08-09-2006, 03:11 PM
Quote:Well... what would be the advantage of zero sum?
It penalizes people or groups that die often. Would PvP be more or less fun if everybody was turtling? Would that make world PvP more dangerous and exciting? Or would it be more frusterating to be ganked.
A zero sum, grouped honor system might work better if combined with some other balancing systems:
- A chess-style rating system: the % of honor taken from an opponent degrades as their honor rating falls below yours, and increases as it rises above yours. <>
- Level ratios could affect this % (so that killing someone lower level than you significantly degraded the amount of honor you received). <>
- A faction-strength-within-short-radius system (say... 40 yards) might prevent a squad from receiving disproportionate honor for beating down a single, unprotected high honor opponent.<>
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With those honor distribution rules in place, you cause a situation where honor grinding with a good PvP group in battlegrounds is ineffective (since participating may cost you honor if you are killing weak opponent after weak opponent but then getting killed by one of those low honor opponents, who then takes a large chunk of your honor due to you significantly higher honor). Equipment rewards for excellence in a particular battleground would still be there, but repeated participation without repeated victory would not move up up the PvP rank ladder. If you want (and this is a good design question -- do you really want people to be able to grind in battlegrounds for PvP rank?), you can use the cross-server battlegrounds large pool of opponents to do ratings matching for the smaller battlegrounds. With a ratings matching system in place, this system should give more honor to those with more skill/better equipment, rather than to those with more time.
So what prevents someone from being very lucky or very carefully stalking isolated opponents in world PvP and soloing them to gain exceptional amounts of honor without regularly exposing themselves to much risk (and therefore the opportunity for skilled opponents to puncture their ballooned honor pool)? I say: Nothing. If the ranking system grants slow, if steady, rank improvements, a character would have to remain lucky for a statistically improbable length of time in order to gain high rank without having the skill to show for it. As far as the stalking rogue or druid, solo ganking similarly leveled opponents in Stone Talon or Felwood or EPL goes, the soloer's risk versus reward ratio gets worse over time, as eventually the known presence of a lone, high ranked world PvPer is going to attract skilled foils to that character, who can gain a lot of honor simply because they are skilled and their class is appropriately set up to handle that particular stalker.
This situation, then, requires a change in the way that players gain PvP rank. I like the idea of PvP rank degradation over time and I like the idea of rank gain being a slow, incremental process where only a fixed percentage of a faction's population is eligible for each rank each week and high ranks cannot be passed through quickly. Since honor rating would depend much more on skill than on number of kills, some additional measure of participation would be required to make sure that those with high honor actually deserved to be considered for rank promotion each week -- we don't want the grind, but we don't want someone to gain high honor and then just sit on it and slowly gain high rank without anymore participation. Perhaps either a significant number of kills or a minimum relative increase in an individual character's honor rating would be an appropriate measuring stick for participation; won battlegrounds matches or some measure of success in the new EPL and Silithus world PvP senarios could form alternate "proofs of participation".