Discussion: Honor Restrictions and Punishments
A topic that seems to get brought up in a variety of posts, may as well be presented in its own post. This is a difficult topic to broach at times simply for the balance sake that comes with rewards v punishment. The topic is a focus on the Honor side of the punsihment system; so it would be appreciated to keep the focus there. We are working with the current rules in effect, meaning chat is punished whether participants believe if it should be or not. Now onto the meat of the matter.
Honor has been sort of a rollercoaster since it came out for a variety of reasons. The biggest ones being the feeling of disparity of trying to regain lost honor to qualify for rewards and activities. As we know Honor is tied to two of the more 'focused' competitive activities on League in a rewarding and restrictive way respectively. Ranked, which requires Honor 2 for end of season rewards; and Clash, which requires Honor 2 to be elgible for.
Ranked: Prior to Honor, one simply had not have a punishment or active punishments after a certain date. This meant that people could of course have punishments early in the season and be perfectly fine; or even right near that cut off date.
Now you are required to have Honor 2 minimum. Which makes it more fair in theory as we have seen people punished early in the season still complaining about not being Honor 2 this late in the season. We know that means they are being validly reported, but not enough so to warrant a new punishment; but they have no idea until they get told that by us. Then you have the people who get tripped at the finish line, being Honor 4 Plip 1/2/3. Just negative enough to have slowed progress and not be H5. They can play off the restriction/serve the ban in time for the old cut off date, but now they would be highyl unlikely to be able to grind enough games to reach H2.
I do not fault anyone whose opinion of this would basically equate to "Don't do the crime, if you can't do the time". I'm there to an extent with you, I just also understand how disheartening the system feels to some of these players. Honor shouldn't have to feel like a grind. I'll present some ideas here in a bit, but I am aware they may not necessarily be good or feasible.
Clash: This section is going to be sort and sweet. As clash is still fairly new; I want to take a wait and see stance while we see how the Honor requirement interact. -
Ideas:
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Try Warnings again, but with something like a 5 game CR so a Reform Card can be presented. This would cause 1 Honor Plip to be taken or just Honor Lock. Previous Warnings were confusing because people thought they were in trouble, now this would show they are. We consider the early punishments to be warnings anyways.
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Have the system scale after a set date. This one sounds better, to me, but may not be programmably possible. Let me try to explain in a moment.
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Reduce Honor Requirement for Ranked rewards be an H1 with some checkpoint requirement (and maybe no 14 day as cause for low honor).
Scale: Currently it is programmed that CR drops to H1 and locks no matter what. A 2nd CR will either drop you abck to H1 if you managed to get H2, or to H0 if still H1. 14 day ban drops to 0. And perm, well, doesn't matter what honor you are at that point.
So this what I mean by scale: -start of season remains the same. Should be able to get back to h2 in time if punished. -after like June 14th it switches. It runs a check and punishes based on the lesser one.
- 10 game CR now reduces a set Honor amount, like 2 [or 3]. (So if you are H2Cx, it still drops to H2. If you are H3C3, it drops you to H1C3 honor locked.)
- 25 game CR would do 3 [or 4].(numbers are changeable, rough idea.)
- 14 day would do 4. (Since H5 doesn't have checkpoints).
That is the best I can come up with, although I know it technically gives a freebie of 1 CR to high honor players at the end of the season. I know that isn't good, and that is why discussions about Honor Restrictions and Penalties can be so complicated. We don't want to give someone a freebie just because they are high honor. Alternatively those who stumble at the end and would have recovered pre honor have no chance really.
Best TLDR I can give is: Honor can feel like a grind for punished players, especially feel bad if the stumble happened late in season. Ideas can't really be TLDR'd. Sorry.
Again, I understand many of you may not agree with my ideas or necessarily this topic and that is okay. I will still appreciate your input, even if it is just to call me a noob. Hope everyone has a great day.