Basic Honor Changes
These are intended to foster more objective oriented games. Numbers are of course tweakable to match our current honor income per game, but proportions seem quite fair.

Kills
-20 honor per kill in midfield.
-40 honor per kill near an objective (point/flag/key NPC). (Honorable Combatant buff)

Objectives
-200 honor for being within 50 yards of a flag being captured/returned, a point being captured, or a key BG NPC being killed.
-Steady stream of honor every few seconds for players standing on an already friendly controlled point of interest when not in combat. Enough to make defending for the good of your team worthwhile, but not enough to make it optimal. It could either be a flat rate, or depend on how many people are there watching over the point. 1 player alone might get 3 honor every 5 seconds. But 3 players standing there would only get 1 honor every 5 seconds. Encourages a proper number of defenders.

Bonus Honor
-2000 bonus honor at the end of the game, multiplied by your team's overall progress. So if you win with 2000 resources in AB you get +2000 honor. Lose with 1500? +1500. Lose with 1 flag cap in WSG? +667 honor. AV winners could get a full +2000, the losing team's honor could be handled by some formula based on relative resources and # of points controlled. Note: Bonus Honor would not apply to Glory Calculations.

Ranked Battlegrounds & "Glory Points"
The basic idea, coming from the idea that Blizz is adding ranked BGs, is that Glory points are earned based on your personal contribution to a BG. Arena points would then be consolidated into the same system of glory points and they would have a combined maximum pool that can be earned per week.
Glory points per BG are determined by your relative honor gains, with a multiplier in there if your team wins. Each BG has a total amount of glory points that are distributed amongst all the players based on their relative performances, with an exponential distribution divided between 4 quartiles. Bottom quartile gets x. 2nd quartile get 2x. 3rd quartile gets 4x. Top quartile gets 8x. Take this "70's Show" themed 4v4 "battleground" the Alliance just won as an example. Honor/glory amounts are completely arbitrary and irrelevant other than to display the proportions. Actual amounts tweaked as necessary

Total Honor
Donna (Alliance): 90
Eric (Alliance): 80
Fez (Alliance): 70
Kitty: (Alliance): 50

Red: (Horde): 100
Stephen (Horde): 90
Michael (Horde): 30
Jacki (Horde): 10


Adjusted Honor For Glory Calculation (*1.2 for the winning team in this example)
Donna (Alliance): 108
Eric (Alliance): 96
Fez (Alliance): 84
Kitty (Alliance): 60

Red (Horde): 100
Stephen (Horde): 90
Michael (Horde): 30
Jacki (Horde): 10


Glory Points Received (based on 100 points total given out for this battleground. 100 is arbitrary and used only as an example)
Donna: 26.4
Red: 26.4
Eric: 13.2
Stephen: 13.2
Fez: 6.6
Kitty: 6.6
Michael: 3.3
Jacki: 3.3

A different distribution could of course be used, but doubling everything was easy enough and it supports the gearing philosophy outlined below well enough. Do take note that the most strongly performing players get x8 more glory pts per battleground than "the baddies"



Glory Point Rewards
The idea here is to combine aspects of "the honor grind" and "purely skilled based rewards" into one fluid system where anyone can buy a piece of gear, but the costs would be so incredibly high and disparity in potential points earned so huge that terrible players might spend a whole season of fervent BG grinding just to receive very few current season items. Great players would be able to accrue points so quickly that they could have a full set well before a season is over. A few notes...

-Max glory per week from BGs would be 1500, likewise for arena glory(IE the same thing as arena points are currently). Absolute max glory per week from a player in the top 5v5 in their battlegroup and who maxes out their BG glory, would be 3000 (1500+1500).
-Deadly and Furious gear would cost 2x its current arena(glory) pt cost.
-Hateful gear would remain unchanged and simply bought with honor.

-Glory (arena) points cap raised to 12,000.

Let's take a quick look at Furious Gladiator's Claymore(2350 weapon): costs 8500 glory. The most expensive/rating intensive item.

(continued in next post)

Examples of gear accrual via player ability/playstyle:

-Amazing hardcore playerA in top 3000 rated 5v5 takes 1500 arena glory. He kicks ass in BGs and hit the 1500 cap after not too much time due to being in the top quartile at the end of most BGs. For a combined glory of 3000 a week, he buys his Claymore after the third week, with 500 in change to spend later.

-Meanwhile, the moron with zero life, playerB, grinds out the BGs, making roughly 1/8 the glory per BG that amazing playerA makes. Playing day and night he maxes out his BG honor at 1500, but is so bad he doesn't want to get humiliated in the arena. End of the week he has 1500 BG glory. 6 weeks later he gets his Claymore and 500 in change.

-Casual playerC doesn't get as much game time as B, and isn't quite as good as A, but manages his time well and is pretty skilled. He plays smart, focuses on objectives, peels for his teammates, etc and regularly places in the 75% quartile. He gets the same BG glory in 1/4 the time as B, but only gets 1/3 the play time. He gets 1125 BG glory per week. He then goes and plays in his 1900 rated 3v3 team and gets 804 arena glory for the week. Totaling 1929 glory for the week his gets his claymore after 5 weeks, with 1100 glory in change.

What about arenas you ask? Won't people ignore them? Absolutely not =D

-Arenas would absolutely be the best glory per hour.
-They comprise half of the potential glory points per week. Doing well in the arena greatly influences your maximum glory per week.
-Top arena teams would still have exclusive titles/mounts.

Further Suggestions

-Contribution in each BG could be tracked behind the scenes. At the end of a season the top 5% BG achievers (via average placement) would be privy to unique mounts/titles, similar to, but different than gladiator titles/mounts.
-BG glory points could be redeemable for battleground-specific flasks (+Resilience/HP), high quality gems, etc. Getting near the cap and the week isn't over? Buy a couple flasks, gem your gear, or sell gems to buy potions, etc. on the AH.

Overall I feel this system would be an excellent addition to World of Warcraft as it combines the best of both the worlds of the arena and the BG system. Suggestions are welcome!

OK, despite all of this, if it were to make it into the rated BG's thing, I'll show you a preview of what the wow forums will look like once it goes live:

"premades are ruining wow"

"I just got steamrolled by a premade"

"wtf blizz, premades?!"

"premades are fine, l2p"

"only bads hate premades"

"just join a premade and stop the qq"

So on, so forth, et cetera.

I remember vanilla bgs, and I can tell you it wasn't fun grinding out my rank 10 one token at a time, while the higher ranked cliques gave away rank 14's like it was candy.

Indeed, it would suck getting rolled by premades, but there's 2 options here:

1) Find a way to break addons that allow for group queues without actually using group queues. Keep premade vs premade and pug vs pug. Queue times could be an issue, but with a new BG system I'd imagine they would be absolutely bustling.

2) Grant another multiplier for pug players facing premade teams. Maybe an x2 multiplier when glory is calculated, or some such adjustment instrument.


#1 being far more preferable, but 2 could work.

bump

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Q u o t e:
Indeed, it would suck getting rolled by premades, but there's 2 options here:

1) Find a way to break addons that allow for group queues without actually using group queues. Keep premade vs premade and pug vs pug. Queue times could be an issue, but with a new BG system I'd imagine they would be absolutely bustling.

2) Grant another multiplier for pug players facing premade teams. Maybe an x2 multiplier when glory is calculated, or some such adjustment instrument.


#1 being far more preferable, but 2 could work.

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I do agree that premade vs pugs is unfair, and my friend and I used to run 50-59 premades on elune in classic. They need to break the mods that still allow premades to go against pugs (AV Enabler etc) imo. If you want to queue as premade you should fight other premades. The rated BG system will be worthless if it just forces everyone into premades.

Well suffice to say it has been hinted many times that Blizzard is trying to find a way to measure "skill" in a BG. As futile and full of BS that is I think they will come up with something or already have.

Rated BGs, IMO, are a bad idea. Blizzard already struggles with the Arena and more or less screws a ton of causal players as a result.

If anything adding ratings to BGs will give Blizzard another excuse to do what they do best in this genre - limit loot distribution. That is all the Arena is to them - it has nothing to do with skill and all about making sure everyone does not gain the same stuff.

And yeah premades will rule the game and will farm gear. No thanks.

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Q u o t e:

If anything adding ratings to BGs will give Blizzard another excuse to do what they do best in this genre - limit loot distribution. That is all the Arena is to them - it has nothing to do with skill and all about making sure everyone does not gain the same stuff.

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Well, to be fair this doesn't lock anyone out from getting loot. It opens up tiers of PvP gear to casuals that previously they had no access to. It will take longer for a super casual to get the gear, but it's doing exactly what most casuals ask for... lets them get good gear over time.

A friend of mine brought up a concern that more casual BG players and fresh level 80s might be pushed even further away from BGs if there were suddenly a bunch of Furious geared players running around BGs all the time. Those with limited interest in BGs might have their interest fall to zero...

Are there merits of creating two separate sets of BGs? Rated and normal? Normal would only award honor and the more casual/freshly dinged players would go here just to chill out or grind out their basic honor pieces. Or would tuning in the BG matchmaking system to better differentiate levels of gear so these types of players would rarely cross paths be a better approach? I lean towards the latter, but am curious to hear other opinions.

I came in here expecting to flame you but I actually really like those suggestions. Blizzard should definitely do something similar; the only part I would be skeptical on is the distribution of the points. Take a game of WSG, where a flag carrier and his healer are alone on their roof while there is a big fight going on in the middle. Naturally, the two guys sitting out with the flag are going to have less padded performance than the ones out fighting. Or on the flip side, if you were fighting to take over a node in AB for the longest time, part of the main group taking it, and you died right before it was finally taken so you were no longer in range.

This is why the idea of rated BGs worries me, there are just too many variables to consider when judging how someone is helping or not helping his team. Then again, Blizzard never does anything to compensate less fortunate players, classes or comps in arena either, so maybe this would not be a problem to them.

Edit: Nevermind, I made more sense of it in my head. It would accumulate throughout the week, not based off of an average. With that in mind yes, your system is really good.

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Q u o t e:
A friend of mine brought up a concern that more casual BG players and fresh level 80s might be pushed even further away from BGs if there were suddenly a bunch of Furious geared players running around BGs all the time. Those with limited interest in BGs might have their interest fall to zero...

Are there merits of creating two separate sets of BGs? Rated and normal? Normal would only award honor and the more casual/freshly dinged players would go here just to chill out or grind out their basic honor pieces. Or would tuning in the BG matchmaking system to better differentiate levels of gear so these types of players would rarely cross paths be a better approach? I lean towards the latter, but am curious to hear other opinions.

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An easy way to solve that would be to have an MMR, not based off performance, but simply based off of how many glory points you have ever attained. So someone who has been a playing the system for say, three months, would obviously have many more points earned in the past than someone who is getting started. Divide it up into brackets based off of that basic idea and it would still be good, actually better, for casuals to get started. If people are grouping up together who would normally be in different brackets, average it out.

^ Actually, you bring up a valid point in your first post that I forgot to include in the OP...

While you certainly get a hefty boost to HKs for defending a point/flag, there might also be a small honor bonus every several seconds for standing around a point/flag when not in combat. Not enough to make it optimal to stand around and do nothing, but enough to take the edge off so to speak... Maybe 2-3 honor per 5 seconds or so?

Also, any thoughts on the overall balance of honor distribution? As you stated, there are indeed a lot of variable to consider. Should kills be worth so much? What about the balance between kills midfield vs friendly points vs enemy/neutral points? Etc.

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Q u o t e:


An easy way to solve that would be to have an MMR, not based off performance, but simply based off of how many glory points you have ever attained. So someone who has been a playing the system for say, three months, would obviously have many more points earned in the past than someone who is getting started. Divide it up into brackets based off of that basic idea and it would still be good, actually better, for casuals to get started. If people are grouping up together who would normally be in different brackets, average it out.

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Good idea, actually, as this would make it so raiders who just decided to get into PvP wouldn't get steamrolled by experienced PvPers with massive Resilience. But then the raiders would decimate the fresh 80s... There is so much to balance. You really have to give Blizzard kudos in general on getting everything to work even fairly smoothly...

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Q u o t e:


Good idea, actually, as this would make it so raiders who just decided to get into PvP wouldn't get steamrolled by experienced PvPers with massive Resilience. But then the raiders would decimate the fresh 80s... There is so much to balance. You really have to give Blizzard kudos in general on getting everything to work even fairly smoothly...

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Well, it's pretty much unavoidable in a game like this that some players will outgear others. But I think it would be better for new players to face raid geared players who haven't done much PvP and probably aren't any better at it. Blizzard is definitely trying but I think they just went the wrong direction with things like rating requirements. I think they should have just kept it the way it was in season 1 and 2 concerning the arena gear, and then let raiders buy one tier under the equivalent gear (T6 tokens for S2, for example.) Then just put more resilience on PvP gear and make the stat only apply to player damage. That would be the fairest way to have things I think, but I know they'll never consider that now.

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Q u o t e:
^ Actually, you bring up a valid point in your first post that I forgot to include in the OP...

While you certainly get a hefty boost to HKs for defending a point/flag, there might also be a small honor bonus every several seconds for standing around a point/flag when not in combat. Not enough to make it optimal to stand around and do nothing, but enough to take the edge off so to speak... Maybe 2-3 honor per 5 seconds or so?

Also, any thoughts on the overall balance of honor distribution? As you stated, there are indeed a lot of variable to consider. Should kills be worth so much? What about the balance between kills midfield vs friendly points vs enemy/neutral points? Etc.

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Well I think honor kills need to change their nature. Such as, you only get the HK if you did damage to that person within 10 seconds of their death, or if they were attacking you within those 10 seconds (to compensate for CC) or if you were healing someone who fell into either category. Flag caps and the like would have to be worth, well, not very much at all to keep people from leeching, and to keep classes good for flag running from gathering up points faster than the squishies. Like maybe make them worth the same as 5 honor kills.

Quick bump before bed.

Edited the OP post. Change list:


1) Combined kill honor for attacking/defending into one category to lessen defending honor to make room for #2.
2) Added defending honor stream while out of combat. Makes it so defenders don't get screwed if nobody attacks.
3) Moved team-wide bonus honor (based on overall objective progress) to not be included in glory calculations. This places more emphasis on individual contribution rather than having players fate being too dependent on how well their team is doing.

As an example for #3: Here, B would get much more glory than C, even though C probably worked his ass off contributing.

PlayerA: 500 honor, winning team. +2000 team-wide bonus honor. Total = 2500 * 1.2 (victory mod) = 3000

PlayerB: 200 honor, winning team. +2000 team-wide bonus honor. Total = 2200 * 1.2 (victory mod) = 2640

PlayerC: 400 honor, losing team. +500 team-wide bonus honor (terrible team) Total = 900


With #3 in effect the glory modified honor totals would be...

A: 500 *1.2 = 600
B: 200 *1.2 = 240
C: 400

bump

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Q u o t e:
Indeed, it would suck getting rolled by premades, but there's 2 options here:

1) Find a way to break addons that allow for group queues without actually using group queues. Keep premade vs premade and pug vs pug. Queue times could be an issue, but with a new BG system I'd imagine they would be absolutely bustling.

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Or just make them illegal addons, Ban anyone who uses such.

bump

i think your honor numbers are a bit to high but the general idea is fantastic. a lot of the problems in pvp are really design problems which can only be fixed by the devs tweaking classes but this system, i think, would certainly revitalize the bg scene or atleast get people willing to try pvp again. i personally like bgs. they are not nearly as intense as arenas but you can still have long hard fought battles(as well as 30 sec facerolls). this system gives people more reward for playing correctly and competently and in turn hopefully make the individual matches more interesting and fun. the numbers have to be tuned very well so the honor and glory points are allocated appropiately for everyone otherwise there will be nothing but qq.

i am a casual pvper and currently only do bgs so i suppose i am biased because this will allow me to get higher lvl items without doing arenas. frankly, i dont see anything wrong with that. i would like to hear from high ranked arena players to see if they think this system is fair and if they would be in favor of letting more players attain some of their sweet arena purples through bgs alone.

however, i don't see such a system being implemented before the expansion. the sooner the better though imo. i think it would really help the pvp scene in wow.

hopefully some blues are following this. bump for a great idea. :)