WoW battleground rewards

Cap'n John blogged about WoW battlegrounds; he finds that there is a mismatch between the number of marks earned and the amount of honor earned. By the time he has the honor he needs to buy the weapons he wants, he has far more marks than he needs, even if he loses all the time and gets only 1 mark of victory per battle. Well, apparently Blizzard noticed the same problem, and is effectively increasing the amount of honor points gained in patch 2.4, by removing the diminishing returns rule. Previously you received less and less honor if you killed the same player on a battleground repeatedly. Now you'll always get the same amount, until you killed him 50 times, and then you get nothing. The added advantage is that with the new way of calculating honor, the exact honor point score can be displayed immediately, not just an estimate. No more finding yourself short a few hundred points when the day before you had an estimate of a few thousand points over the cost of what you want to buy.

I haven't checked the PvP rewards lately, as I didn't participate in PvP since before TBC came out. But at that time you could buy some rewards with just marks, no honor. My troll warrior is riding a kodo bought like that, as I didn't like the look of the raptor. So excess marks aren't necessarily a problem.

But Cap'n John also discusses the way premade groups cheat in battlegrounds. Apparently they just send in one member to check whether the enemy is another premade or a pickup group. If its a premade, the one guy quits the battleground and the premade group looks for an easier target. If its an easy to beat pickup group, the rest of the premade group enters. Cap'n John has some very reasonable suggestions on how to stop that exploit, for example by not showing the enemy group before the battle starts.

I'm usually all for using clever strategies in MMORPGs. But PvP is somewhat different, because when that premade group finds a way to select their opponent, it is other players who suffer as a result. But curiously Blizzard is doing quite a good job to prevent any exploits in PvE, while all the stories you hear about PvP are full of stories of people exploiting the system and hurting other players.

In a recent comment Doeg explained how joining a guild that has Karazhan "on farm" is easier epics than doing PvP. True, but first of all you'd need to find people who are willing to drag you through Karazhan while you are wearing bad gear and are underperforming as a result. *That's* what I'd call "welfare epics", you rely on the welfare of the guild that has Karazhan on farm to get yourself equipped. And second that guild is probably expecting something from you in return, like being willing to help them in their 25-man raids, where you'll do a lot of wiping and get a lot fewer epics. WoW battlegrounds are currently quite popular because you can get epics without owing other players. But the more I read about what is going on in WoW battlegrounds, the more I get the impression that the majority of players isn't there to have fun. PvP becomes a simple exercise of minmaxing, of getting the most epics per time unit, fun be damned. My guild chat is full of people doing PvP but complaining about it all day. I don't think that is healthy. I prefer raiding, with or without farm status, even if sometimes I spend an evening doing nothing but wiping and paying repair bills. A MMORPG should be about cooperative multiplayer gameplay, not about getting the best gear by cheating.