23 September 2008 - 19:00I’m in ur game, resetting ur honor.
…has said Blizzard.
What does this mean? Upon Wrath hitting, all accumulated honor points and marks will be gone (yes, marks too my dears). What about that blue post made months ago saying “Removing accumulated honor is like removing gold, we’d never do that”? Forget it.
The reason given by Blizzard: “We don’t want to give some players an unfair advantage by allowing them to purchase honor gear as soon as they hit 80.”
Of course we know what the real reason is, nothing more than “Hey, thanks for keeping playing till the expansion to do nothing but grind honor, we really enjoyed that 3 months of money you gave us – but guess what? We want to keep your money for even longer, so I guess you have to do that again, good luck!”
Anyway, I’m more than upset with this change – and not in the slightest because my 70s will be affected. My 70s have maximum 5k of honor saved each. As for the marks, my heart will ache for the EOTS ones, but I don’t have many of them anyway, and they can be earned back. I will just blow them on mounts before they are gone.
I have a 19 twink rogue… who really wanted a trinket and battle standard, and was sure she would get it eventually, slowly earning the honor bit by bit. All the work I put towards that will be gone in a few weeks. With the kind of time you need to accumulate honor in the 10-19 bracket (an entire evening’s worth of grinding assuming mostly wins nets 300 to 500 honor), there is no way I can get the full amount I need before Wrath.
I have a baby night elf priest who really wanted a battle standard as well – she’s now 2k towards the required 15k. Again, Alliance in 30-39 Misery has about a 5% to 10% win rate, so even if I grinded my entire waking hours, the max honor I would be accumulating would be 750, maximum. That’s what, 20 days of required nonstop grinding? And since I obviously have neither the time nor patience to grind that, it’s doubtful Kielle will get her battle standard before Wrath.
And what about that black tiger she was saving marks towards so she could buy it as soon as she hit 51 and got the AV marks? Sorry, I guess you’ll have to regrind all them WSG and AB marks… if you don’t need them for gear, that is.
Or level superfast to 51, grind out the marks AND the honor for the battle standard, by which level the battle standard loses the edge it gives in lowbie battlegrounds, and get everything I want by afking in AV… oh wait, that’s what most people do at 70. How different.
An easy solution is, of course, to treat honor and marks like arena points – they are wiped upon leveling up to 71 and not right away at release. And stick a requirement on the new gear that says it can only be purchased at level 71+. Problem solved.
Another solution as suggested is to make every item require a lot more honor than the current system (perhaps five to ten more times), and ramp up the honor gains for level 71+ accordingly. Problem solved.
Yet another solution is for level 80 gear to require a different currency than Honor Points. Call it Grind Points, whatever, and make Grind Points achievable only by participating in level 71+ battlegrounds. Problem solved.
Except with Blizzard, it’s never easy, and those solutions remove the whole “We need you to give us your time and money” for the lowbies, so of course this solution will never, ever be implemented.
I also love every so-called “casual” troll coming out of their caves on the official forums to go “Thanks Blizz for sticking it to the hardcore, too bad you spent all that time farming honor to have an edge at 80, lol nerds”. So basically, people are being punished for having had the foresight to grind out honor, and not all of them are the so-called hardcore – how about the casual who slowly accumulated honor over 3-4 months, doing his dailies every day, who just got shafted?
Of course the 17 year old high school student and the 30 year old programmer with a toddler can’t devote the same amount of time to play every day. So, should a certain percentage of the player base be punished because the other part of the player base doesn’t have as much time as them to devote to the game? Why should a certain percentage of the player base even care if some guy in some other country has a job/kids/wife/elderly mom/other hobbies/all of the above and can’t spend as much time playing as them? As soon as “cater to the casual” turns into “punish the hardcore”, the system loses its meaning.
The honor system is better than the old system, because if people call the honor grinders hardcore now, I really wonder what they would call them under the old system. People quit jobs and school to make the push for High Warlord and Grand Marshal. The system certainly required a lot more time played than today’s system to see any kind of tangible reward. It wasn’t healthy, and when it got overhauled for TBC, it became a much better and much more casual-friendly system overall.
It was turned into a system which let everyone get rewards in their own time, except the hardcore still got rewarded in that they could obtain the rewards faster and stomp the still-undergeared casuals. The casuals still weren’t happy, so out came Arena gear purchasable with honor. Wait, they still weren’t happy, so out came the blue PvP set purchasable with less than a hundred gold at 70. If you hit 70, and did your quests and instances along the way, you could instantly have a set with 150-200 resilience.
…wait, once more, they still weren’t happy…
The game has, and always will, reward time spent. The more time you spend and the sooner you can spend the time, the greater the reward. In fact, that’s true for most things in the world (how many of you expect your part time job to make as much as a full time one?). So far, a system has not been invented that will reward something other than time spent in a MMORPG. Demanding that the game cater to you and just you, just because you can’t spend as much time on it as someone else does, to say the least, a bad idea – the game already caters to the casuals quite fairly with Badge gear and accumulation of honor. So why this hate-spewing for someone who put their time into the system, fair and square? Plain jealousy?
While we are at it, why don’t we also remove all accumulated gold and materials upon the expansion? After all, we don’t want to provide an unfair advantage to some of the player base by allowing them to get their epic walrus on wheels (thanks my dear GM for coining the term, always makes me laugh)/whatever item Blizz has designed as a gold-sink carrot at level 80, faster than the others, because they have had the foresight to save the gold. Let’s remove the herbs people have saved to level inscription too – again, we don’t want people who have lacked foresight to lag behind.
All in all, terrible decision made by Blizzard, no matter what all the casuals, who take delight in seeing the hardcore fall, say – Wrath will still reward the hardcore more than the casual, else there would be no reason for the hardcore to keep playing. The hardcore will still level to 80 and obtain their gear within the first couple of weeks, and the casuals who are maybe level 72 by that point will still be steamrolled. All this decision has done is enrage about 90% of the community, but sadly, I don’t expect it to be reverted.
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