Smolderforge Support Community

Hello.

I'd like to propose a small improvement to our honor system. As we all know, our community is rather focused on the battlegrounds. I believe it would be great to display top 5/10/15 (whatever number you find the most suitable) honor kills gain of the day. I'm talking about honor kills instead of just honor because the latter is affected by turning in battleground marks. I remember being able to accumulate 300 marks, turn them all in at once and have 100k+ honor gain registered. Furthermore, the GM team might find it easier to spot obvious hk farmers/arena wintraders as well.

I'm not sure where this ranking could be displayed but the front page is surely an option. Would that be also possible to display it somehow in-game through Liron or server message?

Moreover, I'd like to suggest displaying the battleground win/lose ratio with corresponding factions. Perhaps it would be easier to monitor the server situation and open those handy free faction transfers accordingly to the results? It would also possibly be a motivation for players, especially one-faction guilds.

Should this suggestion be approved, do you think it would be good to extend it to arena statistics too? Like the highest number of won matches of the day?

I am aware that there might be some negative outcomes of this idea. There is a possibility that daily honor ranking would encourage the return of infamous graveyard ganking (and I'm really not referring to fak/ezatt war, take my word for it.) My second concern is that the display of win/lose ratio of battlegrounds might influence people's decision and make them join the winning side automatically.

I look forward to hearing your opinion about it.

Cool.

I like the idea of daily / weekly /... ranking displayed somewhere to promote some short term contest in battlegrounds. But in my opinion basing it on HKs would be detrimental to BGs and instead I would suggest using honor (or something else). Currently there is no real (edit: long term) incentive to win battlegrounds, seen especially in AB and EOS where nobody (edit: large amount of people) really cares who wins. You gain a lot of honor by winning battlegrounds, not so much from kills inside a BG.

A counter argument to using honor would be that you can hoard BG marks and turn them in all at once to get a lot of honor suddenly.

I don't know the answer but I believe promoting HK farming even further without something to balance it would not benefit the battlegrounds on smolderforge.

Only problem is that pvp is totally unbalanced due to alliance joining with 1 million druid and healers at every BGs, so that's not fair at all

Displaying Today/Yesterday stats would be somewhat easy since that is already built into the game to store for the honor tab. Anything else in addition to this, tracking BG stats, weekly/monthly, etc. would all have to be programmed in to be logged so calculations could be run on it. There was a time I debated adding battleground match history to the website as well, where anyone would view battleground data -- but I felt it wasn't really something people would care much for... just some statistical data on a battleground... is this something people are interested in?

Anyway, displaying the data in-game is somewhat of an issue. Almost everything in the game is cached. NPC/gameobject/item names, gossip text (text you see when speaking to an NPC), etc. The only thing that isn't really is menu items (think our teleporter). Basically the only way to really dynamical show that data would be to have a menu that changed... meaning you're using buttons that don't do anything when clicked... to show data. I've seen this on some servers and it's usually quite ugly. Works... but isn't the prettiest. Only other options really are to have a command or an NPC whisper it to you.

Whether it showed HKs or Honor Points seems to be a hard deciding factor, too. As some have stated, promoting more HK farming isn't necessary ideal... but honor points are "flawed" due to the quests. However, it is possible with some code changes I could have quests simply not be tracked on honor gains. You gain the points to spend, but don't either see it in the honor tab, or it's simply not added to some daily "goal" score.

On that note... this also brings up a topic I've wanted to discuss for some time, and that is the current state of the honor title system. It was implemented in 2010, and lets be honest... it's a little... not ideal. Back then NO one had 15k kills and that's what we set GM/HWL to be. Later on once many players hit this, we debated raising it to 50k, which was met with a lot of bask-lash so we settled on 20k. That was 2012, and we have not raised it since... We have players with 320k+ kills now.

I've always liked the idea of a vanilla-style honor system, but it's not easily implemented in TBC, and there's no honor tab to track status or anything. Plus honor systems in vanilla took a week to calculate ranks, whereas you're able to access your honor instantly in 2.4.3 (early TBC it was after 1 day). But I am sure many players would not at all be happy that we'd change the system and make them lose their titles they worked so hard for, so I've not pressured the idea. But I would really, really like to change it. It's flawed and just a grind fest... it should definitely be more focused on soaking honor points from objectives, winning, etc. AV was perfect for this, but is closed for the time being.