Did the Honor/Rank system exist before BGs?

[howlinfjord]

Does anyone remember if you could rank up before they added WSG/AV in June 2005? Why did they add battlegrounds in the first place? Apparently the horde/ally ration was pretty even on PvP servers back then. Was there a contribution point system? Anyone remember how it all worked?


UPDATED: I found the answer. The honor rank system existed before battlegrounds, but wasn't in the game at launch.

Read all about it here.

How am I supposed to play the game when every where I go someone is waiting to gank me? The graveyard is nice, but I want to see the rest of the world too!

Once Battlegrounds are released the amount of player-vs-player conflicts found around the world will most likely decrease significantly. The same goes for ganking found in the contested zones around Azeroth. Fighting in the Battlegrounds will yeild far more contribution points than fighting anywhere else.

^ Why did Blizzard think this was a good thing? If faction numbers were even what was point of adding battlegrounds in the first place.

https://web.archive.org/web/20050507010 ... tlegrounds

[Setup]

Prior to the honor system that was implemented in 1.4, the system used on Nost today, vanilla ran on a 'contribution point' system, or cp.

There were no ranks or rewards to speak of, your cp was basically just your weekly score.

You can spot many of the super oldschool players because they still call honor 'cp.'

[Setup]

Asking why they added battlegrounds is a bit like asking why they added dungeons.

Their real mistake was incentivizing players to do BGs for rewards rather than for the sake of PVP.

[howlinfjord]

Wouldn't it had been better if you could rank up through ganking in World PvP as an alternative? There was no alternative to grinding Battlegrounds back then, and there certainly isn't one on Nostralius.

The battlegrounds were always easily exploitable grind fests. I just think it was a huge mistake in hindsight. I mean were they worried about too much zerging like in Hillsbrad? The dishonrable kills and size of the world could have mitigated this.

[Drain]

They don't want players fighting out in the world. BGs were created purely to get rid of you, separating you from the world so you no longer affect anything, like a criminal being sent to prison. It's also why PvP in every game now is separated off in the corner, not affecting the PvE side of the world one bit. There is no World PvP in games anymore because they all opt for separation to protect their carebear side of the playerbase(even though PvE servers already did this). World PvP kills NPCs people need and disrupts questing. BGs affect diddly squat. In later years, they put in max level fairy dust guards that endlessly spawn out of the air to keep attacking you until you piss off. They did this because BGs just weren't enough, cities and towns were still being attacked... They also tried the crap with the towers and dust in the plaguelands and silithus... which were a complete failure because if players want to be told where to go to PvP, they would have just queued a BG to begin with. These events would have been useful for a BGless game... but do not mix logically with a BG game.

But BGs as a solution are what I'd call a mistake itself. I don't think games should have a big chasm in the middle of them that says, "PvE this side, PvP that side." A real or immersive world would not function in this way. If an enemy army wants to invade your country... you cannot say, "Well, this is the PvE area, you can't come over here and do that, sorry. You have to go over there to that area to fight." No, sorry, they will go where they want and attack whatever they want...

A better solution would have been to downlevel players by zone(similar to what GW2 does). But rather than take logical steps to fix a problem, they just get out the hatchet and completely remove the problem. Every game sine then has followed suit as well, including GW2, which completely disables any kind of PvP out in the world, again opting to have the PvP over in a meaningless corner that affects nothing and no one in the rest of the game world. Back in the day, we did not say PvE, or PvP, we just said WoW, aka, World of Warcraff. You also used gear from 1 for the other, they were not exclusive as they stupidly became in later years.

Part of the reason why they wanted to remove world PvP was because it overloaded servers. City raids entire crashed servers. In 2005, the game simply could not handle hundreds of players piled up in an area. Just being in a city was a laggy hellhole, so raiding one with 4x as many people all fighting lagged everyone on the server and crashed it. BGs fixed most of this problem... but now, in later years, they can easily handle the loads, and "still" have the BGs around without any incentive to PvP out in the world. City raids should have been brought back with rewards on king kills. Instead they were forgotten and left behind as the game refocused entirely on casual gaming. Now days, PvP on retail is just an obsolete gimmick to keep a small minority happy. Most players will have moved on to more competitive games years ago. Since MOBAs are now common as tapwater, you'll just play one if you want to play one. It makes more sense to play a standalone MOBA(League of Legends) rather than one buried under a MMO(WoW BGs). And this is all the more reason why BGs need to gtfo and bring back World PvP.

[zzxx]

On a server this size there is plenty of wpvp all around the world. If you don't like BGs and don't care about rank, then just wpvp.

[Stalk]

Alterac Valley was the only battleground available when the ranking system was implemented. I do not think that many players were chain-queued into AV to farm honor during that stage of the game. Battleground holidays were also not implemented until Patch 1.7. I believe even Join As Group options for battlefields were added after 2006.

This server would've been very nice if we had some of these early limitations on PvP implemented so that world combat and city boss raiding would shine.

[milkribs4k]

They added battlegrounds because it was absolutely impossible to quest at all when there was an honor system and no battlegrounds.

[howlinfjord]

They added battlegrounds because it was absolutely impossible to quest at all when there was an honor system and no battlegrounds.

What do you mean by this? Was there ever any quote from Blizzard about this. Seems interesting. Elaborate as much as you can!

[milkribs4k]

They added battlegrounds because it was absolutely impossible to quest at all when there was an honor system and no battlegrounds.

What do you mean by this? Was there ever any quote from Blizzard about this. Seems interesting. Elaborate as much as you can!

There was an "uncomfortable" amount of people PVPing in each zone, you'd get killed corpse-camped pretty much constantly.