the people who are great teammates more often than not dont spend their time annoying their teammates with chat. this is true in most cases. those that are playing on a premade team are likely friends or are strangers attempting to make friends. in both scenarios there will be a preconceived notion that either a. you have to honor someone because of x reason or b. y and z reason prevent you from honoring n.
There are players who use chat to communicate complex instructions that pinging cannot do so effectively. Or they're trying to calm a feud and keep attention focused on the game. In both scenarios that is worth giving someone a bit of a pat on the back via honor.
due to the incentive to always honor in order to boost the amount of honor you receive and the fact that chat can be muted by both the player and chat ban restrictions makes the honor system less than adequate in my eyes.
Before Honor 2.0 there was a very, very short period of time in Seasons 1 & 2 where Ribbons were given out for players having received enough honor. As the game grew, less and less honor was being given out, even if you deserved it. There was 0 incentive on your end unless you were feeling extremely charitable. You can very easily choose not to honor anyone and people still do.
every match you play you can earn up to 9 positive or 9 negative reputation for each unique summoner you play with and anywhere in between with repeats only updating previous reputation marks. to me this makes more sense in the grand scheme of things because it would combine both honor and the player behavior system into one. every season it would reset.
Honor is a progression and to reset progression doesn't seem very likely. Especially when the reward is "only" a ward possibly and a border flair which is up to the whim of your peers to have visible anyway. If it reset what would happen is that as honoring diminished, which it will again mark my words, then you would be back at square one. That terrible place where Honor Version 1 ended up.
