Revamping the Honor system

[Bishop]

Honor accumulation has always been a contentious issue. People don't understand the formulas behind it and they often disagree with how rapidly you can gain/lose it. We also get widely conflicting reports of peoples ability to gain Honor. Its about time we looked at and attempted to address the Honor system.

After some discussion with the Developers it was deemed that it was not realistic to explain in detail the current system as it is "crazy" and likely to make your ears bleed if you were to behold it in all its current obfuscation. This isn't a dig at the ability of players, more a comment on the organic nature of many of Utopia's functions which may have started out simple enough, but now are very difficult to understand.

So, the Developers have a question for us - how would you like it to work?

I am going to attempt to foster discussion here and try and find out some information. I have made some polls that I would really appreciate if you checked out and made your opinion known. There are also a bunch of questions/points below that should form the basis of your posts. What we want to get initially is an idea of what you like/dislike about it.


Here are the polls, please check these out first.

<polls links here>
Do you like and understand Honor as it stands? - http://forums.utopia-game.com/showth...you-like-Honor
Do you like the Honor rewards system currently? - http://forums.utopia-game.com/showth...rewards-system This is NOT about how you gain honor, but the bonuses you get when you gain it.

When posting please include this info if you can:

What do you like about Honor, and what do you dislike?

Do you feel Honor accumulation is transparent enough to the user? We could show total Kingdom Honor on the kingdom page, and show what you gain/lose on attacks/ops for example.

Should Honor gained be directly tied to the difficulty, and supposedly the damage, of ops and spells?

Should attacks have their Honor gain capped harder?

Should Honor be generated more aggressively - i.e should an attack/op/spell be able to generate more Honor than is lost?


Please stay on topic guys, offending posts will be removed.

[Landro]

The main problem is that gaining honor is hard but losing it is very easy.

Another problem is that doing the right thing for your kingdom rarely gives you the best honor.
A T/M targeting people with high honor as opposed to targeting the biggest threats will get more honor even though his value to the kingdom is less.
The same is true for attackers. Max grabbing tends to give more honor than deep chaining even though deep chaining hurts the enemy a lot more.

If we pick a chain target and drop him hard, he'll lose about 80-95% of his honor. What did he do wrong? (besides being a threat)

I have no good solution to these issues. Maybe somebody else has ideas?

[Kayani]

I agree with Landro.

I think that honor gains should be on a curve. I.e. it is painfully easy to go from Peasant -> Knight, easy to go from Knight -> Lord, ..., Very Hard to go from Duke -> Prince. If that instance causes more or less honor to be gained than is lost, so be it.

I think you should have some GBP for Honor Loss. Let's face it.... how honorable is it for 10 people to gang up on 1 guy? (i.e. deep chain). The more honorable fight is a 1-on-1.

I think you should get more honor the closer the target is to your relative strength in attacking / thievery / magery. I.e. if you have 10 TPA and the other guy has 1, you get little honor. If you both have 4 TPA, the honor is good.

I might think of more ... this is a good start.

[Kayani]

Oh - in response to "Should Honor be based on relative damage done?"

I don't think so. A lot of the time it's the less-damaging op that is better. I.e. stealing the last 500 bushels from someone, razing the last 2 farms.

How about Honor for Dragon Killing?

I considered Honor for Aid, and decided it was likely a bad idea because it was exploitable. But, maybe implement a "Church" (you can just call it "Charity" if you are against religion) where you can donate food and gold to the peasantry for honor, but ONLY to get you from Peasant -> Knight -> Lord (1800 Honor). You could not go above the default/given 1800 through donations. That might help recovering after deep chains and such. I.e. Sir Lancelot was defeated in battle, but donated his family's fortune to the Church, restoring his honor. It should be expensive to recover honor this way, and let's say you couldn't do it during war - that might lead to honor farming.

Edit: Back to relative damage. You might consider proportion, though. I.e. razing the last 2 farms was 100% of his remaining farms, and 100% proportion means a lot of honor. The first raze was 10 farms of his 100, which was 10% proportion, which means a little bit of honor.

[kilava]

Since honor is so easy to lose when you are attacked (especially chained) I don't see honor as something a player works towards instead I see it as a bonus that changes to different player as times goes by and the total honor goes up if the kingdom "win wars".

At the moment I wont dig myself into the honor system, since it will take a lot of time and thinking to get something that got a chance of being balanced.

I think this question is important since everything depends on it. Is honor something a province should be able to work towards or is honor a kingdom goal.

If its a province goal you need to be able to keep it better. (assuming you aren't T/M behind a wall of defense)

If its a kingdom goal, then each province gain/loss of honor is less important.

The reward system is fine as it is, but everything depends on how you gain and lose honor.

[Scavenger]

I like honor cause it adds an extra dimension to wars and Utopia in general. IEwar: Kd's may lose wars cause they can't resist the temptation of gaining honor. It can be an extra goal besides land, nw and ww. Diversity in goals and play styles is good. Big fan of the re-introduced faeries for the same reason.

Honor accumulation is not transparant, wich it doesn't have to be if it was balanced (gaining and losing it). Instead of showing it on the kd page you could also implement more stages like Earl, Dauphin and such wich would give a better idea of a kd's total honor and make all bonusses +1 and 2 instead of +2 and 3.

Yes tied (liniair) to difficulty, available honor, gpb and nw (both ways equally) and thus damage.

Yes capped at 10%/15% not 20% (wich i suspect it to be).

Honor generated as land (+10% for attacks) in war only. Create standards for ops.

Honor should other than that be equally won or lost.
No honor loss during EoWcf (not sure on that one).

[Uberdog]

whatever is decided, make it so that actual war KDs that won wars are the ones with honor, and not some fake warring supernoob KD----->SUGGESTION: make honor gains for every war greater, a KD doing their 7th war generates more free honor then someone doing their 1st war!

And maybe bring back Happiness :P

[jtwirkus7]

gotta love a honor system that you can start out 4 weeks into the age and where you start out as lord get to 2918 honor then within hours inside a war drop your honor down to 628. then after that in 3 weeks or less inside war make 22hits and only get back up to 1600 honor.

basically it needs to be improved so as t/m ops always give out a certain honor in particular a lower honor than attack ops by alot comparatively lets just say average a t/m can perform 50-100 ops per day and an attacker can only perform 2 hits roughly a day and lets say get off and get trhu with 20 ops the the number should be a set number of honor your gaining per hit lets say 75 honor points inside war and 5 outside war. then the every successful t/m op should grant you 1 honor point in war. give or take these are just figures to point out basics of what i am triing to convey.

regardless of how you would fix honor i dont think it will turn out where no one will complain i mean obviously you cant set it somewhere or someone might actually go negative on honor which would be sad but they would.

maybe create a system where you start out at 0 honor like you do now but instead of giving people honor create a you get honor for helping the kingdom you get squat for doing nothing but you never lose honor with the exception of failed attacks lets say you 100 honor per successful hit inside war and gain 5 per hit outside war (on target within the 20% below 25% above values). for failed attacks you would lose 50% of honor you would have gained if it were successful. put something similar for t/m ops performed but make it 1 honor point per successful op and you can never lose honor. or such. Problems i see with this is that people would instantly be able to tell at all times who is the most active people in teh kingdoms they are warring which would cause night terrors for all those people whilst at war all the time. the honor levels in the game would need to be adjusted accordingly as well i mean these inside war ive been in 2 this age so far and ive only been in it for a few weeks or so and i already made 50 some hit inside war so it would be easy to level up. with current levels.

When posting please include this info if you can:

What do you like about Honor, and what do you dislike? Well overall i like the fact that you get rewarded for activity.

Do you feel Honor accumulation is transparent enough to the user? We could show total Kingdom Honor on the kingdom page, and show what you gain/lose on attacks/ops for example. Actually i like this idea i would like to know what you gain on an op attack or lose on an op or attack if the honor system doesnt change much as it sits now.

Should Honor gained be directly tied to the difficulty, and supposedly the damage, of ops and spells? well i think honor should be tied to kingdom unity i.e. just because landlust is a hard spell and all doesnt mean it is most effective in helping a kingdom win a war. so honor should relate to that.

Should attacks have their Honor gain capped harder? personally i really hate that you can go from 2900 honor down to 600 honor in a few hours its kind of ridiculas not sure if thats exactly what you meant by this personally though i think honor should be more a measure of activity in helping the kingdom not in just being alive and hitting every now again a target that has alot of honor like the current system

Should Honor be generated more aggressively - i.e should an attack/op/spell be able to generate more Honor than is lost? yes inside war an attack op spell should create more honor then is lost as not sure if it is still in the game dont you lose 1%honor per day inside war. But doesnt the current system generate new honor inside war anyways.

[Kayani]

One more then I'm done for now :)

I think you should be able to get honor for ops/spells out of war, even if it's at a reduced rate, and follows the rules above (you'd get very little or no honor for picking on someone not of your size, or having 1 TPA to your 10, etc.). T/Ms cannot get honor out of war, as far as I know, while attackers can.

[Scavenger]

ow and no intel ops should ever be rewarded with honor :)

[Landro]

@scavenger
yes, honor loss during EoWCF is stupid. The protection after war is short enough without tempting people to make it even shorter to preserve honor.

@kayani
I think you misunderstood me. I feel that people should get more honor for working together and deep chaining is a good example of working together. The rub is that the victim of a deep chain loses just about all his honor which I don't think is very fair.
Perhaps honor loss should be shared by the entire kingdom. That way you can reward active team players without the risk of a person losing everything in a single chain.



I also think that honor benefits of the highest ranks (Count and higher) are too high. And getting more votes for higher ranks seems a bit pointless to me.

[Kayani]

Landro - yup, I do agree. I said GBP for Honor Loss - I should have said Honor Loss only, the attackers would still get their honor.

[Bishop]

You have to be careful if you tie honor gain too closely to land gains - you'd end up with a situation where gaining land = gaining honor resulting in large provinces having corresponding honor, and small provinces having small honor.

[SoShaan]

Talk about a can of worms...


No honor in whoring I believe is the best policy.



"If informing the players about the game mechanics will somehow break the game, then your game probably isnt very good"
I feel that just telling us how it works will save everyone alot of headache.

Ticks would be nicer

[Scavenger]

I should have said Honor Loss only, the attackers would still get their honor.

Honor gains graph linked to acre gain graph would already help a lot. Right now you can gain 10% land yet gain like 2% target honor on the same hit with gpb.

edit:

You have to be careful if you tie honor gain too closely to land gains - you'd end up with a situation where gaining land = gaining honor resulting in large provinces having corresponding honor, and small provinces having small honor.

Makes sense, but then acre gain modifications aren't the same as those of honor. (like mill sci)