PvP and Honor System comments

[Trippy]

As we have mentioned before, when you kill other players or aggressive PvP-enabled non-player characters (NPCs) in your level range, you will receive an honorable kill.

Emphasis mine.

But you can't lose honor by killing other players. It's just a counter. Here, let me program it for you:

Oh I see what you are saying now. I thought you were saying you only got honor from killing NPCs (you called it "PvNPC").

if (you.killed(otherGuy))
 honor++

Only if your victim is of high enough level relative to yours and you haven't been killing that person repeatedly.

I'm pretty sure that wasn't the intention of the honor system.

The original plan by Blizzard was to have dishonorable kills in PvP combat but they said they couldn't figure out how to make it work so they dropped that idea. There is still dishonorable killing in PvNPC combat.

I'm also pretty sure that the honor system is virtually interchangeable with a kill count system. If you can't lose honor directly, the way you lose honor is by not killing as often as the next guy.

It's not interchangable with a kill count since, for example, a level 60 killing level 1s will get no honor points at all, or at least that's what's implied by the article.

[Margalis]

It's not interchangeable, but for most situations it's really basically the same. Because you can only gain honor or break even by killing players.

The original idea was you could go on a rampage killing newbies and actually lose honor. In that case killing more of the wrong thing just made it worse. But they way it is now, it's just proportional to kills.

I don't see what the point is anymore. The original point was anti-griefing. This clearly doesn't do that. It's just another rat-race to get involved in. I don't see that it adds anything.

When they figured out that they couldn't do it right they should have just dropped it and worked harder on battlegrounds.

[Toast]

World of Warcraft could have done so much better with the PvP system.

If they had the balls to put in a dishonor system to punish ganking, the appeal of the PvP servers would have been widened immensely. Many more players would get the additional content and fun that comes out of appropriate pvp.

They aimed low and hit their target.

[Threash]

Or maybe they realized that "ganking" shouldn't be punished? Why should the winner be punished? The only difference between a pvp and pve server is that the moment you step in a contested zone in a pvp server you are in danger.  Thats it, call it ganking or griefing if you want but thats ALL there is to it.  Everything else you could want from pvp you can get (or will eventually) on pve servers.  I've never read anything that said the point of the pvp honor system was to stop ganking, yes they did say there would be dishonor kills in pvp but that wasnt the "point" of it.  The point of the pvp system has always been bragging rights "im better than you and i can prove it".  Thats what the ranks are, they are not levels you have to grind to achieve since most of the population doesn't have a chance too, they are simply there so the catasses can point at the list and their exclusive shinies and brag.  My only goal in pvp when this is implemented is to make it to the officer barracks, not the top rank since i know i dont have the time or patience or equipment to do it.  I'm not a ganker or a griefer, i hardly ever pvp at all unless im attacked first and even then my first responce is to try to get away since there is absolutely no point to it, but i have zero symphaty for anyone playing on a pvp server that gets killed under any circumstance (other than cheating) and calls it griefing.  Its not, you got killed on a pvp server, get over it.

[Llava]

World of Warcraft could have done so much better with the PvP system.

If they had the balls to put in a dishonor system to punish ganking, the appeal of the PvP servers would have been widened immensely. Many more players would get the additional content and fun that comes out of appropriate pvp.

They aimed low and hit their target.

Yup.

Overall:

Feh.

One thing I liked about DAoC:  The rewards for PvP worked well.  The main problem I had with the rewards system was how easy it was to get screwed out of realm points because your target had died recently to someone else, possibly somewhere far away.

[Margalis]

I've never read anything that said the point of the pvp honor system was to stop ganking, yes they did say there would be dishonor kills in pvp but that wasnt the "point" of it. 

Um..that was exactly the point. What do you think the honor system was for then? (Hint: think about the word "honor")

Blizzard went out of their way in their original desciptions of PvP to say it would be different than standard PvP in a lot of games in that it would be fair, not mindless, etc. And your retort is that PvP is mindless, so there!

Which it is. But that wasn't the idea. That's why when Blizz first posted they were gutting the honor system you saw 25 pages of "You tricked me into playing on a PvP server" in the forums.

[StGabe]

It was obvious in beta that honor wasn't going to do what Blizzard thought it could.  Players will gank if they can, pretty much no matter what.  Dishonor would become a sort of prestige for those so inclined to gank.  Just about any penalties, short of banning accounts, would leave tons of gankers.  Ganking is near-grief.  And really results from the same thing: the urge to control other players and get attention.  Losing "points" isn't going to prevent people from doing this even if it meant going KoS to allied mobs, losing out on ranks, etc.

It sounds nice, but in practice it would accomplish little (something that should have been obvious post-UO).

StGabe.

[Margalis]

I'm not going to argue that dishonor was a good idea. But Blizz thought it was, they said they were going to do it, then when they figured out they couldn't make it workable they backtracked really lamely. Don't announce things and hype them up if you have no idea if they are even doable.