WoW Honor System; How will it change your play?

[Ojnod]

For the uninformed (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/pvp/pvp-article-part2.html)

Well with the honor system being released as early as tomorrow, I am just wondering how this will change everybody's play style. I know many of you play on a PvE server, so I don't really know how PvP works there, but how will you go about getting honor points?

I play on a PvP server myself so I am going to have to be very careful when leveling, because lots of people will be ready to pick me off while I am at half life. I expect to see a lot of people going for XP in groups now, while before, many people would stay solo all the time. I am level 55 right now and hopefully I can make it to 57 tonight, then if the patch does come tomorrow I won't have much leveling left to do. It will be interesting to see how things go once I start playing any of my alts and get to the contested areas at lvl 20+.

[Rafal Dudek]

Do they still plan on when a person has really bad honor, their own city guards will attack them and stuff? I thought it was a pretty spiffy thing they planned to discourage newbie hunting.

[Ojnod]

As it stands now, when you accrue a Dishonorable Kill, it will not have a negative impact on your current honor ranking. You'll still get to see what the system considers a Dishonorable Kill, but you won't be assessed a penalty for it. At the moment, we don't want to penalize Dishonorable Kills because on normal (PvE) servers, the primary way to instigate PvP battles is through the attacking of NPCs. However, should enough PvP combat occur in Battlegrounds or if the number of Dishonorable Kills escalates to such a degree that it hampers general gameplay, we may well step in and institute a penalty for Dishonorable Kills.

So to keep it short: They are tracking dishonorable kills, but not penalizing for them... yet. Dishonorable kills only apply to killing NPC's, not the killing of players. I see this as a good thing, because otherwise you could just zerg a bunch of lvl 40 players to kill some 60's and the 60's would have to sit there unless they wanted dishonorable kill points. This is mainly put in the game to keep people from going to newb towns and killing off all their quest givers.