Blue Post: Honor calculations - Warcraft Tavern

Honor calculations


Pazorax-1880
Dec 10, 2019
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Pazorax-1880

Did somebody say, “What about the first two weeks?”

I’m glad you asked, because earlier today, we ran a repair script to fix the results of weeks 1 and 2, and that change should be visible to affected players now.

During weeks 1 and 2, as many of you have noted here, kills during certain time periods weren’t being counted in the daily roll-ups, which in turn caused them not to count toward your weekly standing. This resulted in players getting the wrong standing relative to one another, and the wrong amount of rank points. Some players got too many rank points, while others got too few.

Even if you didn’t get all your kills counted, you might have had a higher rank than you ought to, because somebody with a similar standing was missing even more kills (or higher value kills) than you were.

We had all the kills recorded, but because ranks are a result of relative standings, and each week is affected by previous weeks, we couldn’t just apply a repair for missing kills, we had to re-run the jobs for all 3 weeks to figure out what your correct ranking ought to be right now, and we did exactly that. We didn’t want to take anything away from anybody who might have been blissfully unaware of this problem, so after calculating the correct rank points for everybody in this region, we only adjusted the rank points of anybody who’s rank points were too low, to raise their ranking up to the point that it ought to be.

Now that that fix has been applied, we’re in a good state to head into battlegrounds.

Thanks again for your patience!

See you in Azeroth!


Pazorax-1880
Dec 7, 2019
Source
Pazorax-1880

I wanted to reiterate that on Monday night, December 2nd, the values for "Today, and "This Week" were displaying incorrect values as a result of our data repair job. The actual values being used for the weekly script were correct, but the display values are stored separately and were incorrect. The "Today" values were reset to 0 multiple times as the repair job executed, and the "This Week" values were showing numbers that were much too large, up to twice as large as they should have been. I apologize again for the confusion this caused.

It is also still true, even after our fixes, that if you are killing people just after the daily reset, (8:00 a.m. PT / 11:00 a.m ET in this region) you might appear to lose kills that occur as the daily job runs, even though you haven’t. The kills between 8:00 a.m. PT today, and the conclusion of the job are still recorded and will get picked up by the following day’s daily job.

Thank you again for your patience and understanding.


Pazorax-1880
Dec 5, 2019
Source
Pazorax-1880

I know the honor system can be frustrating, and even more so if it feels like you’re not getting credit for your efforts, so I wanted to post and let you know we are looking at people’s honor for the week, and so far all the checks we’ve done indicate that honor was calculated correctly this week.

As we mentioned before, our data repair job on Monday caused the “This week” totals to display an inflated value for the rest of the day, and that appears to explain a lot of the confusion we’ve seen so far.

We also know that some players confuse “estimated honor” with actual honor (estimates don’t account for diminishing returns), or confuse honor with rank (honor is earned from kills, rank is based on your relative standing within your faction). The honor system is slow to progress you through the ranks, even in the best case, so many of these reports aren’t a case of the honor going “missing” as much as they’re a case of an unforgiving system giving you less progress toward a rank than you were expecting.

In addition to being based on your relative standing within your faction, your progress to the next rank also slows down as you reach higher ranks. Achieving the same standing each week won’t award the same amount of progress toward each rank, it awards a fixed percentage of the delta between your current rank, and your current standing. It is actually impossible to achieve rank 14 in less than 12 weeks, and that assumes that you’re the top player on your faction for every one of those 12 weeks.

Those are all intentional behaviors, and are not bugs, but they can all contribute to a feeling of difficulty progressing through the ranks.

We also see reports of missing kills when you’re playing during the daily reset job, and we’ve checked that too. In fact, I just checked right now, on some of the people who reported errors in this thread, and last night’s job did calculate their honor correctly. Those kills are still there, its just a display issue, and they’ll show up on the next day’s daily report now that the underlying issue is fixed.

We are continuing to investigate, but at this time we don’t see any problems in the week 3 data. Once we conclude this investigation we can move on to investigating the problems that occurred during week 1 and 2, and we’re beginning to do that now.

Thank you again for your patience as we work through these issues.


Pazorax-1880
Dec 3, 2019
Source
Pazorax-1880

While I appreciate the reports, panic is unwarranted. The incorrect honor values in “this week” are another display bug.

The repair job runs one day at a time, and one realm at a time, so that’s why logging out and back in was displaying more honor. You caught it between days on the first login, and had additional days processed before the next login.

After this repair job completes the running weekly total displayed for “this week” will be a total of:

  1. the incorrect honor you had before the repair
  2. the correct honor you have as a result of the repair

That will not be the value used for the weekly rank adjustments. The weekly rank adjustment will correctly use the results of the repair.

Tomorrow, after the weekly reset runs, you should see the correct value in the “Last Week” display, which was actually used to calculate your rank adjustment for the week.

We’re working as fast as we can to have this repaired before the weekly job runs, so our focus has been on the data that actually feeds into the weekly honor calculations, not on the display, which actually pulls the data from a different source, that’s optimized for in-game display, rather than for calculation by these jobs. I hope that explains what everybody is seeing, but if you see something inconsistent with what I just explained, please say so. After all, that’s how we found this issue in the first place! :slight_smile:

TLDR:

  • This week” honor currently has a bugged display (shows too much honor).
  • Today kills” currently has a bugged display (DKs too, shows too few kills).
  • All the kills are still logged, none have been lost.
  • Everything for this week should be correct after weekly restarts
  • We’ll take a look at previous weeks as soon as this week’s issues are fully resolved.

I hope that gives everybody some peace of mind.


Pazorax-1880
Dec 3, 2019
Source
Pazorax-1880

Just to be clear, we do have the kills logged (for previous weeks as well).

What I said is that this action doesn’t affect previous weeks’ results, and we’re still investigating the scope of the damage, now that the cause has been identified.


Pazorax-1880
Dec 3, 2019
Source
Pazorax-1880

No, this job will not affect any of the results in previous weeks.

The steps to fully resolve an issue like this are:

  1. Identify the source of the problem
  2. Stop it from getting worse
  3. Determine the scope of the damage done
  4. Repair the damage if possible.

While we’re at step 4 for this week’s data, we’re really at step 2 for the problem at large (repairing this week’s summaries keep the problem at large from getting worse).

While we’ve seen anecdotal reports of lost honor, it’s only now that we know the source of the problem that we can identify how widespread the damage from it was, and that investigation is still ongoing.

I want to thank everybody that provided constructive feedback, and detailed information that helped us identify the issue here.


Pazorax-1880
Dec 3, 2019
Source
Pazorax-1880

It sure is! We’re running a repair job for this week right now.

One thing to note about this repair job is that it will zero-out the kill count display for today, but that is just a display issue. In order to get this out as soon as possible, we’re leveraging the existing daily summary code, and one of the things it does is reset the daily kill-count display.

The kills are all still there and will be tracked in the daily summary code tomorrow morning, just before it runs the weekly summary code.

So to summarize, if you see your daily kills get set to 0, that’s okay, and those kills will still be counted.


Pazorax-1880
Dec 1, 2019
Source
Pazorax-1880

I agree, but unfortunately we didn’t have the chance to respond sooner. We’ve been investigating, and can now confirm that yes, this is a separate issue, that’s not related to the caching issues we were experiencing previously. The caching issues made it more difficult to uncover this issue, and I appreciate the detailed reports of which kills were missing and over what time range which helped us track this down.

We’re getting pretty close to fixing this, and it turns out it was caused by the daily honor script running before the end of the day, causing it to miss kills that haven’t yet happened. But worry not! Those kills are still recorded, they just weren’t getting collected into the daily statistics correctly, so they’re not displaying in-game for “yesterday” or “this week” kills/honor. The source of the issue appears to be a scheduling system treating a UTC time as a local time, and we believe we’ve found and fixed that problem a few minutes ago.

We’re also working on a fix to repair the daily statistics which we’re hoping to run Monday, in advance of the weekly rank adjustment, so it will correctly count all your kills and honor correctly for this week.

I want to stress, that we do have all the kills recorded, even though you can’t see them all in-game, and we’re working hard to get the weekly statistics correct.

Thank you for your patience as we untangle this issue.


Pazorax-1880
Nov 20, 2019
Source
Pazorax-1880

That does help, but unfortunately, Character Transfers will not transfer your kills from your source realm, because its not fair to the players on your destination realm for you to bring in kills from a different environment into that week’s standings. The kills are still recorded, they just don’t count on your destination server. This was true historically as well, and is not a bug.

The character transfer will bring over your current rank, and progress toward the next rank (the results of each weekly calculation), just not the kills that you’ve achieved so far during that week. The best time to start a transfer, if you’re concerned about PvP ranks is immediately after you get your new rank.

We’re continuing to work on improvements so you’ll see the new rank reflected in game as soon as possible after the weekly reset.


Pazorax-1880
Nov 20, 2019
Source
Pazorax-1880

We believe this is caused by the same caching issue, and we’re continuing to investigate and make improvements so we can be certain. It’s confusing because the Honor pane is pulling the data from multiple sources, each of which is cached separately, so that leads to discrepancies in the display.

Everything we’ve seen so far indicates that the data is there, and is being processed correctly. The game just isn’t always using the latest version of the data, and we’re working on a fix so that you’ll always see the correct values after logging out and back in again.

If you can believe it, 15 years ago, when World of Warcraft first introduced the PvP Honor system, we had to leave the game offline for multiple hours while the weekly honor calculations completed. We’ve updated things so that’s not necessary anymore, but we need to iron out a few kinks to get this working properly.

I hope that clarifies things a bit for everybody. :slight_smile:


Kaivax
Nov 19, 2019
Source
Kaivax

Hello.

We’ve found the problem here, and a caching issue is causing some players to still see last week’s Honor.

Rest assured that everyone’s kills are counting as expected, and after an additional realm restart in each region, you’ll have the correct rank for this week.

We’re moving to do those realm restarts as soon as we can. These restarts are being scheduled for 7:00 a.m. PST tomorrow, November 20 in this region.

Thank you for your patience!


Kaivax
Nov 15, 2019
Source
Kaivax

Hello.

I can confirm that we had a bug with the display in-game. We believe that it was just a display issue, and should be repaired during the next daily reset.

Thank you for the reports!

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