Honor points aren't decaying, but they are estimating
by Mike Schramm 
Dec 19th 2006 at 3:11PM
Lots of players have been having issues with the honor numbers after the last patch (and the recent decrease in honor gain), and the CMs are scrambling to get everyone OK and updated with the new honor points.For the record, there is only one known bug: When your estimated honor hits 6554, the display (not the actual honor earned) will reset to zero. That means if you earn 10,000 honor in a day, your display will say 3,446 on estimated honor. It's a known bug, a fix is coming, and Drysc reminds players that the display has no effect on what's earned.
In that same thread, a few players question why estimated honor is shown at all-- if HKs can be calculated, why not show totals in real time? The reason is for diminishing returns: the server can calculate how many times you killed someone, but not who and when, so diminishing returns aren't showing up in estimated honor.
Finally, Neth says there are no current plans to reset honor for the Burning Crusade, so if you want to start stockpiling honor for the new coming items, feel free-- just remember that there is a max limit on honor earned, currently two times higher than the most expensive item. A few players are still worried that the CMs claiming there won't be a reset just proves that there will be one, but I'm siding with Neth this time: she says what she knows. Like the wind in the trees, who knows what tomorrow's Azeroth will bring?
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Ranking, Blizzard, News items, PvP
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Bob Dec 20th 2006 2:41AM
Its an estimate, as in, may not be the truth. Whats so hard to understand about that?
Dave Dec 19th 2006 4:22PM
I think it's Blizzard's way of telling ppl if you're getting 6554 honor a day, honestly you shld be doing something else. ;)
Guernia Dec 19th 2006 4:46PM
6554 = 65536 / 10 (rounded up).
65536 = 2^16 (or 16 bits to represent a numeric value, or 2 bytes of data).
No reason why it's divided by 10, unless it's counting "tenths" of an honor point (i.e. for diminshing returns which counts in multiples of tenths) but if it's doing that, then their whole story about estimated honor is bogus. If not, why the hell would they divide by ten for display purposes, and award honor in blocks of ten, where 10 = 1 honor point? Also, why can't the server figure out who was killed when - I was under the impression the server did that on a daily basis. Are they using two different algorithms? Why?!
Oh well, at least it's an unsigned integer, or else after 3277 honor you'd suddenly find yourself with over negative 3000!
Since I've never actually gotten ~6554 honor in a single day (thanks snowballers!) I've never seen this as a problem. What I do see as a problem is truncation of estimated honor in the display, i.e. ~12... to represent ~1250, or (even better) ~'.' (god only know what that's supposed to mean). I fear interference from a mod...
Cedric Dec 19th 2006 5:54PM
@2:
I definitely got hit by this bug. My honor suddenly reset from 6000 (yes, it was a slow weekend) to 100 and I wondered if I had misread. I just checked today and I do find myself with 6k more than I thought I would. That's definitely a good news.
As for your other points, yes, not quite sure why they seem to switch from binary to decimal, but I've grown to respect their technical skills so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt :-)
Skuska Dec 19th 2006 6:18PM
Hmmm, interesting that they are overflowing on a 16 bit width, when most modern day compilers treat ints as 32 bits wide . . . that would suggest that they either explicitly set the honor as a 16 bit value (unlikely) or it is some other problem with the code, completely unrelated to overflow. Interesting bug.
klinko Dec 19th 2006 7:50PM
If I have to wait a day to find out exactly how much (or little) honor I got, so be it. I'd rather they'd work on giving me something to do with my excess medals! I hit 100 AV medals last night and was rather disappointed to find that all the medals I get from now until I spend the ones I have are sent to rot in my mail box for 24 hours before disappearing. I only have about 17,000 honor so far so there's really nothing I could spend them on. What I'd like is if they would bring back the turn-in guys so you could convert excess medals to honor as I know I'm not the only person with this problem.
paul Dec 19th 2006 8:08PM
good idea!
i don't think Horde have this problem on our battle group, we never win AV.
J_I_Logan Dec 19th 2006 8:13PM
What about disappearing kills? At 8:58 last night I had 444 Honourable Kills 'Today'. At 9:02 I had 0 and in the 'Yesterday' column it said I got only 125.
What is also CRAP is that the end of day honour doesn't even come close to the total Bonus Honour after each battle.
klinko Dec 19th 2006 8:22PM
@6:
Horde have the opposite problem (or at least my horde toons do): too many AB and WSG medals.
Buer Dec 19th 2006 11:40PM
When do you gain the bonus Honor from AV? At the cap time or the end of the AV?