Tobold and Abalieno have both gone off recently about WoW’s PvP revamp or more specifically, the lack thereof. To quote Tobold:
The first curious thing is that you don’t get your honor points immediately. Instead you get an “estimate”, which tends to be far too low, and then get your real honor points the next day. Imagine experience points worked that way! “We estimate you have gained experience for two more levels today, but come back tomorrow for the exact value and the actual reward.” I wondered, if honor points are given out on an absolute scale now, why would it take one day to calculate the honor points?
The answer of course, is that they’re not actually given out on a standard experience-point-style scale, as everyone assumed when they read the details on the WoW 2.0 PvP revamp, but still indexed based on total player participation. So, the reward for your PvP evening is still wholly dependent on how Englebert Frostshock, the prototypical 12 year old kid who spends his entire waking life pwning Warsong Gulch, spent his day. Amazingly, many players don’t want their personal success based on Englebert’s.
While it’s good to see the World of Warcraft designers experiment with things (since they, you know, can, being probably the only development team on the PLANET that doesn’t have someone asking to make their game more like World of Warcraft) the reward structure for PvP effort isn’t really a good place to start. I’m going to pull out a cliche here and say “As I clearly said in my blog months ago, this isn’t a good idea.” For bonus points, notice where I made the same mistake as everyone else and assumed they were moving to a flat reward system! Here, I’ll just repeat myself:
Relative reward systems are a horrible, horrible idea in MMOs. Not only is it horrible because it frustrates players for what to them are irrational reasons, it\’e2\’80\’99s horrible because it pits players against one another in a fundamental environmental way over something as core as character advancement. In most WoW servers, the highest level PvPers trade off so that each can have 1 week at the top so they can unlock their UberPants. But imagine the drama that would result if someone didn\’e2\’80\’99t.
So now you have the same problem – only even worse, because you don’t have the immediate feedback of “I am Rank 13, so I can ease off now.” You have the worst feature of a relative reward system – the penalty for greater player participation – combined with a broken feedback system. So you just don’t know if you did well or not. Until the great database gods behind Oz Da Gweat and Tewwible grind out their code and you find out that yes, you did actually earn enough points last night to purchase your UberPants.
It would be far easier to just award points based on total historical participation. Not that any game has ever done that which you could derive concrete examples from or anything. And clearly it would be far easier on WoW’s overstressed databases than trying to run historical analysis on every PvP player. Like most things that make little sense, this is pretty clearly based on someone’s religious convictions.
Again, there are things that it’s cool that WoW innovates on. But historically, PvP has not been one of them. And this latest revamp that’s not a revamp continues this storied tradition.
{ 26 comments… read them below or add one }
Actually this version is pretty independant of other players performances. Drysc is being fairly vague there.
You get some honor value for killing a player of X rank, which is divided among the players in your raid in range to get honor from the kill.
If you’ve killed the player before within the last 24 hours or so, the amount given to you is then reduced by 10% for each time you’ve killed them before, until after 10 kills they’re worth nothing.(This is the calculation I assume they don’t want to do server side.)
That is the only part that is based on other players. The reason for the huge disparity between the estimate and what you recieve is that none of the ‘bonus honor’ for completing BG objectives is added into your estimate either. I assume that’s a bug, but who the hell knows.
The old system used the same calculations as this new one to get some sort of intermediary participation total, and that was the value compared to every other player’s total to determine your rating points for the week. The new system doesn’t do any comparison, you just get the points you earned.
i have to agree, wow pvp is lacking
it took mythic 3 years to get pvp right in daoc
blizzard has 1 more year to get pvp right in wow
my favorite pvp concept was from shadowbane, i really wish bliz would copy that or the keep system from daoc.
don’t get me wrong, cap the flag/cap and hold are fun game styles. but very basic compared to pvp concepts from years ago. The most advanced pvp option bliz has available is ranked arena games.
my guess is the majority of bliz development money is spent on zones/scripting, with pennies on a dollar spent on evolving pvp gameplay.
and they sold us the game as the “world of WAR craft”, when in reality its just the best “team up with your friends and bash a big rat to get shiney things” game ever developed.
Even if the new system isn’t as better as some folks wanted, it is still MUCH MUCH BETTER in many ways. Ex: It would be impossible, yes I say impossible, for me to ever acquire the Grand Marshall gun for my hunter under the old system. The amount of time required to make it to the top rank tier is simply not within my grasp unless I won the lottery and could stop working full-time.
In the new system, it is possible. How long will it take? I don’t know exactly because I don’t know how much honor I can accumulate per day. But at least I don’t have to worry about that honor going away if I take a week off. Someday, eventually, it will accumulate to the point where I can buy the big shiny gold gun.
Alarik, thanks for the clear-headed response. Everyone (Tobold included) is reading Drysc’s post and jumping to the conclusion that “depending on the opponent you defeat” means that some nefarious version of the ranking ladder is still in effect.
So far, I don’t think Blizzard has explained the system well enough. But that’s no reason to jump to the conclusion that Tobold and Scott have.
People are a bit too quick to yell -doomsday- it seems
I’m seeing exactly what Alarik says. The estimated honor is just ‘kills honor before diminishing returns’. The competition from the previous honor system is gone completely. That said, you still see ‘HK: General’ messages from killing people, though that might just be their chosen title, I do wonder if (as in the past) you get more honor from killing people of higher rank, and if so whether this rank is still be calculated or just legacy.
“So far, I don\’e2\’80\’99t think Blizzard has explained the system well enough. “
When have they ever explained anything well? Quite a bit of the bitching on the forums would be at least muted somewhat if people knew how certain things “worked”. MMO players love numbers and they love for them to = what the hell the developer says they are equaling.
Hmmmmm, I’m not quite so nostalgic about the Mythic PvP reward system. At least when I played it was ridiculously easy to farm realm points with it by killing the same people over and over again.
Lets give credit where credit is due; if you’re going to have rating based on history there is a game that’s older than DAoC (omg!) that does this: http://www.uschess.org/ratings/
Second, pvp only matters to me when the result of pvp matters on the map. If there is no territory up for grabs (that matters), then all you have is a quake arena.
Last, I’m sure the WoW team get to hear how “this can’t be done because it’s not what got us 7 million players, and would kill the golden goose.” CEOs/Marketers/Idiots – whatever you call them – are everywhere.
I don’t know WoW but it seems easy enough not to award points tomorrow, waiting for today’s relative scores, but rather award them today, based on yesterday’s relative scores.
If memory serves Aces High (this is a MMO-flightsim, no elves involved) does something like this for its point scoring system. Fly the popular uber-plane, get fewer points. Shoot something down in a early-war plane, score big.
Number six, I never played Aces High but that sounds like a really interesting pvp dynamic. So you’re saying that the flavor of the month gets fewer points by virtue of its popularity/uberness… I always gravitate toward the bizarre/unpopular specs and would love to see something like this in a pvp design. Devil’s in the details, though — players would find some strange way to game the system.
did anyone else see the comment by Rand’al thor and just ignore it because of the name?
Funniest thing I’ve read in a long, long time.
*muwah!*
Love,
Hanna
The whole deal feels like the beginning of the downward spiral most games engage in. Bad patch, poorly received features, dooooom dooooooooom i tells ya
If it’s just ‘diminishing returns’, why make the players wait? You could easily enough track who they killed in the last 24 hours and apply it immediately, no?
“did anyone else see the comment by Rand\’e2\’80\’99al thor and just ignore it because of the name? “
yeah yeah yeah but I like to be consistent with my posting no matter where it’s at so Rand ‘al Thor has been my online name in every forum since I played my first online game (which coincidentally was right after I had read The Great Hunt).
it could be worse I could have gone with a Tolkien based name
The reason more MMORPG developers don’t say exactly how things work is two fold, Randy. One, they want to give away their secrets to hackers and/or competitors. Two, if they leave it nebulous, the angst usually dies down after awhile. If they be specific, and it’s determined the “community” doesn’t like it, they will rail against it for ever and ever and ever.
There’s over 350 games running on my cluster right now. I’m pretty sure this new system isn’t a failure. I’m also not entirely sure where you got the impression that the system was relative, I mean, yes, you get more points for killing harder people, and its calculated at the end of the day rather than instantly, but I don’t really see where its a relative reward system. You get points, you spend points, you buy items.
They applied a 30% honor gain reduction today. Clearly, some former-catass-player-turned-WoW-developer realized that non-catassers were coming into epicz without, ya know… catassing. Perish the thought!
… and needless to say, the thermal energy radiating from the forums could power a small third-world country for several days.
“The reason more MMORPG developers don\’e2\’80\’99t say exactly how things work is two fold, Randy. One, they want to give away their secrets to hackers and/or competitors. Two, if they leave it nebulous, the angst usually dies down after awhile. If they be specific, and it\’e2\’80\’99s determined the \’e2\’80\’9ccommunity\’e2\’80\’9d doesn\’e2\’80\’99t like it, they will rail against it for ever and ever and ever. “
The first I can partially understand, don’t see how saying killing X gets you Y is going to help the hackers/competitors, not calling for a full release of the code afterall
, but i’ll give the benefit of the doubt on that.
The second point though I don’t believe. There are people in some of the older games who STILL want to know how certain things work and it routinely comes up in forum discussions and or topics. Especially any time they tweak something which only makes it worse. Now you have the people who THOUGHT they understood it going WTF thats not how it worked..when in actuallity they had no clue how it worked ot begin with but were just guessing. If the numbers info is already out there those discussions get to be stillborn because hey look there’s the answers.
I always thought that MMO devs were vague about how things operated because it helps them avoid accountability when it turns out that things don’t actually work the way they described?
Rand’al Thor..
Er…no, generally it’s NOT aimed at the competition. It’s aimed at the explorer types, who are otherwise fickle about the games they play. If they can be kept experimenting, they keep playing. And if they make the flavour of the month change when they discover something “new and neat”, all the achievers dive off in a new direction, extending their subscriptions too…
Of course, the way its done can vary.
Eve explains all its basic combat mechanics. In detail. With java applets. But for things like running starbases, or making boosters…players have to figure it out for themselves.
“I always thought that MMO devs were vague about how things operated because it helps them avoid accountability when it turns out that things don\’e2\’80\’99t actually work the way they described?”
It’s also very easy to tell players they’re wrong when you don’t give them the tools to prove themselves right.
What do you mean 3 years to get pvp right in daoc? It’s freaking horrid still.
WoW used to have good pvp untill dishonourable kills come in and actually killed pvp totally, then they brought in quake CTF style crap that is based on one class (or 2 if you are horde… go figure that horde would have the pvp advantage eh?).
Something wrong they did was to adjust the award later on because guess what, the people who would grind to rank 14 were gaining items at one a day rather than 4 weeks and they are now lowering the amount gained per kill because of it. SO now the time taken for anyone not -zero lifed moron- who pvp’s for 8 hours a day is actually LONGER than it was before.
Good way to design a ‘reward’ system.
The thing that I think is totally bizarro about the new honor system is that your honor rewards per player still seem to be based on what the player’s rank was at the time that the patch went in – everyone seems to have a phantom rank and they are still treated by the system as if they were that rank.
This extends to characters who happened to be at least at sergeant rank when the patch happened retaining their sergeant discount. Whoops.