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Let's discuss the Honor System

Daen·10/25/2013, 1:48:40 AM·3 votes·417 views

Hey guys, Mr T here.

I do a lot of thinking about League in general, particularly the community/player behavior. I've been doing a somewhat limited analysis of the system within a few categories, and this is just from my perspective, not representative of the full community at large. At one point I attempted a statistical analysis of Honor, but without data such as how much Honor each player receives from each game I really couldn't do it accurately... :(

Honor has essentially no meaning at the moment in my opinion partially because it's an automated system. Players give and receive Honor with no checks from anyone else to see if the Honor is valid. My friend and I were discussing how Honor would be so much more worthwhile if there were incentives, but it's completely impossible to add tangible bonuses when the Honor System is this inaccurate.

To my knowledge the Tribunal has a 99.9% accuracy rating, which is (in a community of 20 million) twenty thousand false punishes/pardons. Those are pretty damn good odds. I'd be interested to see what the accuracy of the Honor System is with a comparison of Honor received to legitimacy of that Honor (e.g. was it traded, given to the carry, or actually legitimately for a community-minded player). I would be willing to bet the accuracy is ~90% if not lower, which would be over two million people that either have crests and shouldn't or should have crests and don't.

The way the Honor System works currently would be essentially like the reporting system if there was no Tribunal. For example, let's say you were reported by some random person for absolutely nothing; the report would be a black mark against you, and once you accrue enough black marks you're punished regardless of the legitimacy of those reports.

This is actually pretty surprising when you think about it, because the Honor System is essentially a reverse of the report process with no control (i.e. the Tribunal) whatsoever.

I have a question for you guys: Do you feel like it's even possible to have a fully automated system that gives rewards for good behavior?

Let me put forth an analogy. You are given a dollar by a machine that spits out dollars to whoever uses the machine correctly. How much does that mean to you? Alternatively, say you help someone across the street and someone you admire noticed your good deed and gave you a dollar. Does that mean something different than the first option with the machine? It's still a dollar, but the way you 'earned' it was different.

This stuff is from my qualitative (subjective) experiences in-game from the advent of the Honor system to now. These are the four important things that were interesting to me from my observations during my time dealing with the system:

  • Amount of Honor given per game
  • Reason people give Honor
  • Which players tend to have Crests
  • How the current state of Honor compares to the system on initial launch

I'll discuss these each in turn, because I feel like this stuff is important.

So for the first one, Honor given per game. Anyone with half a brain would have noticed that after the initial "EHRMAGERD GIVE EVERYBODY DA HONOR" the rate of Honor giving/receiving has dramatically fallen to the point where it's actually rare to see any significant amounts of Honor distributed even if many players fit the criteria.

As for the reasons people give Honor, it has always been the case that players who do well tend to obtain more Honor. This makes sense, because if someone carries you to victory then sure they technically had Teamwork. This to me is one of the fundamental flaws of the system, the Teamwork honor is too general while the other two team-based honors are far too specific. From my experience the Teamwork honor is drastically more commonly given than the other two, which obviously makes sense due to their specificity. As a general rule having good teamwork really doesn't show any sportsmanship or community awareness whatsoever, in my opinion.

Now, as for players that have Crests. I've noticed that most of the players with ally crests (green yellow blue) are indeed great to play with, but the Honorable Opponent crest is a bit less cut and dry. I don't consider this a problem with the system but more of a strange interaction through All Chat. This will likely be a controversial statement, but I've found that very often if there's a troll on one team and some people on the other team that like stirring things up, that troll gets egged on by the other team. I've seen on numerous occasions enemy teams saying in chat they'd be honoring the troll/feeder for no good reason other than because he's amusing. I would assume this isn't the norm, but it's something to note.

Last but not least, the current state of Honor vs how it was at launch. So at launch Honor was this huge new thing, and people were giving it out left and right. This is both great and terrible at the same time; community-minded players were getting lots of the Honor they deserved, but there was a lot of Honor trading and game-wide Honor giving (everyone in game gets honor!). After about the first two weeks it started to even out a bit and the game-wide giving/trading petered out a bit. This resulted in a lessening of Honor for the community-minded players as well, but I would personally consider this time the best for the system. Roughly two months after that Honor started to trend in the direction it has moved to now, where Honor was being reserved for players that carried them and denied from community-minded players that were not good at the game or had bad games.

  • Do you feel this assessment is accurate? Why?
  • Do you think the Honor system accomplished its goal either overall or at any point in its life cycle?

Tl;DR - I feel like the Honor System doesn't currently accomplish its goals. It relies on players using the system properly, and let's face it this community doesn't tend to be good with that kind of responsibility.

Please let me know your thoughts below!

  • Mr T

6 Comments

Verandure10/25/2013, 3:59:57 AM1 votes

...I'd be interested to see what the accuracy of the Honor System is with a comparison of Honor received to legitimacy of that Honor (e.g. was it traded, given to the carry, or actually legitimately for a community-minded player). I would be willing to bet the accuracy is ~90% if not lower..."

A good portion of the honor given out is to people who play well rather than good players. Summoners see the honor initiative as a way to thank somebody for not being bad rather than to thank them for being good. This leads to a lot of "friendly" and "Teamwork" ribbons being given to people who are neither toxic nor standout positive members of the community.

The system fails to "properly" reward players for being good as it requires a consistent flow of honor in order to attain and maintain the ribbons. The vast decrease in honor rate since its induction only exacerbates the issue and has resulted in a good number of summoners with ribbons to be members of Players versus Bots communities or low M.M.R. normal communities. Other means of artificially inflating honor received -- honor trading and premade honor -- serves to further deflates its value to the community at large.

I do not see it as an inverse to the report function only because honor decays very quickly over time. There is no threshold to a ribbon, it's just a matter of rate, and with rate as low as it is right now, only the very dedicated or the very charismatic (the ones who should have them) will be able to get and maintain an arbitrary commodity.

ArisenHero10/25/2013, 5:24:01 PM1 votes

I think that a helpful addition to the honor system would be a bar that indicates how close you are to obtaining a ribbon in each category. The bar fills up and decays and shows your total amount of honor; if you are above the threshold you get a ribbon, but if you decay below you lose it. I think that would help people to see the value of honor and be more interested in receiving it, which hopefully improves their game play in those areas (friendly, helpful, etc.)

On the other hand it is very difficult to receive honor imo because of the nature of humans. If someone points out your mistake no matter how politely you are probably not going to give them the helpful honor. For one you don't like your mistakes pointed out and for two you may queue up after the game and completely forget that they helped you. Hopefully a bar that fills up would help people to remember better.

Once you honor someone it would be good if the bar was revealed to you so you can see how your choice impacts them. The immediate feedback from clicking will encourage more honoring. Very similar to how when you fill out a survey poll by clicking you get to see the results afterward. The immediate feedback gives the honoring player an idea of how good their choice was, just like in a poll.

I completely agree that the honor system needs something else to promote it and keep people interested in it. An indicator bar that fills up I think would be most helpful.