Here are my suggestions to improve this complete disaster of a PvP system this game now has. First, there should be some changes to the BGs:
- Restore the original version of AV (with lots of guards and where you could capture the enemy towers as opposed to destroying them), make the NPCs even a bit stronger. Give them lots of HP and make them hit hard. A Naxx geared player shouldn’t be able to successfully fight more than 2 of them alone simultaneously, 2 should already be a challenge.
- Drastically increase the honor awarded for a win, I’d say factor 10, and make it poportional to the run time of the BG. Keep the honor awarded for objectives the same as currently or increase it slightly.
- Award this honor for winning to each player who contributed to the battle proportionally to the time he was in the BG, regardless whether he actually is in the BG at the time when it is won. Add a slight decrease which punishes BG hopping. For example, if you played a BG for 25% of its total run time, you gain 15% of the total honor awarded for the win, if you played 50% you gain 45% and up to 100% if you played the whole BG.
- Make it possible to give up your spot in a BG to a different player of your choice. In order for this to function the other player has to wait until he’d be able to enter the type of BG you’re in by regular queuing.
Reputation should be awarded in the same manner as honor described above.
Further, there should be changes to the honor system. The new system with static, fixed honor brackets doesn’t work. Even something as simple as BG queue time becomes a huge problem with this system as soon as there is any kind of faction imbalance.
Actually, the changes to the honor system were way too much. The only problem with the old system was the decay or more precisely, the decay at high ranks. The changes from above would alter the dynamics of the system in such an extend that skill is the most important requirement for a high rank, not grind. Thus, the old system with dynamic brackets determined by the players should be restored. I’d also keep the decay but completely change how it works:
If you’re not familiar with the details of the old honor system, you can google “Vanilla WoW honor system”, I can’t include links here for whatever reason.
- You should only start to decay after 4 weeks, in all of which you failed to achieve the requirement to keep your rank.
- The requirement to keep your current rank should be to just gain weekly contribution points according to the bracket where the regular 20% weekly drop of your total rank points would put you.
- If you make less than the requirement, every honor you earn should reduce your decay linearly, from a decay of half a rank at zero honor to no decay at honor enough to satisfy the requirement of point 2.
Example
A player is right at rank 13 with 0% advance, which equals 55000 rank points in total. The weekly decay equals 20% of the total rank points (11000), which mathematically would bring the player to 44000 rank points. This equals rank 10. Now we project the 44000 rank points to the weekly standing, which is the amount of weekly contribution points that would eventually lead to a maximum of 44000 rank points if the player earns this exact same amount of weekly contribution points every single week. It’s somewhere in the rank 10 bracket. If the player earns at least that much contribution points, he keeps the 55000 rank points and thus rank 13.
If the player makes less than the amount described above, the decay only sets in after 4 consecutive weeks and then the decay will be 2500 rank points each week if he earns zero weekly contribution points up to no decay at the amount of weekly contribution points necessary to keep the rank. For contribution points in between, the 2500 points decay are adjusted linearly.
This system would eliminate the problem with the decay in the old system, that in the example above the player would have to earn at least 11000 weekly contribution points to only keep his rank, which means he has to be in the rank 13 bracket every single week only to not decay.