The Honor System in Classic
The biggest “timesink” in World of Warcraft back then was the PvP and the associated honor system. There wasn’t an arena rating or a clear progression, but a massive grind fest. Every Wednesday, the game recalculated the PvP ranks for all players. The PvP rank depended on the honor received, which in turn fundamentally depended on the time a character spent in PvP.
Only those with the appropriate rank could buy the best PvP armor in the game. Typically, this meant that one had to play PvP every day and do absolutely nothing else. Time for a dungeon? No way! Spending an hour in the auction house? That would lower the chances of achieving a high rank. In practice, this meant that several players shared an account so that one character could be permanently online and present in every battlefield.
In plain terms, this meant: Anyone who had to go to school or work could never reach rank 13 or even 14. Anyone who had a life outside of WoW could simply forget about achieving great success in PvP.
Worse than the actual honor system were the “Ruthless Murders”. For some reason, Blizzard found it amusing and necessary to implement these. Whenever you killed an NPC who was actually just a villager (like a quest giver, a merchant, etc.), you received a ruthless murder. This was not only recorded in the character window but also permanently reduced all honor you would receive from that point on.
If you had too many ruthless murders, you could never obtain a high PvP rank because you would receive less honor. Particularly “funny”: Even if a teammate in the raid killed an enemy NPC, you would receive a ruthless murder. That was quite a fun incident when a “fool” suddenly gave a character that could never reach rank 14 because he had murdered some vendor in Tarren’s Mill…
The good old “repair costs” are the subject of the last page.
