PvP, Honor, Faction and BGs

[Watto44]

on the honor front the mother of all grinds begins...

This pretty much sums up my "honor" experiences to a "T".

I am not a casual gamer, I play Wow a lot. However, I'm not in a big guild. (Which is a whole other story. Quite boring, no drama.) When honor was released I thought of it as a way to progress my lvl 60 character(s) without having to join a raiding guild. It was a great boon in my eyes: I could progress and remain competetive against the epic clad opposition by doing something that I was really interested in.

And then reality hit. I hit the wall and the wall hit back. Hard. A variety of issues (work, family, timezone) keep me away from the computer for much of the day. I could not compete with the people in my own faction to gain the required standing to progress past rank 7. Frustraition has set in, and I've spent the last few weeks relaxing and assessing the situation. Here's what I've come up with.

Blizzard is essential the author of their own demize. They billed this as a game that catered to the needs of both the hardcore and casual player. Unfortunately, because of the way they designed character progression at level 60, balancing these two needs is extremely difficult.

Imagine a scenarion where a casual gamer could spend thirty hours spred out over several weeks to significantly progress their character at level 60 by grinding for faction to get themselves some nice new gear. Sounds great, but then try and balance that with the hardcore gamer who can probable knock that 30 hours over in 4 days. The situation you end up in is one in which the "hardcore" aspect is so cheapened that you may as well remove Ony/MC/BWL from the game entirely. Why bother spending hours and hours of time keying 40 characters for Ony when you can spend that time getting comparable gear through a simple level grind?

So how do you resolve this situation? The solution that I see blizzard taking is to make the casual grind hellishly long. So long in fact that it becomes both unfeasable and unenjoyable for casual gamers to progress their characters at level 60 in a manner that is comparable to a hardcore gamer in a raiding guild. (For a good example of this, try and imagine how long it would take someone who only plays 10 hours a week to get a Hide of the Wild. Doable, yes. Enjoyable...)

Now apply this same logic to the honor system. Admittedly bliz made a mistake with the rank percentages - which is being rectified in the next content patch - but the same logic is still applied. To balance the progression of the hardcore and casual player you either cheapen the efforts of the hardcore player to the point where there is no reason to chase harcore content, or you set the casual gamer up with a hellish grind.

That, in itself, is not so bad, but the real problem for the casual gamer isn't so much the hellish grind, it's the fact that the highest level of pvp is unattainable for them. The grind I wouldn't mind, it's the fact that I have to compete with players who have far more time than I do just to get a set of blue gear. It's not a contest I can ever win so my character stagnates.

As for solutions, as I said, it's a tough bind that blizzard has found themselves in. How do you let casual players progress in a meaningful way without cheapening the achievements of the hardcore? But step one would be to make the tier 1 pvp set an achievable goal for casual players. Removing the need to chase standing to get to rank 10 might work, making it more like grinding for experience than a frustraiting and unwinnable contest for a lot of people.

Hehe, sorry to hijack your thread with a bit of a personal rant, but I'll get a little more on topic from here on in. :P

The loss of "world" pvp that happened with the introduction of BGs was a direct result of the flaws in the honor system grind. Why engage in world PvP when the return is meaningless in comparison to the return from BGs? (The fact that it's an absolute ton of fun aside. B) ) For anyone who wanted to get that pvp set, all thoughts of grinding honor outside of BGs went out the window the first time they won a BG and saw that big, juicy honor bonus.

The solution here seems a lot simpler, but it would still be a stop-gap. Remove or greatly reduce the honor bonus for winning battleground. There is still incentive to play in them as the rep rewards are nice, but there is no [b]need[/p] to play in them if you wish to progress in ranks.

Another - more hair brained and definately not well thought out :) - solution would be to scrap the honor system as it stands and replace it with a similar system to the reputation hand-ins in AV. Want those pvp boots? Bring me 50 tufts on gnome hair. Then tie the epic rewards into suitably epic pvp acomplishments.

Unfortunately we aren't left with any simple answers at the end of the day. In their most recent battleplan bliz mentioned that they are thinking of introducing world pvp events. Perhaps this will help to return world pvp to the servers, but it won't address the basic flaws inherent in the honor system, just as Dire Maul and Zul Gurub haven't addressed the basic flaws in PvE progression.

(Wow, sorry about this. I didn't realise it was so long. Congratulations if you actually made it through the whole thing.)