Boards›Player Behavior

Honor System Improvements

AeroWaffle·9/29/2018, 8:10:12 PM·2 votes·3,127 views

The idea behind the honor system is great, it gives some amount of positive reinforcement for being good sports without the absolute need to avoid false positives like with the negative reinforcement of the punishment system.

So what can be done to make it better? In its current state I feel like the honor system is a huge untapped opportunity for improving the overall mood of the game.

Some things to keep in mind with the honor system,

  • It can't make a change that segregates the player base, such as placing high honor people in queue with other high honor people. Don't want to create a prisoner island system accidentally.
  • It can't give any gameplay advantage.
  • It can't be too overwhelming of a cosmetic benefit. Riot does have to make money somehow.

My current qualms with the system is you can no longer see the tally of the individual honors you receive and the rewards you get are few, far in between, and it's mostly imperceptible how many more times you need to be honored to get your next reward. All together it adds up to there not being much motivation to get honors on a game-to-game basis. We need more short-term benefits, no matter how small.

Some suggestions:

  • Add back in the totals of how many times you have been honored. Even if it's only visible to the user. This little number that people can see increase after each game would add a small reward for getting honored and feel better about it if they see it come out to be a large number overall.
  • Visible short-term goals and rewards. Add in a daily/weekly quest or something where the goal is to get honored X amount of times for a small reward of blue essence or some sort of honor currency that can be exchanged for key frags.
  • Remove the intangible bonus key fragments you get for having high honor. This only encourages people to get to high honor then stop trying as hard. Instead give people bonus keyfrag(s) for getting X amount of honor or through the honor currency described in the previous suggestion. Making it a tangible and quantifiable goal should help keep it a constant influence.

Comments on my suggestions? Any other suggestions of what to add/remove to the honor system to make it work better?

5 Comments

mlm olo mlm9/29/2018, 8:29:19 PM2 votes
  • It can't be too overwhelming of a cosmetic benefit. Riot does have to make money somehow.

Says who? And how much? And haven't they already made enough?

Anyways, I have some suggestions to throw in.

Blue essence gains per game. (Remove from the level ups if need be money man.)

Loading screen borders for "S" ranked games.

Kei1439/29/2018, 9:12:02 PM1 votes

I remember reading an article from someone in the behavior team (was it Kim Voll? or was it a Ask Riot post ? hmm ..) saying that their next steps in honors was to acknowledge the player's count of each honor, they would provide different types of rewards and different visual flairs depending on which honor has the highest count.

Can't find that anymore.

Danksley10/3/2018, 3:32:24 PM1 votes

Less autofill. You can already easily game the autofill system by during with a support and trading champion / role every other game. I don't see a problem with just excluding high honor from autofill.