A Thoughtful Discussion on Honor and Ribbons

Hi all,

I just wanted to share the experience I've had with the honor and ribbons and some more general thoughts on the honor system that it prompted. I can summarize my feedback on the honor system in two sentences which I will write below, then tell the story from which I drew this conclusion. Sorry in advance for the massive length, but I think I have some meaningful thoughts if you can stick with it.

My tl;dr opinion on the honor/ribbon system:
-Honor is a good conceptual feedback system for a player to improve his positive behavior, but lacks the transparency and detailed information on your current status needed to give actionable feedback in practice. With the minor change of more information given, the honor system could have a much stronger impact.

I'll elaborate on this opinion a little more at the end, but first, I'll relay my experience leading to this:

My Story:
When the honor system came out, I was really excited. I considered myself a pretty positive player and thought it was cool that we could point out good behavior in deserving players. I was, starting then, particularly motivated to always be a positive influence in my games, as was the intent of the honor system.

I received lots of honor in games over time (particularly teamwork) but was surprised after a while that I had still not earned a ribbon. I know that you earn ribbons essentially based on reaching some threshold of average honor per game in certain honor types. We don't know exactly what these thresholds are, and more-over unless you do record keeping yourself, we can only see our absolute count of honor received in each category, not the average per game which is the value that matters for getting a ribbon. And even then, it's actually more complicated because honor from a stranger is weighted more heavily than honor from a friend and I'm sure there's other factors too. This left me with a sort of vague uncertain feeling on how I was really doing with my positive behavior or how it compared to others. The result of this was a little less active motivation to go above and beyond in being positive and I, to some degree, defaulted back not my normal, albeit still positive, attitude.

Eventually I did receive a green ribbon. I was excited and wore it proudly on each load screen. This new achievement, and the public display to prove it, renewed my motivation to take pride in trying to be a positive influence in game. I think this is a great and intended effect of the ribbon system.

I've had the ribbon for a long time now and the initial excitement of having it has worn off, but i still take pride in it and I always feel automatically more at ease and less combative with me team when I see other green ribbon-ers queued with me. Again, this is a good behavioral effect of honor/ribbons.

Fast forward a few months and one day recently I notice my ribbon is gone. I have not consciously or noticeably changed my playing attitude. And I have not noticed a real decrease in the honor I get (obviously there was a decrease in honor-per-game, but I just general notice getting a 'couple' honor ever 'couple' of games and didn't see a noticeable decrease in it). As far as I know, the ribbon system works basically like this: you have to reach a threshold of honor-per-game in the certain honor types necessary to earn a ribbon. Once you earn a ribbon, I believe there is a slightly lower threshold of honor-per-game than you have to continue to get to keep the ribbon (again in reality there are actually at least a couple more complex factors involved).

So there are a few possible reasons why I lost my ribbon. I'll point out some possibilities, but the important point here is not that I lost my ribbon, or even why exactly I lost it, but rather that I don't know what the reason is. It could be that I reached the threshold to earn the ribbon and have since always been floating slightly below that honor-per-game level and only just now happened to fall low enough to lose the ribbon without any real change in behavior over time. It could be that I used to have more positive behavior and developed worse attitude over time, which in theory would correspond with a decrease in honor received (and thus honor-per-game) causing me to lose the ribbon. It could be independent of my behavior all together and just mean that there is some general trend of people in my games not giving honor as much resulting in less honor-per-game.

So without knowing what my trend in honor over time has been, or the more global trends in giving honor, I don't know if there is some temporary change in my behavior I can correct, or if I should just generally strive to improve how I've been all along or if in fact there is just a global community trend because of which I should expect to not get as much honor. This is basically where I stand now

Conclusions from my experience:
I summarized my conclusions earlier that basically there is not enough transparency and information given for the honor system. Let me clarify that I think the honor system does have some good effect currently. But the main point I want to make here is that while the current system is beneficial, there is opportunity for it to more strongly incentivize positive behavior with a very minor change of sharing more information.

I know riot is actively working on improvements to the honor system, and I'm sure they have done a lot more work and research on this than I could. So I'll emphasize that I'm not trying to brainstorm sweeping changes or improvements to the honor system but rather relatively minor increases in what information is displayed.

So what information would I like to see shared? There are lots of things that I would be interested in general to learn about how honor is calculated and how ribbons are earned, but the most essential points of information that I think would allow people to respond more actively to improve behavior are these two:
**1)**What is my current rate of honor-per-game received?
**2)**How much honor is being given generally in the game?

I'll elaborate on each:
1)My honor-per-game: By knowing this, and potentially being able to see your rate change over time as well, you have a point of feedback to see how well you are doing with your attitude. If you notice this drop over a period of time, you can consciously chose work on your attitude.

Inherently by doing this riot would then be giving up information on what the threshold values are for earning different ribbons as people could figure out when they get them or not. We don't currently know what these threshold values are but I don't see any downside to releasing this information and being transparent on how the system works. On the contrary, I could only see benefit of motivating people close to threshold values to try to be more positive.

Now of course it's a little complicated because the honor you receive is weighted according to if you know the person honoring you or not (and potentially other factors) when determining ribbon eligibility. On this point I would ideally like to have your honor-per-game values including this weighting openly displayed. This again would result in/require more transparency of how the system works which we have not had up to this point. And again, I don't see a down side to this kind of transparency.

Riot, if there is a good reason you have for withholding on this transparency can you tell us why? I could understand if you see some potential negative behavior incentives caused by releasing this information but I can't think of anything like this.

Overall, this information already exists for each player and goes in to their ribbon calculations. By allowing players access to this sort of honor information and being able to track it over time, a player can make more conscious decisions on how they behave in game. Also it leaves room for better communicated and received incentives for players to act positively.

I know if I had know when i was close to the threshold of getting a ribbon I would have been more motivated to keep up the positivity, and if I had know i was on the threshold of losing my ribbon, I would have redoubled my effort to stay positive sooner.

2)Global honor information: While it's the rate of honor you receive that goes in to determining ribbons and such, the rate of honor you receive of course depends on the rate of honor given. If you want to let players see their honor-per-game values (as I do want to allow) then it would also be important for a player to be able to judge how much honor is being given in general as their honor-per-game may drop not because of their behavior but because other people aren't giving as much.

Really, the ideal situation in my mind would be not just showing this information but adding it as a factor when calculating the weight of an individual "honor". As we discussed before, riot has told us they weight how much an honor counts based on if you know the player or not. This same idea could be applied to give a weight for global honor frequency as well: If people are giving out tons of honor, then weight that honor less. If people are rarely giving honor, then when you do get it, it means more, so weight it more.

This is potentially a little more complicated because, as we know from riot, the rate of honor given varies significantly with different subsets of the community (eg: high elo games have very little honor given while low elo games have much more). This means to get an accurate weight you would have to somehow gauge what subset of the community someone is in and look at the global honoring rates for just that subset. This is also difficult as players can be part of multiple subsets (say you are high elo ranked, but play stupid fun stuff at low elo on normal and then throw in TT or dominion separately and you've got a mess). But I think I see a potential solution for this:

When you give honor to someone, weight it based on how frequently you personally give honor (higher weight for those that give less honor, lower weight for those that give more honor). This way, the weight is applied individually to each player so you only get the weight from players that are honoring you and are thus already in the subset of the community in which you play. This way you could still get a ribbon at high elo, where honor is more rare, because the honor you do get means more toward eligibility. The only abuse case of this I could think of is players intentionally withholding honor so it means more then giving it to friends or something. If you already weight honor by if you know the person or not though, then it seems you could just not add the "rarity" weight when honoring a friend and this abuse would be avoided.

Summary: So in the end, I guess what I want is to be able to see exactly what your weighted honor rate status is (the number that goes in to ribbon eligibility) and to display what the ribbon thresholds actually are. This sort of transparency would have been a strong factor for my personal case to motivate efforts for positive behavior and I think it would do the same for others.

As discussed, we know riot is working on improving the honor system, but this seems to me like a very small change (mostly just revealing information that is already there) but a step that would have significant positive impact.

Do others agree with me? What do you think? What experiences have you had with the honor system, and how do you think it's influencing the community? Can any rioters comment on my thoughts or share riot's perspective on this? Let discussion begin!