Why Dishonorable Kills failed at their intended purpose

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Before you share your opinion on this topic, let’s make sure you know what DKs actually were, and were not.

TIMELINE:
November 23, 2004 - WoW is released.
April 19, 2005 - Honor system introduced.
June 7, 2005 - Patch 1.5.0 hits, Dishonorable Kills introduced.
December 5, 2006 - Patch 2.0.1 hits, Dishonorable Kills removed.

A dishonorable kill was an instant, one-time penalty for killing an npc with a civilian flag. You did not get DHKs from killing player characters under any circumstance. A DHK was not a permanent hit on your ability to rank, either. A Rank 5 player could go on a DHK spree, drop down to rank 4, stop, and continue as if nothing had happened. A Rank 1 player could accumulate tens of thousands of DHK’s over a bloody career of griefing, wait a week, join their server’s dominant team, and climb up to rank 14 as if they had never been the Terror of Redridge.

Now that you’re up to speed, let’s consider the possibility of omitting them from Classic.

Hard Mode On: You may not play the “it wouldn’t be vanilla” card, unless you wish to look like a dunce. As indicated by the timeline, the were glorious months where the Honor system was implemented without DHKs. Classic is already a cherrypick of features - so, fair game, lads.

Here’s why I want them gone:
If a single player in a raid killed a civilian NPC, every single member of the raid received the full penalty. This led to a lot of sabotage and same-faction griefing, and ensured that attacking towns and cities for players trying to rank up was a literal minefield where one false jerk in the party or raid could set a highly ranking player back a week of effort, or more.

I’m sure most of us can agree that world pvp was wonderful, and that it should be encouraged wherever possible.

You might be thinking: “hey, cybadster, city raids are cool and all but this penalty discourages that griefing!”

No. It doesn’t. The only way to significantly affect your weekly ranking with DHKs was to either be rank 13, when even a tiny loss can represent a threat to your chances at the big 14, or to stack a whole bunch of them in one week to ratchet up the cumulative penalties. No one trying to rank seriously has time to be standing around, chain-killing npcs that afford no honor. Removing DHKs will not affect how people trying to rank play, besides encouraging them to show up for city raids, which is good.

Who does that leave us with? People trying to grief. These are players who have already attained their ranking goals, or are not trying to rank at all. They do not care about penalties this week, or the next, and if they ever wish to rank on that character, they merely need to wait until the end of the week to begin, as their history of griefing has no bearing on their earnings, going forward.

It is for these reasons that I believe DHKs were a dud, a failure, bad, useless, and should not be reincarnated.

Please, discuss. Remember that Honor without DHKs was part of the historical vanilla experience, just like Honor with them.

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So less than a month and a half with honor and no DHKs. And that is historically significant enough to warrant not including them?

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Significant enough to justify the sacrifice. Can you provide any reason they should be included?

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Because they were in the game.

Only reason ever needed

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They were also not in the game. Get lost.

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This, and it’s a built-in anti-griefing deterrent.

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for less than 2 months

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Can you provide some sort of explanation as to how they deterred griefing?

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Just as an example – you got honor taken away if you killed lowbies and quest NPCs. Or was it just lowbies? I know it was one of those.

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You didn’t read my post, dude. Not cool. You’re wrong on both counts.

There’s a ton of misinformation floating around about DHKs, and it needs to be corrected.

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What DHK’s created, that part you are lobbying against, was part of what made vanilla. To want to remove DHK is to not want vanilla…

Am I doing it right?

DHK’s being removed doesn’t hurt my feelings one bit. Nor does leaving them in. People are going to adjust either way.

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There’s no such thing as a dishonorable kill when you’re killing players.

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Classic is already a cherrypicking tour of vanilla with features from all over the place, so no, you’re doing it wrong. What I’m suggesting fits right in with the design philosophy.

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One big use is to be able and de-rank. When u are rank 12 got all the gear you needed and won’t go for a higher rank u can use DHK’s to de rank all the way back to R0 even. This is just kinda trollish epicness.

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How about you don’t kill civilian tagged npc’s if you are grinding ranks?

Problem solved.

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You’re not solving any problem. The only people DHKs could significantly hinder didn’t have time to be killing NPCs. Read my post.

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7 weeks is now “months”?

There were 18 months with DKs, vs 7 weeks without.

That means over 90% of the time the Honor system was in place, there were Dishonorable Kills.

To pretend that there was this significant glorious era in which DKs did not exist is revisionist history.

I would be totally ok with this situation lasting for Phase 2, but then gone for Phase 3 when BGs are added. But that’s the decision of the devs.

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Can’t we all just leave Classic alone? Stop trying to change things to something they weren’t for the majority of its life.

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Was glorious to me, dude. I’m all about city raids. Now, can you provide some reason that they should be included?

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You are going to have to give some example of this cherry picking because I don’t see something as large as removing DHK.

Also, the “am I doing it right” comment is a shout out to the #nochange method of chastising people for making an opinion post. You are more than welcome to ask a question like this and have a reasonable expectation of a discussion. (Translation: it was sarcasm)

DHK did not do what was intended but what they did do was still maintained for the life of vanilla. It is part of vanilla. Much more so than not having DHK. That is my perspective on this one.

We will still have people farming NPCs to bait out the enemy or grief low levels. They will have to decide if DHK’s are worth it.

9 Likes