What is the minimum required honor for Rank 14? (Math)

[Jipptomilly]

TL;DR: Approximately 3,863,340 based on simulations and a fairly accurate equation. You can achieve higher PvP ranks while gaining less honor by saving your hard grinding until later (compared to grinding the same amount of honor every week). Moreover, large honor gains early in the honor grind have virtually zero impact on your resultant PvP rank.

I'm a big fan of math. So when I hit 60 and decided to aim for the higher ranks, I wanted to do my research and make sure I was gaining honor in a smart way. So I Googled around looking for information on the honor grind, and the best information I found gave a description of the system, but not the implications that come with it.

Please note in advance that while I'm confident the equation I am using to calculate RP is fairly accurate, it could be off by a few percent. The formula Nostralius is using may or may not be based on standing. Only the devs could tell us.

Also, I may not have all of the information known about Nost. So please forgive me if I did something stupid like breaking an honor cap or something. I can promise you that the information here, even if the numbers are slightly off, would be incredibly useful to someone starting or in the middle of an honor grind for PvP rank.

A very simplistic description of the vanilla honor system is as follows:

Your rank is determined by your total RP value. The following is a list of RP values needed for each rank:

R1: 15 HKs (no RP value needed)
R2: 2000
R3: 5000
R4: 10000
R5: 15000
R6: 20000
R7: 25000
R8: 30000
R9: 35000
R10: 40000
R11: 45000
R12: 50000
R13: 55000
R14: 60000

Each week you lose 20% of your previous week's RP. You then gain RP based on how much honor you have accumulated that week (the formula for how much RP you get is unknown tmk, but a lot of player reports give us a good idea of the actual gains). Also, players under level 60 have a cap to their maximum RP.

Gaining 50000 honor gets you about 6700 RP.
Gaining 100000 honor gets you about 8600 RP.
Gaining 200000 honor gets you about 10500 RP.
Gaining 300000 honor gets you about 11750 RP.
Gaining 400000 honor gets you about 12775 RP.

One thing that may seem obvious if you're a math person like me is that due to the decay, early gains have less of an impact than late gains. I decided to test out that theory.

For starters, all scenarios in this post will assume a person starting at 0 RP

Using a set of sixteen honor -> RP pairs of various amounts along with curve fitting software I determined that the honor curve could be approximated by the equation:

y = d + (a - d) / (1 + (x / c) ^ b)

where:

a = -5563.013
b = 0.1957049
c = 11110910000000
d = 537694.2
x = honor farmed for the week
y = resultant RP gains for the week

While the numbers may seem crazy, if you try a few values you'll see it's extremely accurate to known honor -> RP curves.

Next I calculated the overall rank a person would earn if they chose to farm 120k honor per week for twelve weeks.

Based on the above formula, you would end up at rank 10 + 40% to rank 11.

Now let's say you decided to go hard early and did 300k gains for the first three weeks and 120k for the next nine.

Based on the above formula, you would end up at rank 10 + 58% to rank 11.

Now let's say you decided to go hard later and did 120k for the first nine weeks, and then 300k for the last three.

Based on the above formula, you would end up at rank 11 + 76% to rank 12.

As you can see going hard early made a very small impact on the result. If you don't care about hitting the higher early ranks quickly, then it was basically a huge waste of time. Meanwhile going hard late and earning the exact same total amount of honor - just on different weeks - made a huge difference in your final standing.

That part is simple though. What's useful is knowing what the minimum amount of honor would be for gaining a certain rank in a certain time frame. To find this, I had to create a simulator that could find the optimal honor distribution. This was done by distributing an input amount of honor among each week, and then moving honor from one week to another recursively , and in smaller and smaller amounts, until moving one honor from any week to any other didn't result in a gain of RP (and is therefore the optimal distribution of that honor over the given weeks). For this simulator I made two rules - you couldn't have less than 20k honor in a week or more than 450k.

This simulator helped me determine the following:

Let's say you wanted to get Rank 13 in twelve weeks. You could do this by earning 301k honor each week which would result in a final RP value of 55004. This would require a total of 3,612,000 honor farmed total.

However, if instead you chose to stagger your gains and do smaller gains early and larger gains later, you could also hit rank 13 with a final RP value of 55007 in twelve weeks with only 2749992 honor gained. That's about 24% less honor required. The required honor each week along with the approximate resultant rank is as follows:

W1: H-38495 T-6180 R-3 23%
W2: H-50018 T-11727 R-4 34%
W3: H-68029 T-16913 R-5 38%
W4: H-93099 T-21868 R-6 37%
W5: H-121744 T-26563 R-7 31%
W6: H-162924 T-31152 R-8 23%
W7: H-214844 T-35657 R-9 13%
W8: H-279243 T-40093 R-10 1%
W9: H-372395 T-44602 R-10 92%
W10: H-449377 T-48863 R-11 77%
W11: H-449824 T-52276 R-12 45%
W12: H-450000 T-55007 R-13 0%

As you can see, in the early weeks you aren't even breaking 100k. It's only the last four weeks in which you start needing more honor each week than the previous example.

Lastly, to answer the topic title, you would need approximately 3,863,340 honor over twenty weeks to hit rank 14 if you did it as efficiently as possible. At twenty-one weeks the additional decay even with a slow curve makes it require slightly more honor. And at nineteen weeks it takes slightly more honor due to less efficient baby steps. The optimal distribution is found over twenty weeks.

The honor gains per week and approximate resultant rank are as follows:
W1: H-20703 T-4863 R-2 28%
W2: H-21130 T-8794 R-3 75%
W3: H-21130 T-11939 R-4 38%
W4: H-21318 T-14473 R-4 89%
W5: H-24148 T-16754 R-5 35%
W6: H-33202 T-19255 R-5 85%
W7: H-42257 T-21795 R-6 35%
W8: H-57347 T-24546 R-6 90%
W9: H-75457 T-27429 R-7 48%
W10: H-96584 T-30379 R-8 7%
W11: H-132803 T-33615 R-8 72%
W12: H-169020 T-36902 R-9 38%
W13: H-217313 T-40294 R-10 5%
W14: H-289704 T-43922 R-10 78%
W15: H-392368 T-47845 R-11 56%
W16: H-449714 T-51460 R-12 29%
W17: H-449714 T-54352 R-12 87%
W18: H-449714 T-56666 R-13 33%
W19: H-449714 T-58517 R-13 70%
W20: H-450000 T-60000 R-14 0%

Once again, the real values may be more or less depending on the actual formula as opposed to the approximate formula, but they would be similar.

[Harm]

This might work for you in theory, but in practice it wont works like this.
There are several factors like bonus weekend, number of players and how much honor other players get. These factors will change the honor you need every week.
I can tell you with 100% certainty that you are not going from rank 13 to 14 on this server with 450k per week.

You are correct that going hard at early ranks is a bit of a waste, but the numbers you present here have nothing to do with how it really works since you cant know how much honor you have to get on a given week because its controlled by other players.

RP is given in brackets of 1000 RP.
Bracket 1 gets 13000-12000 RP, Bracket 1 is now around standing 1-20.
Bracket 2 gets 12000-11000 RP, Bracket 2 is now around standing 20-x
etc etc.

Honor has nothing to do with RP gains, Honor decides your standing and RP is based on your standing and how close you are to the standing above you.

This is a nice spreadsheet for approximate RP gain based on your CP the current week.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... =303311076

[Aklol]

are you jipptomilly from stormreaver/maelstrom?

[Rylox]

That cool graph that shows 450k honor = 13k RP is just to show an estimate in a graph form.
The 450k must be adjusted to wherever standing 1 is for that week.
>These calculations fluctuate based on standing 1 of your faction
Gaining 50000 honor gets you about 6700 RP.
Gaining 100000 honor gets you about 8600 RP.
Gaining 200000 honor gets you about 10500 RP.
Gaining 300000 honor gets you about 11750 RP.
Gaining 400000 honor gets you about 12775 RP.

[Jipptomilly]

This might work for you in theory, but in practice it wont works like this.
There are several factors like bonus weekend, number of players and how much honor other players get. These factors will change the honor you need every week.
I can tell you with 100% certainty that you are not going from rank 13 to 14 on this server with 450k per week.

You are correct that going hard at early ranks is a bit of a waste, but the numbers you present here have nothing to do with how it really works since you cant know how much honor you have to get on a given week because its controlled by other players.

RP is given in brackets of 1000 RP.
Bracket 1 gets 13000-12000 RP, Bracket 1 is now around standing 1-20.
Bracket 2 gets 12000-11000 RP, Bracket 2 is now around standing 20-x
etc etc.

Honor has nothing to do with RP gains, Honor decides your standing and RP is based on your standing and how close you are to the standing above you.

This is a nice spreadsheet for approximate RP gain based on your CP the current week.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... =303311076

I think maybe you're missing the point. It doesn't matter if actual RP has to do with standing or not. I knew presenting actual numbers might confuse the issue, but I wanted to give an example.

The equation, which is approximate, and will always be approximate, can still be very accurate. It's similar to approximating a drive over 500 miles or so. You can't give an exact time it will take due to traffic, collisions, and roadwork. But, given the averages, you can approximate how long it will take. This is the same thing.

The main conclusion, which have nothing to do with any inaccuracies in the curve-fitted equation, is that distributing honor in a way the gradually increases your progress - compared to just going hard every week, results in a much better PvP rank with fewer honor points farmed overall. A general rule of thumb would be to shoot for about 3-5k RP over the decay up until rank 10 or so. Any more than that is a lot of work for very little gain.

are you jipptomilly from stormreaver/maelstrom?

Yeah.

[stimz]

There's a pretty complex formula on rank 14 requirements. Free time in hours/1. If that value is less than 10 daily, shoot for rank 11.

[Slicy]

Bracket 1 gets 13000-12000 RP, Bracket 1 is now around standing 1-20.

It's even up to standing 25 and more. We've calculated the RP gained by several players in standing 20-25 for like 3-4 weeks and they got more than 12 000.

I believe bracket 1 should be around 27 slots at the moment.

[nervous]

are you jipptomilly from stormreaver/maelstrom?

beat me to it.

Yeah.

what's CO fucking around with these days? waiting on RoA/new dawn?

[Jipptomilly]

are you jipptomilly from stormreaver/maelstrom?

beat me to it.

Yeah.

what's CO fucking around with these days? waiting on RoA/new dawn?

Most of us are here. Spades is level 55. Most of the rest of us just hit 60 (all on Alliance).

[Aklol]

i'm Krael from <Spectre>. haven't run in to anyone else from Spectre but I did however run into Sominus and Blink from <TTL> in the beginning of the server. cool to see some Maelstrom vets here

was also in Nightmare Inc for a short time before the Thaedz split to Maelstrom. still see Tronjheim and Synonix IRL very often and Broodlord a couple of times.