Yesterday World of Warcraft’s honor system finally went live, and it did so without its much anticipated sister feature, the Warcraft 3-like battlegrounds. With the honor system in place, players are now rewarded for brutally murdering players of the opposite faction, effectively making PvP an integral part of the game experience rather than a worthless waste of time. Unfortunately, in all its infinite wisdom Blizzard never stopped to think that such a system would make any sort of gameplay other than player versus player combat completely irrelevant.

With no battlegrounds to contain the killing (and at this point, I doubt even they could do it), the world itself has turned into an all out war zone. While a few players cling desperately to the old ways, saturating the general chat channels of the major cities with LFG messages, the rest of the player population, a majority of which is at the level cap, is actively participating in a full scale war. I wonder what the NPCs who claimed that the Alliance and Horde were no longer at war say now.

Over the course of a few hours last night I joined a roaming Felwood death squad, participated in a large South Shore raid before hopelessly trying to defend Tarren Mill from within a small barn, defended Orgrimmar against an Alliance raid, ran like hell from a huge Alliance ganking party in Winterspring, participated in a massive underwater brawl consisting of at least 100 players outside Grom’Gol, and crashed against the gates of Stormwind. And honestly, it was a lot of fun. It’s like I was playing an honest-to-God Warcraft game or something. However, for the minority of players not bored of running instances at the level cap, I imagine the results of the honor system are more like a nightmare than a breath of fresh air. Every zone in the game has become incredibly unsafe, as massive groups and lone warriors both search for any and every player who would reward them with an honorable kill. Traditionally PvP-heavy zones like Hillsbrad, Tanaris, and Blackrock Mountain (home of four (and soon to be five) major end game instances) are now little more than huge, lag-filled tug of war matches. Neither side ever holds a single zone for long, despite hugely imbalanced player populations, resulting in a large scale back and forth struggle which makes any sort of PvE gameplay an impossibility.

Tonight I signed on to see if the initial activity following the patch’s release yesterday had settled down, but if anything it’s actually become worse. There are now players with 5,000 or more honorable kills (I have 355) and the game-destroying lag which plagued the most PvP intensive zones has now spread to the entire server. Still, it is a hell of a lot of fun to kill your fellow man, especially when doing so with 300 of your closest allies and enemies, but I can’t help but feel that a large percent of the player population isn’t going to be too keen on the idea of paying their monthly fee towards what has essentially become a deathmatch of epic proportions. Players stuck trying to quest and level up are probably in store for even less entertainment.

It’ll be interesting to see what Blizzard does to fix this problem, assuming they do anything at all. The most rational and least probable solution would be to remove the honor system entirely until the battlegrounds themselves were available. However, chances are Blizzard won’t do anything at all and we’ll be stuck with this insane online war until the next patch is released in a month or two. If they make any sort of move before then, it will probably involve adding some sort of strict penalty for dishonorable kills rather than changing the system at large. Also, I can’t help but wonder what measures Blizzard will take to try and confine the player versus player game to the battlegrounds when and if they do show up. Perhaps honor will only be earnable in the battlegrounds themselves or players will instead earn some sort of honor bonus in the instanced combat zones. Whatever happens, Blizzard will need to do something, especially if they hope to ever attract any new players to the game. As it stands right now, the honor system transforms the game from a PvE heavy, solo-friendly quest-a-thon to an all out war in which only the strong can hope to survive. It’s a lot of fun for those of us ready to experience it, but hell for those are aren’t.

Additionally, the amount of honor that players earn is ladder based, meaning each honor ranking is reserved for a limited percent of the population rather than based on a linear, level-like system. This effectively makes alts, the distraction of choice for many bored 60s, entirely pointless, as trying to gain any sort of respectable rank is enough of a chore with one character, let alone two or more. Also, this ladder based set up ensures that players will keep killing one another in ridiculous numbers until they have some reason not to.

I guess I’ve just become another grumpy MMO player, but it’s hard for anyone to admit that the honor system, while desperately necessary, was implemented extremely poorly.