More from Lyte about the Honor system.

Posted on at 3:55 AM by Moobeat
Lyte has been a very busy Rioter lately! Since the original announcement of the new Honor system, an new and upcoming feature that will allow Summoners to "report" players who are positive influences in the game, he has been steadfast in his attempt to answer any questions or concerns players may have. His introduction to the new system now boasts nearly 100 answers about how the new feature is going to work, what it's goal is, and even what Riot has done to prevent ill begotten summoners from abusing it.
Continue reading to catch up on some of the most interesting posts, from the last few days, regarding Honor.
On the PBE you can currently see some of the framework for the Honor system sprouting up on Summoner Profile pages.
First and foremost for this update, Lyte belted out a very clear and succinct answer about what the goal of the Honor initiative is. He says:
"The end-goal of the Honor Initiative is to encourage players to aspire to be more positive. It's to encourage players who otherwise might be neutral or slightly toxic to instead be positive and to reinforce their behavior when they do act more positive. It's to encourage strangers to shed anonymity and aspire to be more respectful to one another.
Next we'll move on to two subjects/questions that tend to garner the most attention - Potential rewards for being a remarkably positive player and honoring your friends/premade.

Rewards tend to be the biggest questions regarding the Honor system and here is Lyte's response on why tangible rewards aren't quite on the table just yet.
"The initial goal of Honor is to identify the positive pillars in our community. This is why we aren't talking about rewards right now. However, if you know me and understand psychology, you know that positive reinforcement comes in many shapes and sizes. We won't use rewards to encourage your participation in the Honor Initiative, so if you feel like there isn't enough 'value' to being good in the current iteration of the initiative, that's fine for now.

The end goal of Honor is to shape player behavior more positively--to help encourage and nudge players to lean good instead of bad when it's an emotional game."
Furthermore, he expanded on this answer by reiterating that Honor is largely an experiment and that it needs to get settled before rewards can be considered, saying :
"We're not talking about rewards at this time. Consider the Honor Initiative as a multi-phase effort, with Phase 1 being to just test the system and determine whether it is accurately identifying positive players.

It's a very large-scale, unpredictable experiment, so we have to take things one step at a time. The whole purpose of this experiment is to try to find the players who are legitimately being Honorable, regardless of any tangible rewards. Once we identify those players, who knows what may happen?"

Second on the list of popular topics is the question regarding premades and the issue of whether or not players who play with the same small group of friends have anything to gain from the system. Lyte addressed the question by saying:
 "If you premade 90% of your games with your friends and most of your games are non-toxic because your teammates are all friends... then you are not the main audience of the Honor Initiative. However, we have taken extra measures to ensure that there are still ways to progress and receive Honor if you play 90% premades. In fact, even though you mainly premade, you can still participate in every aspect of the Honor Initiative."
There is still building concern that this sort of "devaluing" of friends honor votes sort of undermines those premade only players. Lyte responded with his own question:
"Should your Honor 'vote' towards your own friends be just as important as one from a stranger?"
To sort of put things into perspective and clarify about this question, he also presented an extreme example,
"There's a lot of research that your vote of Honor towards your own friends means less. To give a more extreme example, what's worth more?

1) Your parents saying you are the best in the world at LOL
2) Your peers saying you are the best in the world at LOL
3) Random strangers on the street saying you are the best in the world at LOL"
You see what he's saying? Strangers, who have no sort of bias or investment in you, celebrating how good of a player you are is more of an accomplishment than your friends, people who have a positive bias towards you, honoring you for being commendable game after game.


Lastly, let's wrap up with a few specific questions to help you visualize how the new system is going to work.

Lyte mentioned that you won't be totally in the dark when it comes to honor ( like you are with reporting ), saying:
"You will receive a notification that you got some Honor; however, we are not telling you specifically who gave it to you. This is one of the many design choices we made to help prevent trading."
He also fielded a question about if you can both report and honor the SAME person in a game posted. Since this would sort of defeat the purpose of the system, it's no surprised he answered with:
"You can only Report or Honor a player at the end of a game. They cancel each other out."
Closing out, Lyte was clear that there was no time frame on the implementation of Honor yet, but he also promised some more news later this week. He said:
"No ETAs! We'll be revealing more details about the Honor Initiative and start some new discussions around it sometime this week."


For more information on the upcoming Honor system, you can check out this PBE post for the first glance at some of the small resources in place, this post concerning some yet to be implemented Honor related goodies found in the PBE files, and the original announcement post that started it all.