PvP Ranking System

[Deleted]

Looking through these pages, I don't see many discussions about PvP systems aside from the occasional dishonourable kill thread. I wanted to ask if there's any consensus on the vanilla PvP ranking system and which, if any, changes should be made to it.

Famously, the system rewarded playing for incredible amounts of time and account-sharing, since we all have to sleep. The former might be fine, though it contributes to WoW's poor reputation and general unhealthy behaviour from players. Account-sharing however, has always been cracked down upon by Blizzard, and I can't see them implementing or re-implementing a system that is widely held to encourage it.

There's a few ways the system could be changed to avoid these issues. Removing the competitive element, such that you only need set amounts of honour within a week to get to the next rank would be one. Another would be re-using the honour system that was in place up until Legion, where honour is directly used to buy gear. Some means of gating would have to be implemented there, so you can't skip straight to epics. I'm sure there's other ways to go about it, just wanted to ask if anything else has been experimented with and what's acceptable to people interested in Classic.

[evogsr]

I generally take the side of no changes, as such I'd rather see Classic as how Vanilla was back then. That said, this would be my proposition for the honor system if any such change was to be made:

The original system could be made to work well, rather better than it did by just tweaking two values and not facilitating the need to develop a new system or entirely overhaul the existing one. The two values that I'm referring to would be honor decay & same rank tax. If these values were substantially turned down or off (same rank tax is actually worse than honor decay from a game design standpoint). It would of course make the Rank 14 grind a less substantial grind. This has its potential downsides, Rank 14 gear was commensurate in power to gear from BWL & AQ40. You wouldn't want this gear being tapped into weeks or months ahead of BWL, so participation and award timing is critical, since we have no idea how Classic will launch in respects to patch content. Adjusting the value of honor decay to correctly match up with raid release scheduling is critical.

However, it would also bring a few benefits. We likely wouldn't see a Chinese/third party pvp rank leveling service pop up. In tandem, it'd also lower or remove the need for account sharing that took place. Win trading between horde & alliance premades would also cease or be diminished. Getting to rank 14 would no longer be a competition between players of the same faction, but rather foster more premade vs premades and competitive pvp as a whole.

For posterity: https://imgur.com/a/tjvAd