HK Diminishing Returns Removed in 2.4.

Talgog · 02/01/08, 2:13 PM

WoW Forums -> Diminishing Returns Removed from Honor in 2.4

As the PTR approaches we wanted to give everyone a preview of one of the larger changes for PvP that's currently planned for the 2.4 patch.

Currently, diminishing returns are applied to all honorable kills. What diminishing returns mean for honor is that each subsequent kill of the same target will reward you with less and less honor; 10% less per kill to be exact. One of the major downsides to diminishing returns is that the calculations, for potentially hundreds of thousands of players, is too intense to do real time, so they are calculated during off-peak hours. This in turn requires that the honor you gain be temporarily displayed as "estimated" until the calculations are run. It's a system that we've certainly improved (moving the calculation from weekly to daily) but still always disliked. It creates a very uninteresting and sometimes aggravating or confusing detachment from your achievements and the actual reward.

The reason for diminishing returns has always been to avoid the potential exploitation of the honor system. As the game has evolved, especially the honor and battleground systems, exploitation of the honor system now without diminishing returns would no longer be considered a lucrative alternative to simply participating in a battleground normally. We've also greatly improved our ability to monitor and track exploitation of this nature.

We've reached a point where we're now confident that applying diminishing returns to honor is no longer necessary, and we're currently planning to remove it with the 2.4 patch.

With this change we’re including a few restrictions as well though: Players that have the resurrection sickness debuff will not be worth any honor, and if a player dies 50 times or more during a battleground they won’t be worth any honor for the remainder of that battle.

What the removal of diminishing returns means for you is that as soon as you defeat an opponent that rewards you honor, you will receive that honor, and you will be able to spend it right then. There will no longer be an estimate, and you will no longer need to wait until the next day until you can actually spend it. Your achievements through honor-based PvP will be instantaneous.

Go Warsong Gulch?

Nite_Moogle · 02/01/08, 2:17 PM

This almost certainly means they're introducing a mechanism similar to AV's reinforcements to WSG to discourage infinite camping. Topping off after 50 would still make for pretty obnoxious games.

david0925 · 02/01/08, 2:19 PM

This almost makes guarding Stonehearth worth it, even though that's going to turn AV into a double turtle.

Yaltus · 02/01/08, 2:23 PM

Wouldn't the 50 kills to no honor achieve that? I mean, in theory you could win trade some 500 kills back and forth, but that seems unlikely. I'd figure any reinforcements addition to WSG would be solely to prevent infinite duration matches rather than exploitation of honor kills.

This should help AV too - currently HKs become worth zero honor very quickly, and this should keep them steady at 1-2 a pop, somewhat alleviating the sting of getting shut out on bonus honor.

The instant gratification aspect is nice as well. I'm not sure how much of a long term impact it might have, other than decreasing the soul-crushing "ness" of the honor grind. No longer will you have to punch out an extra honor of PvP'ing on Monday night in fear of being 300 honor short, or log in the next day only to realize you STILL can't get your gear.

diotox · 02/01/08, 2:44 PM

I think a significant portion of the wow population had no clue there were diminishing returns on kills in the first place - this showing up in the patch notes will be the first time they've ever heard of it. And it will only serve to reinforce the idiotic "I'm farming honor" justification that people use to camp the graveyard in WSG while completely ignoring the flag. I'm really hoping this is just a sneak-peek that will be coupled with some kind of change to WSG that caps the length of the game in some manner. But even if it isn't linked with something along those lines, it's still a good change that I'm glad to see. I want my extra honor from the 7k hp mages that run in spamming arcane explosion over and over for the entire duration of a game.

oldmandennis · 02/01/08, 2:56 PM

I don't really think extended WSG GY camping will really be a problem, even if they didn't put the 50 kill limit in. Even in ideal circumstances (enemy just sits in their own GY) you are only pulling 2520/hr, which isn't worth much more then a premade can get playing straight up - not enough more to make it worth the hassle of organizing it and risk of ban.

Emeraude · 02/01/08, 4:49 PM

Yeah, you can actually get about 12,000 Honor from just defending Stonehearth Graveyard the entire game, 600 reinforcements x 20 = 12,000. And there's no worrying about that 50 kill limit because in a 40 vs 40 game you have to do something ridiculous like 2000 kills to spike into diminishing returns.

Of course this is totally ignoring the fact you have to split said honor with the other people in your immediate area.

diotox · 02/01/08, 6:56 PM

Also correct me if I'm wrong here(which I hope I am), but I don't think the removal of diminishing returns is going to be a very remarkable increase in honor gained. Even on the days when I've put in the biggest honor grinds with the most about of kills to be diminished, I don't recall ever losing more than 1k-1.5k honor or so to diminishing returns. The best part is the instant calculation so that you don't have to worry about being just a tad bit short of some purchase and having to wait until the next day.

Unity · 02/01/08, 10:08 PM

For me I expect the best part will be not having the server freeze to do the honour calculations just as we pull.

Maynard · 02/02/08, 12:36 AM

I'm excited about this change as a precursor to revitalising world PvP in WoTLK - a motivated blood-bath at Halaa could yield some very nice honour.

I have to wonder if this change could motivate sophisticated cross-faction kill trading though?

• Mex · 02/02/08, 3:15 AM

Originally Posted by Maynard

I'm excited about this change as a precursor to revitalising world PvP in WoTLK - a motivated blood-bath at Halaa could yield some very nice honour.

I have to wonder if this change could motivate sophisticated cross-faction kill trading though?

I was thinking about that too.

The first thing that popped into my mind when I read about the change was to find a friend on the opposite faction, get them to dump their inv into the bank, then find a nice secluded graveyard somewhere and have them spam spirit res several thousand times. Then I kept reading and discarded that idea.

At first glance, it would appear that the inbuilt res timer would inhibit any serious attempts to do this. Perhaps someone cleverer than me could figure out a way to get around that though.

• Argium · 02/02/08, 3:25 AM

Originally Posted by Mex

I was thinking about that too.

The first thing that popped into my mind when I read about the change was to find a friend on the opposite faction, get them to dump their inv into the bank, then find a nice secluded graveyard somewhere and have them spam spirit res several thousand times. Then I kept reading and discarded that idea.

At first glance, it would appear that the inbuilt res timer would inhibit any serious attempts to do this. Perhaps someone cleverer than me could figure out a way to get around that though.

The inbuild res timer should prevent any sort of repeated honour farming to any serious extent; probably to the point where just doing a battleground would be a more effective way of getting honour.

Also with WSG they've stated their intent to put some sort of timer mechanism to prevent 10 hr games of turtling (and hence honour farming) which should bring it in line with all the other BGs.

◊ Vontre · 02/02/08, 3:44 AM

Originally Posted by Mex

I was thinking about that too.

The first thing that popped into my mind when I read about the change was to find a friend on the opposite faction, get them to dump their inv into the bank, then find a nice secluded graveyard somewhere and have them spam spirit res several thousand times. Then I kept reading and discarded that idea.

At first glance, it would appear that the inbuilt res timer would inhibit any serious attempts to do this. Perhaps someone cleverer than me could figure out a way to get around that though.

Players with resurrection sickness are not worth any honor. There is no timer on spirit rezzing, however.

BrTarolg · 02/02/08, 5:55 AM

I personally think this is definately a change in the right direction - but I also think it will have very little affect on the honour gained. Its a good change purely for the mechanical aspects of getting your honour straight away and not needing the stupid DR calculations - however the system is very hard to abuse, and wont result in my extra honour gained at all (even if you farmed HK's excessively in BG, I cant think of a reason why it would end up with more than 5-10% extra honour at the end of the day).

Main reason is because of the world pvp constraints (res timers will make this pointless to farm, and spirit res = no honour), and in BG's you are almost always sharing that honour with a multitude of other people.

An interesting change I would like to be considered, is the idea of increasing returns for every person in the group. So you would still get less honour if you have more people, but the overall honour of killing a person is increased depending on the number of people in the group.

• Mex · 02/02/08, 6:29 AM

Originally Posted by Vontre

Players with resurrection sickness are not worth any honor. There is no timer on spirit rezzing, however.

But spirit ressing gives resurrection sickness.

Or is that what you were trying to say? Cause that's my point. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to trade honour.

Nadiar · 02/02/08, 6:58 AM

To exploit it would take several enemy faction characters and an AE class.

For example, it would be interesting to have 50 naked Horde and 3 Alliance Characters (2x Warlocks, and the PLee). But anything you really try to set up would result in circumstances that I think would be simple for Blizzard to track down.

Bevz · 02/02/08, 10:56 AM

There is no way to cheat the system, short of setting up two bots near a graveyard and leave them going at it for a week. Which would get you a pitiful amount compared to doing a battleground.

Blizzard will have thought about those two rules extensively before removing the diminishing returns.

As far as extremely long wsg games go, simply remove the requirement that friendly flags must be returned before you can score with the enemies. That way it becomes a faster paced battleground and people actually try and win because if you just turtle, your going to lose.

Talgog · 02/02/08, 11:45 AM

The effort you would have to go to in order to exploit the system at a rate beyond Premade v. PUG Warsong Gulch or AB is really pretty extreme. Such exploits are also pretty clear, and Blizzard might well have autoflags set up if someone gains X HK's in Y time.

Flesseck · 02/03/08, 2:12 PM

They also noted that they'll be able now to enforce the change and punish any violators/exploiters who attemt to honor farm. They weren't very open about how they are going about this.

So my thoughts are that they'll be very vigilant and stern about these actions like they are with AFKing in BGs. People will probably report others or they'll just be able to monitor such things more aggressively by having a dedicated effort towards stopping any sort of honor exploitation.

seminarca · 02/03/08, 11:35 PM

I'm pretty sure I've read a Blizzard post stating something to the effect of: the large disparity between estimated and actual honor gained is due to being online at the time the honor calculations are performed (pretty much a certainty for Oceanic players). Anecdotally, once when I was farming honor and actually monitoring estimates vs actual honor gained, I did notice a far lower difference one day when I wasn't online for an entire evening, having logged on a few hours after calculations.

As mentioned already, the two biggest positives of this should be:

1) No more server lag for honor calculations.

2) Immediate earnings; not having to wait until the calculations to spend .. and no more "OH MY GOD ONLY 7 HONOR SHORT" moments.

Shinanigans17 · 02/04/08, 3:31 PM

yay for camping people for honor!

deadlights · 02/04/08, 4:41 PM

Yep that was my first reaction. Won't be able to solo queue WSG anymore for fear of running into a premade who will simply camp the GY until the 50 kill cap kicks in. At least if AB five caps and you're starting GY is being camped it can only last a few minutes.

seminarca · 02/04/08, 7:56 PM

Or, one could intentionally not cap the fifth node and farm until the 50 kill cap.

Just had a thought, it's going to be even harder now to convince people to defend nodes, nodes that might never get attacked. You face dissention and disobediance even in trade channel premades (I really like the "pugmade" moniker, can we adopt that officially??) when it comes to defending, forget about solo queue pugs.

Amonra · 02/06/08, 11:33 AM

Originally Posted by seminarca

Or, one could intentionally not cap the fifth node and farm until the 50 kill cap.

Just had a thought, it's going to be even harder now to convince people to defend nodes, nodes that might never get attacked. You face dissention and disobediance even in trade channel premades (I really like the "pugmade" moniker, can we adopt that officially??) when it comes to defending, forget about solo queue pugs.

Unless the queues are very long, what would be the point of not capping the fifth node? Sure you can farm kills, but equally well you can win the game almost immediately (with a 5 cap) and get straight into a new game with more people to kill.

Plus even the most stupid opponents are going to very rapidly get bored with being slaughtered over and over and will stop ressing, thus forcing you to get that 5th cap.

• LodeRunner · 02/06/08, 11:39 AM

Originally Posted by Amonra

Plus even the most stupid opponents are going to very rapidly get bored with being slaughtered over and over and will stop ressing, thus forcing you to get that 5th cap.

Doubt it. They'll res in hopes of picking the weakest target and killing or seriously wounding them before they die again.