A couple of things...
Honor system
I think it's pretty obvious to most people right now that the Honor system is broken. It doesn't really work. At lower levels, it's okay. It's pretty easy to rank up with even a moderate amount of PvPing. The rank decay isn't very quick. You can just do PvP a few times a week and feel like you're advancing yourself, or at least not find yourself sliding backwords. It's where you hit the middle ranks, around 6-8, that things become obviously more problematic. To even maintain rank you have to PvP a hell of a lot more than you did to get there in the first place. To actually ~gain~ rank, you have to play yet more than that. The higher you get the more and more you have to play. It stops becoming a fun diversion or an activity and becomes a grind. A really horrid one that you can't give up even for a day. Weeks and weeks straight that you have to go in and slog through PvP match one after another, hour after hour.
And it's not right. It's pretty screwed up and needs to be changed. There are some fairly simple ways to change it at least some for the better.
1.) Cap rank decay. If Blizz were to be generous, they could cap it completely so that the highest rank you achieve is the rank you stay at and you merely lose points towards your next rank. Example. You achieve rank 6 and get about halfway towards rank 7. You stop playing for a while. You lose all your CPs towards rank 7, but you don't drop down below rank 6. If they're less generous, then they could cap the ranks every 3-4 levels and you never fall below that point. For example, you make rank 9 and stop playing. You may fall down to rank 6, but not below that point. Rank 14 may stop decay at rank 10, and so on. This is somewhat less forgiving, but still means that you can hit a certain point, stop PvPing, and coime back without having to start ~totally~ all over agian.
2.) Change the way decay works. Currently every week you lose 20% of your ~total~ current honor. This is brutal when ranking up because the higher you go, the more that 20% is. At rank 3, 20% is easily gained back in 3-5 BG games. At rank 10, you're looking at nearly a full day of PvPing just to make up for that decay. Either the % needs to be lowered considerably or they need to change decay to a per-rank basis. Example, you lose 20% of your current rank (absolute, not relative). So if you're halfway (50%) towards rank 7 and you don't PvP at all, you come back at 30% towards rank 7 (not 10%, if it were a relative percentage)
3.) Change the idea about a curve of players at each rank. Currently the idea that Blizzard has is that the number of people of X rank are limited by the number of people on the server as well as the number of people PvPing on the server. So there are much fewer higher ranks than lower ranks. The problem with this idea is that it means that you're basically competing with your own faction for Honor. And it means that you can play your ass off and get thousands and thousands of honor...and not progress a whit because some other person got just a week bit more honor than you. It's a bottleneck and makes the already horrid grind even worse.
4.) Change the honor needed per rank to a static amount, not one relative to the entire rest of your faction. The benefits of this are obvious. Not only can you tell exactly how much honor you may need, it also means that you can go at your own pace a lot easier. Maybe one week I just want to get enough honor to keep from deranking. Instead of having to randomly guess how much I may need, I know exactly how much I need to PvP. And conversely, if I want to gain rank, I know how much I need to do.
All of these changes combined would drastically and quickly change PvP a lot for the better. It would make it more fun. It would stop encouraging cheating, exploiting, and botting. It would give whiny casuals a very valid and realistic way to advance their character. It would take a lot of the grind out of PvP and put a lot of the control back in the hands of the character. You can PvP however much you want for whatever rank you want and no outside force like the rest of your faction or decay can change that.
The Gates of AQ
Well, I'd like to say that the opening of the gates of AQ on Eonar was a really cool event. Being just the 28th server to have them open, it was a pretty big opportunity to pick up the pace and catch up to the faster servers. However, I wouldn't know how the Opening event really went, seeing as how the server crashed 3 times before the gong was rung and proceeded to crash several more times immediately after. I was stuck at "retrieving character list" for nearly 2 hours. When I did get back in, the lag was so severe that insta-cast shots were taking upwards of 10-12 seconds and I was doing about 3 autoshots per minute.
I'm just dissapointed that the infrastructure of the servers is so weak that what should have been a pretty cool event is turned into a lagfest slideshow where you die before mobs even load on your screen. Even at the end of the event, 10 hours later, Silithus was lagged bad enough so that instant cast actions still often took upwards of 5 seconds to complete. People were seemingly "teleporting" due to ridiculous lag. People were dying and taking 10-15 seconds to release or rez. Though not as bad as the earlier Opening event, it was still pretty atrocious, considering there were about a quarter of the people in the area for the end.
The general idea and premise behind the event was really nice. The way crystals popped up along with mobs, not only in Silithus, but in Tanaris, Un'Goro (assuming), and Feralas, as though there were a real Quiraj invasion was really cool. I didn't see much of the opening event because the server lag/crashes were overwhelming, but the ending event was really cool, with the Alliance and Horde generals taking down dozens of NPCs to the Gates and having a huge battle there. And the battle here was hard and long. We were fighting for...a good 30-45 minutes, I would guess. Killed dozens of huge (and I do mean ~huge~) Anubis-style statues. There had to be at least 200-250 people there all fighting 5-6 Anubis statues at a time. It was wild and crazy and dangerous. I died 3 times just during that event. I had a lot of fun inbetween too. Mostly kiting lesser (but still very large and very dangerous) Anubis statues and Quiraj monsters to Cenarion Hold where the NPCs helped me obliterate them for money and reputation. Kiting can be so much fun.
All told...I wish the event weren't so hopelessly marred by the lag. It really did ruin the experience for most people. A large number of people died horribly before the Gate opened or Mobs even loaded on their screen. I also wish that the 3 Collussi weren't so...worthelsss. They were so ~very~ difficult, to the point where we had about 100 people naked GY rushing, one rez at a time, to try and kill the Hive Ashi one. And what did we get? 2.7g, 200 Booty Bay rep, and a bag filled with 1-3 low 50 greens/blues, some potions, and some food/drink. Most probably spent more just repairing their weapons than they got in equivilent trade from the quest.
Overall...the whole event was a nice idea. Very nice. And in a perfect world that was what Blizz envisioned when designing it, it would have been totally badass. However the limitations of humanity (the war effort turn ins) and technology (the incredible lag and other technical problems), really hurt it a hell of a lot.
I think it's pretty obvious to most people right now that the Honor system is broken. It doesn't really work. At lower levels, it's okay. It's pretty easy to rank up with even a moderate amount of PvPing. The rank decay isn't very quick. You can just do PvP a few times a week and feel like you're advancing yourself, or at least not find yourself sliding backwords. It's where you hit the middle ranks, around 6-8, that things become obviously more problematic. To even maintain rank you have to PvP a hell of a lot more than you did to get there in the first place. To actually ~gain~ rank, you have to play yet more than that. The higher you get the more and more you have to play. It stops becoming a fun diversion or an activity and becomes a grind. A really horrid one that you can't give up even for a day. Weeks and weeks straight that you have to go in and slog through PvP match one after another, hour after hour.
And it's not right. It's pretty screwed up and needs to be changed. There are some fairly simple ways to change it at least some for the better.
1.) Cap rank decay. If Blizz were to be generous, they could cap it completely so that the highest rank you achieve is the rank you stay at and you merely lose points towards your next rank. Example. You achieve rank 6 and get about halfway towards rank 7. You stop playing for a while. You lose all your CPs towards rank 7, but you don't drop down below rank 6. If they're less generous, then they could cap the ranks every 3-4 levels and you never fall below that point. For example, you make rank 9 and stop playing. You may fall down to rank 6, but not below that point. Rank 14 may stop decay at rank 10, and so on. This is somewhat less forgiving, but still means that you can hit a certain point, stop PvPing, and coime back without having to start ~totally~ all over agian.
2.) Change the way decay works. Currently every week you lose 20% of your ~total~ current honor. This is brutal when ranking up because the higher you go, the more that 20% is. At rank 3, 20% is easily gained back in 3-5 BG games. At rank 10, you're looking at nearly a full day of PvPing just to make up for that decay. Either the % needs to be lowered considerably or they need to change decay to a per-rank basis. Example, you lose 20% of your current rank (absolute, not relative). So if you're halfway (50%) towards rank 7 and you don't PvP at all, you come back at 30% towards rank 7 (not 10%, if it were a relative percentage)
3.) Change the idea about a curve of players at each rank. Currently the idea that Blizzard has is that the number of people of X rank are limited by the number of people on the server as well as the number of people PvPing on the server. So there are much fewer higher ranks than lower ranks. The problem with this idea is that it means that you're basically competing with your own faction for Honor. And it means that you can play your ass off and get thousands and thousands of honor...and not progress a whit because some other person got just a week bit more honor than you. It's a bottleneck and makes the already horrid grind even worse.
4.) Change the honor needed per rank to a static amount, not one relative to the entire rest of your faction. The benefits of this are obvious. Not only can you tell exactly how much honor you may need, it also means that you can go at your own pace a lot easier. Maybe one week I just want to get enough honor to keep from deranking. Instead of having to randomly guess how much I may need, I know exactly how much I need to PvP. And conversely, if I want to gain rank, I know how much I need to do.
All of these changes combined would drastically and quickly change PvP a lot for the better. It would make it more fun. It would stop encouraging cheating, exploiting, and botting. It would give whiny casuals a very valid and realistic way to advance their character. It would take a lot of the grind out of PvP and put a lot of the control back in the hands of the character. You can PvP however much you want for whatever rank you want and no outside force like the rest of your faction or decay can change that.
The Gates of AQ
Well, I'd like to say that the opening of the gates of AQ on Eonar was a really cool event. Being just the 28th server to have them open, it was a pretty big opportunity to pick up the pace and catch up to the faster servers. However, I wouldn't know how the Opening event really went, seeing as how the server crashed 3 times before the gong was rung and proceeded to crash several more times immediately after. I was stuck at "retrieving character list" for nearly 2 hours. When I did get back in, the lag was so severe that insta-cast shots were taking upwards of 10-12 seconds and I was doing about 3 autoshots per minute.
I'm just dissapointed that the infrastructure of the servers is so weak that what should have been a pretty cool event is turned into a lagfest slideshow where you die before mobs even load on your screen. Even at the end of the event, 10 hours later, Silithus was lagged bad enough so that instant cast actions still often took upwards of 5 seconds to complete. People were seemingly "teleporting" due to ridiculous lag. People were dying and taking 10-15 seconds to release or rez. Though not as bad as the earlier Opening event, it was still pretty atrocious, considering there were about a quarter of the people in the area for the end.
The general idea and premise behind the event was really nice. The way crystals popped up along with mobs, not only in Silithus, but in Tanaris, Un'Goro (assuming), and Feralas, as though there were a real Quiraj invasion was really cool. I didn't see much of the opening event because the server lag/crashes were overwhelming, but the ending event was really cool, with the Alliance and Horde generals taking down dozens of NPCs to the Gates and having a huge battle there. And the battle here was hard and long. We were fighting for...a good 30-45 minutes, I would guess. Killed dozens of huge (and I do mean ~huge~) Anubis-style statues. There had to be at least 200-250 people there all fighting 5-6 Anubis statues at a time. It was wild and crazy and dangerous. I died 3 times just during that event. I had a lot of fun inbetween too. Mostly kiting lesser (but still very large and very dangerous) Anubis statues and Quiraj monsters to Cenarion Hold where the NPCs helped me obliterate them for money and reputation. Kiting can be so much fun.
All told...I wish the event weren't so hopelessly marred by the lag. It really did ruin the experience for most people. A large number of people died horribly before the Gate opened or Mobs even loaded on their screen. I also wish that the 3 Collussi weren't so...worthelsss. They were so ~very~ difficult, to the point where we had about 100 people naked GY rushing, one rez at a time, to try and kill the Hive Ashi one. And what did we get? 2.7g, 200 Booty Bay rep, and a bag filled with 1-3 low 50 greens/blues, some potions, and some food/drink. Most probably spent more just repairing their weapons than they got in equivilent trade from the quest.
Overall...the whole event was a nice idea. Very nice. And in a perfect world that was what Blizz envisioned when designing it, it would have been totally badass. However the limitations of humanity (the war effort turn ins) and technology (the incredible lag and other technical problems), really hurt it a hell of a lot.
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tired
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