Honor System [Improvement]

The issue. I am aware the following situations are part of any PvP realm, but when they are abused create unfair/toxic world PvP and damage the overall game-play experience:

• Regular high level players are camping/ganking low lever players constantly in starting-to-middle level zones. There is no reason to do this, but disrupting other people's game-play and indulging these player's sadistic cravings, since there are no honor gains on making these kills.
• Regular high level players in party with one or more low lever players are camping/ganking low lever players constantly in middle level zones. I would expect this is another instance of the previously described situation in case the lower level player does not get honor gains from these kills, or honor farming otherwise.

The solution/proposal. EXTEND DISHONORABLE KILLS TO PVP:

• Blizzard introduced dishonorable kills to discourage high level players killing NPC players for no reason. I propose to extend this to PvP by accounting a low level kill (i.e., the ones that give no honor) as a dishonorable kill. By low level kill, I mean when the player or party has a high level player that is a Skull level to the low level players being camped/ganked.

How exactly would this be an improvement? If someone is spending all their time in low level zones ganking, chances are they don't care about losing honor in the first place.

Maybe I should log on Feigerhund again once in a while.

World pvp is fun.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA4hfCpXp2c

nope!

I have been leveling loads of chars on x1 servers and vanilla wow would not be the same with out som ganking while leveling no matter how annoying it is.
Leave the area or get a friend to help you.
This is vanilla not World of Carebear

Ganking/Honor Farming [Dishonorable Kills]

Thank you for the interest on the topic.

First of all, let me state the obvious: fair world PvP != (honor farming || ganking). Bare in mind I use the word ganking strictly for the special case of having a skull level player in the party killing a lowbie. Within a gap of 10 levels any PvP encounter is all fair world PvP and I have nothing against it.

The proposed feature could be implemented in the same way a dishonorable NPC kill is at the moment. This implementation would note the players levels and when there is a 10+ or higher level gap between them, it would make the killer get a dishonorable kill.

I know there are many of you out there that enjoy the sadistic pleasure of ganking/honor farming, but please go check a psychologist instead of ruining the world PvP/PvE experience for the rest of us. Do not worry, you can still do your sad thing over and over, just for the price of having dishonorable kills. That is what ganking/honor farming is in the end.

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TL;DR: At the moment skull level killing lowbies and honor farming have no penalization. This behavior generates a toxic world PvP and disrupts the leveling PvE game-play. The proposed feature aims to account these cases as dishonorable kills. Its purpose is to discourage these practices by extending an existing concept in the current honor system.

Obligatory comment about this thread's existence validating the 60s ganking lowbies.

Clarification

Horo said:

Obligatory comment about this thread's existence validating the 60s ganking lowbies.

Click to expand...

It may acknowledge the fact of 60s ganking lowbies, which unfortunately happens rather too often, but it certainly does not validate it. On the contrary, it proposes a feature that aims to discourage this kind of toxic world PvP practices. I copy below the TL;DR to avoid further misunderstandings.

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TL;DR: At the moment skull level killing lowbies and honor farming have no penalization. This behavior generates a toxic world PvP and disrupts the leveling PvE game-play. The proposed feature aims to account these cases as dishonorable kills. Its purpose is to discourage these practices by extending an existing concept in the current honor system.

It won't be implemented, because it affects authentic Vanilla experience, hence too many people are opposed to it. Additionally, what's going to happen with "defensive gank"? 40 kills 20, 20 asks 60 friend to revenge. Should this friend just say "sorry, I care about DHK, he does not, so you have to suffer"?

I would be happy if Blizz made something like this, with even toughter punishments. But they have not, and Kronos will not.

Blizzlike is not Enough

nimeralos said:

It won't be implemented, because it affects authentic Vanilla experience, hence too many people are opposed to it. Additionally, what's going to happen with "defensive gank"? 40 kills 20, 20 asks 60 friend to revenge. Should this friend just say "sorry, I care about DHK, he does not, so you have to suffer"?

I would be happy if Blizz made something like this, with even toughter punishments. But they have not, and Kronos will not.

Click to expand...

The concept of Blizzlike is somewhat blurry and usually used as an excuse to avoid the costs of making changes. Either way, is up to the staff to make the final decision, at best through in-game-polling to inquiry the player base, definitively not to just you or me.

I sincerely think there will be significantly many more players in favor of having a mechanism to discourage toxic world PvP practices than the ones that may support them. Regardless of how numerous their voices are here in the forum or within this thread in particular, I see the world chat every day full of players complaining about this kind of behavior.

Regarding your question, I think that if we had a penalization like the internal one this thread proposes, or a more severe one (e.g., make honor farming bannable based on SS/Video), then it would not be necessary to have friends lowering themselves to the standard of those bad apples (i.e., defensive gank or whatever alike). The casually-tempted leveling gankers/honor farmers would probably think twice if their unfair killing is dishonorable. The hopeless gankers/honor farmers, who just do it out of sadistic pleasure, may not be discouraged, but they are usually max. level players, and as such any other max. level player could revenge the lowbie and earn honor points, while the bad apples just loose honor points in the process.

I honestly see no detriment in introducing any kind of punishment for these toxic world PvP practices. Does anyone have any good objective reason not to penalize skull level killing lowbies or honor farming in the realms?

Re: Blizzlike is not Enough

Does anyone have any good objective reason not to penalize skull level killing lowbies or honor farming in the realms?

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Firstly (and most important), as already have been said, this is not 'blizzlike'.

Secondly, this is PvP realm. If you venture anywhere with your PvP flag on, you are eligible to be killed by opposing faction representatives.

Thirdly, this brings more problems than you might have been thinking about when you were writing your message. For example, we once had a 12v13 PvP in Hillsbrad Foothills with levels ranging between levels 30 and 60 on each side. How is this supposed to work if your suggestion is implemented? In such situation high levels should not worry about whom they kill as long as the deceased had PvP flag on. I was mid-30 in that battle and I still enjoyed it.

Another example is capital city assault. If a low level have just returned by gryphon or bat master and have PvP flag on for the next five minutes, those who attack the city should not care much about trying not to slay him with accidental AOE spell.

These are just the examples I could think of at an instant, but there are way more similar problems if you think deep enough about it.

Special Cases Could Become Exceptions

Kamchak said:

Firstly (and most important), as already have been said, this is not 'blizzlike'.

Secondly, this is PvP realm. If you venture anywhere with your PvP flag on, you are eligible to be killed by opposing faction representatives.

Thirdly, this brings more problems than you might have been thinking about when you were writing your message. For example, we once had a 12v13 PvP in Hillsbrad Foothills with levels ranging between levels 30 and 60 on each side. How is this supposed to work if your suggestion is implemented? In such situation high levels should not worry about whom they kill as long as the deceased had PvP flag on. I was mid-30 in that battle and I still enjoyed it.

Another example is capital city assault. If a low level have just returned by gryphon or bat master and have PvP flag on for the next five minutes, those who attack the city should not care much about trying not to slay him with accidental AOE spell.

These are just the examples I could think of at an instant, but there are way more similar problems if you think deep enough about it.

Click to expand...

Thank you for the objective feedback.

I already shared my thoughts about the Blizzlike concept in the previous post. Far too diverse PvP parties could be indeed an issue because that is precisely what this feature is aiming to discourage (i.e., honor farming), however, you are right that in some very limited cases, such as the ones you mentioned, this may happen without being a toxic PvP practice. These very limited cases should be analyzed in more detail to define exceptions for this feature, for example it could be automatically turned-off in capital cities or friendly zones to support capital city assaults.

In general, the PvP flag would protect the players in friendly zones and the proposed feature would discourage skull level killing lowbies/honor farming in contested ones, completing the circle.

I know this is a PvP realm, this is vanilla not World of Carebear or this is Sparta. Nonetheless, I truly believe these toxic PvP practices disrupt the PvE/PvP game-play and should be discouraged, either internally through features like the one proposed in this thread; or externally through abuse reports on the website.

The whole reason why I play vanilla is for wpvp. If I'm going somewhere and an Alliance player strolls into my view, I'm going to attack. It's Alliance vs Horde, not level 60 vs lvl 51-60. If you don't like wpvp, I suggest you go play retail as there is none. If I want to role play and defend a point on a map against all Alliance players, that is what I should be able to do without being penalized. Get a higher level to help you or go somewhere else, this proposed idea is stupid.

Gonna be fun fighting over the ZG island when you suddenly see level 1 warlock clickers logging in raping the other raid with dishonorable kills from the AoE.

It's obvious you want a pve server, but you'll have to look for that elsewhere.

Funny thing happened earlier today when I was helping a buddy go through Uldaman for enchanting. We came across about 10 level 40s that began to swarm us. We were overwhelmed immediately and were killed due to the ambush. Now we ended up fighting back and they eventually scattered but if this crap idea was put into place, I would've racked up a bunch of dishonorable kills because I had to fight my way through to a dungeon. This is another reason why your idea on how to "fix" the Honor system had no real thought behind it.

Dishonorable Kills Already Exist

Grukz said:

The whole reason why I play vanilla is for wpvp. If I'm going somewhere and an Alliance player strolls into my view, I'm going to attack. It's Alliance vs Horde, not level 60 vs lvl 51-60. If you don't like wpvp, I suggest you go play retail as there is none. If I want to role play and defend a point on a map against all Alliance players, that is what I should be able to do without being penalized. Get a higher level to help you or go somewhere else, this proposed idea is stupid.

Click to expand...

Ultimately, this feature would not affect fair world PvP, but only a couple abusive situations that actually disrupt PvP/PvE game-play. Your role-play argument to kill lowbies or to justify honor farming makes really no sense because dishonorable kills are already implemented in the game for NPC, which are also either part of alliance or horde factions; you could interpret this feature as an extension of the dishonorable concept during a role-play scenario.

Smoker said:

Gonna be fun fighting over the ZG island when you suddenly see level 1 warlock clickers logging in raping the other raid with dishonorable kills from the AoE.

It's obvious you want a pve server, but you'll have to look for that elsewhere.

Click to expand...

Why are always the Warlocks. Hehe. I would not like to go to a PvE realm or to retail, I also enjoy world PvP myself. However, where is the fun in world PvP when a low-level is being camped and 2-shoot kill by a skull level repeated times to feed the honor of its own low-level alt or to feed a sadistic craving? Lets not forget to mention that the same situation breaks the whole PvE game-play as well by forcing people to leave zones, abandon quest lines, or the like.

Grukz said:

Funny thing happened earlier today when I was helping a buddy go through Uldaman for enchanting. We came across about 10 level 40s that began to swarm us. We were overwhelmed immediately and were killed due to the ambush. Now we ended up fighting back and they eventually scattered but if this crap idea was put into place, I would've racked up a bunch of dishonorable kills because I had to fight my way through to a dungeon. This is another reason why your idea on how to "fix" the Honor system had no real thought behind it.

Click to expand...

The whole point of this thread is to discuss its feasibility, analyze flaws, and propose alternatives. It is called constructive criticism, something you obviously lack.

Regarding your example, I commented in a previous post remarking that special circumstances should be considered in detail to define exceptions for this feature. For example, group diversity could be handled by calculating a party level gap based on the number and levels of its members. The party level gap could be used similarly to the player level gap to determine dishonorable kills.

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TL;DR: At the moment skull level killing lowbies and honor farming have no penalization. This behavior generates a toxic world PvP and disrupts the leveling PvE game-play. The proposed feature aims to account these cases as dishonorable kills. Its purpose is to discourage these practices by extending an existing concept in the current honor system.