The Dishonor System has been put in place to punish those who abuse PvP matches.
This extends to the matchmaking itself, where you wait in the queue until a match has been made, and 10 players have to click “accept” as for it to begin.
If you do not click accept, there is now the possibility of a small amount of Dishonor, where you have to wait a few minutes before you can queue again.
In the match itself, you can get Dishonor for not playing (moving), DC’ing (disconnecting), AFK’ing (away from keyboard) and some possible reasons like being reported.
In my experience so far, I have gotten Dishonor for various reasons. My first being to accidentally click “decline”, because I was about to click something in my inventory. After this I quickly experienced another form of Dishonor, when I had to leave my keyboard for the first 3 minutes of a match for personal reasons. That same day I also had a DC later on due to a power shortage in the entire house.
I get the small dishonor, I don’t mind having a bit of dishonor for an occasional accidental DC. My internet has been fine the last couple of months, but I can imagine other people might have troubles with their connection, and so their desire to play PvP. That day I got about 40 minutes of dishonor after the DC, possibly due to the accumulating reasons of dishonor.
What strikes me as a problem, is that there is no judgement system, other than some computer algorithm that does not know the cause of action.
Today has been the most bizar so far, when I got 10 minutes of dishonor (see screenshot), when a pop-up menu had not even come by.
In the map chat someone was talking about the loot content, and I pointed out the possibility that a low level character would receive less loot than an 80-level character. After a few messages we both received a random 10 minute dishonor, since apparently we both were in a queue.
There was no pop-up menu, but only a message saying that the queue had been cancelled. This time I have received a rather large amount of dishonor for no reason, other than maybe helping someone in map chat.
The only possible reason I could think of, is some mass reporting going on, with fast effect. This would mean that a number of people could affect someone with no negative consequences, since they have never spoken in the map chat itself.
I am still shocked to see how PvP has changed for me, and I have been wondering whether this has been happening to many others.
The return of Ranked PvP has been very nice, since having only Unranked was fairly chaotic, but the Dishonor system has already shown some deep problems.
Transparency of the System might help inform the victims of random dishonor.
Of course I would love to see this fixed, since this is by far more than a great game.
I have been thinking about how a possible Honor System, implementing positive aspects of an individual, could help counter the randomness of these Dishonorings.
It is understandable that a certain level of transparency could be difficult due to the structure of the code itself, but if the code itself is producing problems and no one outside understands what is going on, it will become increasingly difficult to calm complaining PvP’ers.
Maybe there are small parts which could be fixed, rather than removing such a system.
If it could be possible for the system to know what the nature of the DC could be, it might help.
If there are many complaints throughout the PvP community, this could also take a lot of time from the support area from the game, and it could be arguable if the benefits of such a system outweigh the negative side effects it is producing.
To wrap it up:
The implementation of this system is understandable. The negative side effects it has produced has already affected innocent people. This might be affecting more people than the support group or development team is currently aware about.
I would like to help out with solutions.
The Support Team has sent me an e-mail, explaining how the Forums are now the only place where it is possible to acknowledge this problem, and address its faulty aspects.
Hopefully this post will help out. There have been many ideas and issues I have been thinking about to help out with this game, but this is the one that has sparked me to jump to the forums.
Help me community, you’re my only hope.
