[Era] It's time to reconsider how ranking works

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
1

TL;DR

  • Era is intended to be a “forever” server, which means populations fluctuate. The current population levels on Era have resulted in several points of friction for the players.
  • Current system of breakpoint caps make it extremely difficult to achieve rank progression on Era.
  • Players are currently gaming the system in specific ways just to have a hope of progression leading to restrictions on BG and playstyle choice, often resulting in abusive chat to players who don’t “fall in line”.
  • Remove the breakpoint system entirely, potentially considering an increase in total honour required and/or reduction in weekly caps, preserving the spirit of the current system while allowing players to advance towards R14 at their own pace and with more flexibility in how they approach it.

Preface

We all want to feel like our efforts are meaningful. Like the work we put in matters. However, we all want this forever server we find ourselves on to remain available for us to play, and we want to retain access to as much of that content as possible. The current iteration of the ranking system is causing some friction. It’s pushing players into a specific type of behaviour which, after a year now, is starting to wear on the player base in ways that I don’t believe the developers intended with the initial ranking change. It’s time we consider a change…

Current System

To gain rank you participate in PvP activities and gain honour. Your honour accumulates until you hit a specific breakpoint, at which point your honour is kept and your rank advances, either by a whole rank or by a portion of a rank. As you increase in rank the amount of honour required to keep your progress increases. At low ranks, breakpoints are relatively small and easy to attain; however, as you approach high ranks this breakpoint can be quite large. There is also a weekly limit of 500k honour, after which no further honour gains are kept.

For example, moving from R13 to R14 (the final rank), players are required to obtain ~1.25m honour for the full rank. However, the 500k weekly cap means this gets broken up into three ~420k honour breakpoints.

Era Problems

Era is a forever server. It’s intended to be a place where we can enjoy the Vanilla version of the game, mostly unchanged, forever. As a natural result of this, the populations will fluctuate. The current population of Era should be considered to be at a middle point. It’s higher than it was when Anniversary servers first launched and many players went to check out the fresh experience, but it’s lower than it was prior to that launch, in the wake of the Hardcore movement that brought many players back to Era. It is significantly lower than Anniversary at this current point in time.

Lower populations mean less players are queueing up for BGs, which means less queues and less honour gains. To maximize their efforts, players are currently engaging in the following specific behaviours…

  • Players only tend to queue up for PvP on weekends, when the PvP bonus is in play. This is currently on a three week rotating schedule where each battleground gets a bonus to honour gained while participating in that battleground and runs Friday to Monday, inclusive.
  • To maximize honour gains, players are focusing exclusively on Alterac Valley, as when played in a specific way, this battleground can provide a high amount of honour for both the winning and losing teams. This is leading to two sub-issues…
    • Players are only joining the queue for Alterac Valley because it gives them the best odds of getting the high amounts of honour required for the weekly cap. While players may want to engage with WSG and AB, it is risky to do so because without massive time investment, any honour obtained will be lost.
    • Players are putting heavy emphasis on a strategy that devalues PvP in favour of what is effectively win trading. One team is allowed to rush to the end while the other team focuses on killing NPCs, both teams getting high amounts of honour. Any players deviating from this are met with strong opposition, often escalating to abusive chat.

Core Proposal

Honour gained through PvP should directly contribute to your ranking progress. There should be a weekly cap on the amount of honour you can gain, but the current honour breakpoint system should be removed.

The core issue here is the large amount of honour required simply to advance to the next rank breakpoint. This puts a lot of pressure on players to maximize their time and has resulted in the player behaviours outlined above. It is unlikely that the developers making the original ranking change intended for this to be the case.

Removing the breakpoint system entirely takes some of the pressure off the player base to get as much as possible. This is something players will certainly still want to pursue, in order to make their ranking journey as short as possible, but for many others it means that the cost of a longer game or playing something outside of AV will be less penalizing.

Supplementary Changes

In order to preserve the spirit of the current ranking system, here are some potential supplementary changes…

  • Increase the total amount of honour required to move from R1 to R14. The current amount from R1 to R14 following the maximized path is ~2.5m honour. This could be increased to ~4m which, at the current cap of ~500k honour, would result in 8 weeks to achieve R14 and be in line with the current optimal experience.
  • Reduce the weekly cap to ~312k honour. The current system requires 8 weeks to move from R1 to R14. Assuming ~2.5m honour required to move from R1 to R14, a weekly cap of ~312k would mean a player trying to optimize their journey could expect the same amount of time spent.
14 Likes
Era and Anniversary PvP QUEUE
ERA pvp ranks and titles
Era have enough pop for AVs yet?
Why is it that?
Rank 14 grind
Blizz fix the New pvp meta
[Era] Show PvP queue population
Era - Alterac Valley
Please put a disclaimer for PvE players that PvP happens in BGs
Possible to hit R14 on Era?
Anyone else find it weird that Horde like making AV miserable for everyone?
The Easiest Fix for AV
Just put the AV weekend up every week
Fix classic era
Merge NA and EU ERA BGs!
Classic Era PVP PSA
2

Any honor achieved, no matter how small, should count towards the next rank. 500k cap is ok, just eliminate the need to do it all in one week. If I need 1.2 million honor to move from one rank to the next, then allow the rank achievement upon reaching 1.2 million over however long that takes.

26 Likes
3

I played a few AV games this weekend, knowing full well that I would not have enough time to reach my breakpoint required to advance rank.

I had fun in my games but it would have been more fun knowing that the honor I gained would not be lost

10 Likes
4

I dare say we would all run more BGs and participate in more WPvP if honor wasn’t wasted by missing a cap.

11 Likes
5

If players are looking for that “pvp” experience. They should run sand as blizzard intended…

It also feels like blizzard has no incentive to give players what they want. If you fail in hitting your cap thats a guaranteed month re sub and cash in the bank

The bottom line here is that blizzard dosent care about the players and what they want.

If you really wanted a pvp experience, you would remove honor decay in battlegrounds and let players kill eachother all day long for that juicy 200 honor over and over and over. And if that causes griefing cause ppl are being cave farmed. Dont suck! Hahaha

1 Like
6

A compromise was already reached on this matter. The grind is supposed to be grueling. That’s what makes it that much more rewarding when you get it.

The changes suggested basically make the PvP system equivalent to buying honor gear in TBC. Compromises like that chip away at the identity of vanilla and should be avoided.

2 Likes
7

Very true, however to be fair, the system was also designed to be done in 7 days, not 2 or 3 like it has become. I do think it needs to be reworked somehow to accommodate the loss of how honor was intended to be collected. Also as it stands AV is the only weekend ranking for the masses occurs, leaving AB and WSG weekends less utilized. To me, this system isn’t vanilla anyway, so if it changes, then we really haven’t lost anything “vanilla”

3 Likes
8

Fairly easy to fix the problems of a smaller gross population in BG’s that cause honor gains to be lower over time played…

Place the DR reset for PVP honor kills to reset every game. Then playing the objectives and honor kills are equally valuable.

For world PVP set them to re-set every 2 hrs.

2 Likes
9

As an avid pvper on era, I would love hks to be more relevant. The threshold of 15 hks makes sense for low ranks, but GMs should need more hks. I like the idea of the continuous progress, so on the non-av weekends I can get a chunk into the next rank. This would also incentivize even those who want the gear for pve, to pvp. I also love Dakahn’s proposal to remove the diminishing returns of hks in bgs. If you would get significant honor from kills, AV would be a pvp bg again and no more zerg rush.

3 Likes
10

They could just have perma rep and honorbonuses for wsg and ab to maybe encourage people to play them. Basically make it wsg weekend all the time. I do miss my pvp in battlegrounds.

4 Likes
11

While I share your desire to preserve the Vanilla version of the game, I would urge you to consider your perspective from a broader sense. Especially in terms of how the game’s population is evolving.

The PvP grind should require time investment, but it should also be possible. I’m currently 45 mins in an AV queue mid-day on the final day of AV weekend. Given that queues don’t pop outside of the weekend, best case scenario that means players have ~3 days to hit their caps. When I did my grind in September/October of last year I was able to achieving my cap by Saturday or Sunday night with a Tuesday start and putting in 10+ hour days. This was a challenging endeavour, one that I was able to undertake only because I was unemployed at the time. This would be significantly harder were I to do it today, given that I would have to compress a 5-6 day grind into 3 days.

Furthermore. That queue I wrote about above finally popped after around 52 mins. The game lasted 12 minutes. I played defense and ~7400 honour on the board. If I was actually ranking I would be hard pressed to make a lower end breakpoint, let alone a 420k one.

Is this still the rewarding endeavour you envisioned it to be?

I think you need to ask yourself what the value is in advocating for restrictions to PvP progression for our community. Yes, preserving a semblance of difficulty is important, but there’s a significant difference in taking 2 solid months to grind out R14 (under my proposal above) and getting handed the items for free.

I think there’s room for further compromise as this game continues to evolve. Especially if we want it to remain accessible to us.

2 Likes
12

Vanilla’s honor system is utterly atrocious. I got to rank 13 back in 2005 when I was a kid (gave up before 14, even with sharing the account with friends) and it was biggest waste of time ever. It’s not even skill based whatsoever. It’s all about who is able to sit on their a$$ unemployed for 3-4 months.

There is a 0% chance that BS or something similar makes it into Classic+ and thank god.

2 Likes
13

Well to be fair to your to be fair, you actually get 4 days. A BG weekend lasts 4 days. And you can supplement with some sand grinding during the other 3 days.

The only real difference is that you don’t have to compete for the top brackets. The caps, while they did vary, were probably pretty close to 500k on some realms. Although the caps have of course been much higher on more populated realms reaching 1 million+.

Also, the whole “they changed it a little so let’s keep changing it” is just silliness. A little salt on your eggs doesn’t mean you should then proceed to dump a quarter cup of Carolina reaper hot sauce on them. That’ll ruin your eggs.

14

That’s interesting. But I just don’t see that having a massive impact on honor gained or on how people play.

15

If the Honor kills DR re-set per game then getting 12 to 15K per game in AV would be very normal. Gains from WSG and AB would be 5 to 7k greater also in some situations. The honor gains under the present population are actually reduced VS what they would be if we had a true old school vanilla population with more active PVP players.

The use behind the honor kill DR system was to prevent farming of players in a single match or farming in a GY respawn to exploit in world PVP.

16

I disagree. I think it’s perfectly fine if r14 isn’t obtainable for everyone. As a matter of fact, I think that’s how it should be. You should have to dedicate your time to it. And if you don’t have the time you should have to find a way to make the time. And if you can’t then oh well.

I really don’t care for this culture of pursuing the widening of goalposts in video games instead of just accepting a game for what it is and achieving the goal. I just don’t have a lot of respect for the attitude of “it’s too hard or unobtainable so it needs to be made easier because I need to have it.”

17

Yeah maybe it would have more of an impact on honor gained than I realize. I guess I’d be fine with that.

18

Brutal, grueling, demanding, yes. Yes it was.

It was much more time based, which I’d argue is far more MMO-like. Trying to make an MMO into a competitive game just seems odd to me.

19

I agree insofar as it’s a question of whether or not you can dedicate the time to it or not. My stance on this extends beyond PvP and into the game itself. I’m against boosts, xp reductions, or changing time sinks. If you don’t have time for something that’s ok.

However, the current iteration of the PvP system isn’t a question of whether or not you have the time, it’s a question of whether or not you have the time and there’s enough people playing to allow you to pursue your goals. Back in Fall 2024 when I completed my grind, it was reasonable. The population has decreased significantly since then and it’s no longer the case.

Which brings me too…

This point of view assumes that the people playing the game don’t change either. Keep in mind that the original system was actually designed to take into consideration realm populations. When Blizzard made the change, they replaced this with a fixed rate that didn’t shift anymore.

I think that the grind will still be pretty grueling with no breakpoint caps. The weekly caps still ensures that it will take two months of solid grinding to achieve. That’s a meaningful time investment.

20

I think the decrease resetting between games is a good compromise to the system, but I do want to lower how fast it diminishes, especially for AV. Making it a continuous grind with caps but no thresholds, will definitely be the best QoL especially as games get harder to come by. I think those things combined would change the current AV meta and also make WSG and AB more viable on their weekends

1 Like