The PvP Honor System - Great Addition or Game-Breaker?

pril 19th. A Pope is elected. An LQGaming staffer has a birthday. Blizzard releases the long-awaited PvP Honor System content patch. Blizzard promised an honor system would be included at release, which of course didn't make it, but Blizzard has finally tested and released the PvP Honor System and reward program.

The Honor System was created to give players incentive to PvP against other players, specifically players of your own level range. Blizzard didn't want to penalize players for killing those of much lower level because:

• It's World of WARcraft, and in war the more skilled warriors do not give mercy to the lesser skilled ones
• A dishonor system would be almost impossible to implement without having some way of abusing the system

Abuse it? How you ask? Let's assume there is a penalty for killing a lower level character. Someone could very easily just get their level 20 or level 10 character to float around the battlefield. With all that's going on in a big battle, AoE could definetly strike these easy-to-kill characters and result in sabotage - people setting up the opposition to get dishonorable kills which will penalize them. There is pretty much no way around this.

It's ironic that players have complained for months about the absence of the PvP Honor system and how it was supposed to be ready at launch. Now that it is released, all you hear are complaints on the forums. It makes it look as if everyone hates the honor system, which couldn't be farther from the truth. Worldwide, there are over a million WoW-subscribers who have access to post on the forums. The North-American community knows at least 500,000 of the current subscribers are living in Canada and America (and some in the Central-American region). On the forums, there could be at any given time a thousand posters reading and posting. Even if that number was 5,000 or 10,000, it still represents a vocal minority - the minority complaining about a feature on Blizzard's primary communication bridge to its players.

One thing many people don't consider is that the people who actually like the honor system are not being vocal about it. They are too busy racking up contribution points to go onto the forums and post about how they like the system. Think of it as a consumer-seller situation. Let's say 100 people buy a lawn mower. Out of that 100, 80 are very satisfied with it and have no complaints. 10 of them have discrepancies with it, and write to the manufacturer. 5 of the consumers may like the product and write a letter to the company telling them it's a great buy, while the other 5 may hate the product but continue using it, and not bothering to express their feelings in writing.

This analogy brings up good points that are true for many PvP servers:

• The majority of people on a PvP server do enjoy the current Honor System
• The majority of those people who like the Honor System are not bothering to write on the forums why they like it
• The majority of feedback on the honor system is coming from those who are not pleased with it
• There are also those who are dissatisfied but are not willing to express this in the World of Warcraft forums.

Don't be fooled. How many times have the nay-sayers proclaimed that "this patch will be the one to break WoW". Blizzard is too smart to put in a system that could entirely ruin their game. They needed to add incentive for level 60's to get off their alts or stop farming gear and start PvP'ing against those of their own level. It's interesting to note, however, that most of the people complaining are those have not reached level 60 yet. Their main complaint is that the system encourages that every contested zone (which past level 30, every zone you quest in will be contested) should be a battlefield where people are hunting for opposition all the time, making level 60 an impossible feat for lower levels.

The truth of the matter is that this is only partly true. This is from personal experience; I have a level 51 Rogue on Stormreaver. The Honor System came out when I was around level 47-48. Yes, I was repeatedly killed and corpse camped the first few days, but after that most of the action came either full-swing or minimally. 90% of my PvP deaths were to opposition 'zergs' who happened to find me on the way to a raid. I still quested quite fine and leveled up pretty quickly.

Many people believe the honor system is also giving those who haven't reached level 60 the motivation to do so, especially on PvP servers. The Honor system hasn't even been out for 3 weeks and people are complaining non-stop. Blizzard has commented that due to the nature of the system, it will take several months for even the most dedicated player to become an officer of high-rank.

I cannot comment on the state of PvE servers, but I can say that even for PvE servers the end-game looks to PvP-based, even if it is consentual. But that's another topic.