Honor Prices in the WoW 2.0 Release

On 12/10 (a Sunday) the rumors started:  That the new honor system (which I previously mentioned) would see its prices raised in the next patch (Tuesday) so you should spend your honor now so you don’t get screwed.  It was easy to believe this rumor because it was now a lot easier to get the spectacular Marshal/Warlord armor pieces and weapons.  

The rumor was quickly quashed in a blue post (in the World of Warcraft forums posts by admins/Blizzard employees are in blue and are thus called blue posts – kind of a rare and important proclamation from on high).  Here is the post (well really a reply in another post):

19. Re: Heard the price of GM weapons….  |  12/10/2006 10:12:27 PM UTC   
More than likely the prices will be adjusted for the current honor rewards sometime after the expansion releases to reflect their ‘value’ more appropriately when compared to expansion items.

That would mean the prices would be going down though, not up.

[edit]Changed original text to indicate that the prices, if lowered, would happen sometime after the release of the expansion and not right when it releases. I wouldn’t want to mislead anyone in to thinking that they can save up for release day and spend their honor on newly cheapened items before running in to Outland. Likely that will not be the case.
[ Post edited by Drysc ]

Now of course, today, 12/12 (Tuesday), the patch comes out.   And, wow, they didn’t raise the honor prices to purchase the armor and weapons!   Woot!  Oh wait.   Sorry.  Yeah, it’s true we didn’t raise the prices.   We just lowered the amount of honor you get.   By 30%.   The blue post:

0. Honor Gain Reduction- 12/12/06  |  12/12/2006 05:24:29 PM UTC    
Now that the Before the Storm content patch has been live for the past week, we’ve had a better opportunity to track the rate at which players are accumulating honor, and subsequently how easy it’s been to obtain honor rewards. In gauging these elements, we’ve determined that the effort required to obtain honor rewards is more trivial than we had intended. As a result, during today’s maintenance we’ve applied a hotfix that reduced the amount of honor gained by approximately 30%. This change allows the honor rewards to be obtained at rate that better reflects the item’s in-game value.

The reason that we decided to reduce the rate of honor gain rather than simply raise the honor cost of each item, is to ensure that everyone’s time and effort participating in PvP since the patch is not diminished. As this change will only affect future honor accumulation.
[Posted by Nethaer]

Now hey, I’m all for changing things to make sure the game stays balanced and fair.  That’s an important part of all MMORPGs.  But, saying one thing and then changing it in two days is a little ridiculous.  To their credit, at least the honor earned in that one week didn’t depreciate.   But now it takes about 50% longer to get anything (reducing honor earned by 30% sounds better though.)

So that basically means for the higher end items it now takes an extra week or two for the average players to get.  (Possibly more, it is really hard to calculate honor gain since it is highly dependent on victories, which if you are not in an experienced PVP group can be pretty close to random.)


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So, what do you think ?