From the PvP masterminds over at Blizzard:
We’ve reached a point where we’re now confident that applying diminishing returns to honor is no longer necessary, and we’re currently planning to remove it with the 2.4 patch.
Basically what they are saying is if you would like to honor farm, as most PvP players do, simply queue up for WSG and head to the middle of the map. By removing diminishing returns, Blizzard has successfully removed any motivation for a game of WSG to ever end, unless you need a few marks of course. Now to earn a few easy epics, you just need to run down the hill, spam away in the middle, die, and repeat until its time for you to log off. Easy infinate honor, without all that silly ‘winning’ that gets in the way.
I think we are one patch away from Blizzard just giving away epics. Why even play the charade of having to actually earn them.
Hardcore Casual 
This is disapointing news. I’d say nearly 70% of the time I’m in a WSG game there are only 2-3 people interested in actually capping the enemy flag three times to win the game. This is going to diminish that percentage even further and encourage more graveyard camping kill fests and afk’ers.
You might have missed the little piece of information that blizzard intends changes to wsg to solve exactly this problem of nobody intending to actually win ;)
Grinding honor entirely through kills is not the most efficient method of gaining honor. In fact, dimishing returns has actually been antiquated ever since the 2.0 honor system was introduced and all players were worth the same number of honor point irregardless of rank. Saying that removing DR diminishes the game play of the BGs or is giving away epics is a bit silly. First of all, removing DR actually ENCROUAGES people to engage other players in BGs. So, fighting players instead of NPCs in AV yields you more honor than it did previously. Secondly, the “never ending WSG” certainly doesn’t go away with the change, but at least you’ll continue to get honor for kills in a 45-60 minute match. In all, this is a good thing.
Sure, removing DR might help AV (the most flawed BG out now), but it ruins WSG.
Now our pre-made 10 man simply has to camp the GY of the opposing team, AoE murdering them as soon as they respawn, and do so until we feel the need to let up. As players quit, a new one will spawn in their base, a short walk and kill away, and back into the grinder he goes. With DR, the strategy was not viable due to DR and the fact that it was generally easier to just run up and down the field with the flag. Remove DR, and there will be no reason not to camp the GY indefinitely.
As for PUG WSG, anyone not interested in badges will be best served running to the middle and fighting, not sneaking around and getting the flag. Without DR, anyone trying for the flag is just reducing their honor gain, and if WoW has shown us anything, its that most players are only concerned with their personal pursuit of epics.
Research might help you out here, in the future, as your post comes off as extremely uninformed.
You clearly missed the part where a player that has been killed 50 times stops yielding honor entirely.
I got that part too, and it has no effect on WSG.
My guess is once someone has been GY insta-killed 20-30 times, they will AFK out, being replaced by a new, honor giving victim. 50 times the current respawn rate gives players plenty of time to get frustrated and afk out.
I think you missed my point about it not being honor efficient. Your 10 man premade is better off GY insta-gibbing while 1 person runs the flag back for the win. The quick win plus the GY insta-gibbing yields more net honor. Back before cross realms when queue times were outrageous, it was a bit different. Personally, I don’t think this really changes the mechanics or strategy of WSG. That doesn’t mean it isn’t still broken, but removing DR isn’t going to make it worse.
The reason I think it will make it worse is that previously with DR, it was not worth the time/effort into putting the other side into a GY lock. Now that you can continue the GY lock indefinably, it certainly does.
Cross realm queue times are down, but queue’ing a 10 man pre-made still can be lengthy, and the bonus honor you receive from winning does not out-weight this. Without the need to gain WSG rep in order to buy gear, ending the game quickly actually hurts a pre-made. Especially that once you establish a GY lock (fairly easy), keeping it up is effortless and a sure thing. Ending a game of WSG and playing again you run the risk of running into another pre-made, which results in a long drawn out match, either in a stalemate or one team simply afk’ing out. Either way not nearly as efficient as GY farming.
You are incorrect in your analysis regarding efficiency.
The most efficient thing for a premade to do against PUGs to run the flag, ending the game in 5 minutes with a 3-0 victory. This can be done with two flag runners, with the rest of the team playing control/shutdown midfield or at the enemy graveyard.
It’s not worth it, honor/wise, to drag out the game camping the graveyard, for the simple reason that honor/kill is split among all the people near enough to get credit for the kill.
Here’s math to prove my thesis:
Suppose we’re looking at 200 bonus honor for a win, and a win takes 5 minutes.
Further suppose we get 2 honor per team member for each kill at the graveyard.
Further suppose we have maximum efficiency, all enemies choose to rez, and we can instantly kill every 30s respawn.
Thus the first 5 minutes nets us 200 from bonus honor, and 2 * 10 * 10 = 200 honor from kills (2 honor per person there (remember it’s split among all team members there), 10 enemy players, and 10 30s windows within a 5 minute game).
Note that for any time longer than 5 minute, such that brought about by prolonging the game, we no longer have the 200 bonus honor, but instead only get the 200 honor from kills.
Thus we can illustrate honor (H) per hour (h) with this simple equation, for all h > (1/12):
H = 200 + 2400 (h)
We convert this to honor per hour:
H/h = 200/h + 2400
Thus the longer the game takes, the less honor per hour we receive.
Therefore we want to minimize the duration of the game, and thus a 5 minute 3 cap combined with eliminating the enemy team is optimal, even in a new DR-less world.
That’s great math, now factor in 10min+ queue time between each round for a pre-made, the possibility of running into another pre-made, the chance that some PUG runs off and hides with the flag, and any other randomness.
Sure in a perfect world, with a start game to another start game time of 5 or 10 minutes, flag running would make sense. With the way queues work, the best way to farm honor will be to GY camp.
Which is not to say every pre-made will do it, but even if only a few teams do, WSG will soon turn into more of a shitshow than it is now.
For simplicity, we can ignore the effect of premades, since they happen with a probability independent of whether you camp the GY or not.
We now look at the analysis with two variables, queue time and game duration.
Here is a nice graph of the results, displaying honor per hour.
As my prior analysis showed, with a zero or near-zero queue time, it is best to just to chain run 3-0 flag games.
However, as you astutely pointed out, once you add in even a 5 minute queue time, it is better to camp the GY until one reaches the max kills. This effect only becomes more pronounced with increasing queue times.
A better chart:
Well the assumption of zero queue time would be nice, but how often does that happen? For that matter, how often does a sub 10min group queue time happen?
And when you say ignore pre-mades, do you mean facing a pre-made, or playing in a pre-made? Because my entire point is that a pre-made group will now favor GY camping, while a PUG vs PUG game of WSG might as well just last forever with both sides fighting in the middle (this assumes one PUG can’t GY camp the other).
I mean ignore the effect of facing premades. I assume you are running a premade.
Most queue times I’ve seen on Stormstrike Horde during WSG weekend range for 0 to 3 minutes.
Yea sadly I play Alliance on Hellscream (no clue what BG that is in). Agreed that playing during a ‘weekend of’ cuts down the queue greatly.
it’s pretty obvious that they’re going to add reinforcements to WSG to prevent the kind of situation you’re predicting. 150 kills per side and the match is over.
You realize its going to be a 20minute game, no game can last longer then 20 minutes, after that it becomes who ever captured a flag first, if no one captured a flag then it goes into a tie, and half honor is given.