Monday, March 15, 2010

What's in an honorable kill?

Pending me not being lazy and turning on the floating combat text that tells you what an honorable kill is worth, I am resorting to old-fashioned math. The gods at Blizzard have told us that in 3.3.3 our honor from killing someone (and, associated thereto, the battleground objectives which have a straight conversion) is being doubled. From what to what, though? Traditional wisdom says, 20.9 honor per kill. I have my doubts about that though, having run some figures, and that just leaves me more confused. Though I will say that 20.9 x 3 = 62.7 = 63, which is the honor I see from burning towers in AV so maybe that's not a TOTAL bunch of hogwash.

BUT. Questions remain. In WSG, you gain honor three ways : killing people, capping flags, and winning. Now, I have more than three winning games of WSG recorded, and because I'm anal like that I recorded the caps in those games, so ostensibly you should be able to set up a system of equations that reduces you out to solving what each of those things is worth. Three lines, in 3-dimensional space, which should converge at a perfect (x,y,z) point. But they don't. And if you add more lines (=games), it gets worse.

So, ok, let's take something simpler. Arathi Basin gives you honor in only two ways, at least according to the general info site : killing people, and the amount of points you have at the end converts directly into your bonus honor. Linearly, I would assume, but that may be in error. So you can set up a two-dimensional system of equations, theoretically.

(HKs)*(value of HK=x) + (End Resource Count)*(Value of One Resource = Y) = Total honor gained in match

So I did that for all 18 non-holiday AB games that I have written down. A picture is worth a thousand words; here's the result :



Notice how those lines DO NOT CONVERGE ON A SINGLE GLORIOUS POINT. Moreover, even if you wanted to draw a really big Dot Of Best Fit...the x-value -- an honorable kill, remember -- there hovers somewhere (roughly) between 9 and 12...NOT 20.9, the standard accepted answer. Y is in the 0.3-0.5 region but that's not really relevant to my point here.

I'm not being given correct information here and as an engineer I am extremely distressed by this. Seriously, I was in bed trying to go to sleep with my wife and this idea SO UNNERVED me that I had to come down to my computer, play with graphs and desperately attempt to fit some sense into it, and then write a blog post about how annoyed I was when the data would not be forced. Note to the public at large : if you ever want to explode an engineer's brain, feed him bad data and watch the fireworks.

*sigh*

*tries to go back to bed*

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh god that graph hurts my brain. There has to be a reason the data is that bad.

Did you factor in the new 50% honorable defender bonus? That might be what's screwing it up.

Ihrayeep said...

Yeah but that's missing the point -- when I went into AB to check with the scrolling text, the honor was between 8-12 (much like the graph shows) and when I was close to a node it went up to 15 -- like the base was 10 and the 50% bonus bumped it to 15.

BUT you would expect that if an HK was 20.9, the bonus would put it to 31.35 -- which is way off these numbers anyway. It's like the actual value is half the value they're using to calculate their formulas.

Anonymous said...

ooo. I did miss the point there. I was distracted by the lines not converging and didn't notice the y-axis.

Do you think perhaps the honor is shared amongst people who get the kill? Like, say, that each one is worth 20.9 but if it gets allocated between 2-3 players, the total honor is reduced?

If so, that would suck. I get HKs for standing around the LM when the fight rages at BS, which really isn't right.

Big Wally said...

I personally never crunch the numbers this way, but I like to see and read about them just the same. It is nice to have a way to quantify what you're doing. If HONOR is a currency to you, then you want to know 'how much' of something you need to do to reach a goal.

Its like leveling up. When you can see how much XP you're getting per kill and determine how many mobs need their ticket punched for the re-spawn line.

Good stuff, even if Blizz seems to be using a random number generator at times :D

Ihrayeep said...

@ Big Wally - Thanks for commenting, it's nice to know other people are reading!

@ cynwise -- a good theory but unfortunately directly shot down by blizzard who says on their general info page *pause, looks up exact wording*

"Members of a group or raid will share Honor gains from kills in the same way as XP. However, the raid penalty on XP does not apply to Honor" (my emphasis).

I'll try to look at some more today, see if being in a crowd reduces the honor gained. Mebbe you should do the same and we can compare notes?