunately I've set my sights low (Sgt. Major) so I just need to keep consistent in my weekly "score" and based on numbers there I should be able to hit it.   

[Cheddar]

I hit scout!  phe4r my leetness.  Battlegrounds is still on my list to try; I am having the inverse response to PvP in this game that I did with Guild Wars.