[2019] Honor orbs are incredibly underwhelming and don't encourage for "positive attitude"

I'm a big fan for Dan Ariely's work! This case study is why we don't do some obvious stuff like give you BE/keyfrags at the end of game screen for every honor you get, which is more analogous to the study. The way we give honor rewards is meant to lower the risk of this outcome, for example: we recognize your sportsmanlike play on login with key frags and orbs so that currency rewards aren't as directly tied to the game you played. We were conservative with the rewards we gave out (and how we gave them) so that they don't subvert the intrinsic motivation to play well in a team. Our decisions were based on best practices derived from behavioral economics studies.

These posts kinda validate that we've avoided one of the big risks of the system: the rewards are too significant and players change their behavior to try to get them (which then leads to really negative effects from people trying to game the system). The purpose of honor is to highlight that playing well with your team is appreciated by others and helps you win. Part of this is giving a little bit more recognition to the overwhelming majority of neutral and positive players for sportsmanlike play (e.g. play to win, don't frustrate your team so it's harder for them to play to win). You don't need to do anything except quietly play the game in order to benefit. We don't want players to strive for honor 5. If you happen to get it, it should be because you believe that consistently playing well with your team in a sportsmanlike manner is the best way to win the game.

To address the OP's sentiment, BE isn't the ideal reward and there's certainly room for more interesting rewards that are of similar value, but more bespoke to the honor system (and something that we brainstormed a lot of ideas for during development, many of them bad :D). I haven't worked on the team in a while though, so I can't really speak more about future intentions.

Well, that probably means we did a good job! As we were testing early iterations of the system we would actually ask the players how they would imagine gaming the system. One sign that we were in a good spot is when most of our answers are what you said.

However, when you first start looking at the problem you might do some really obvious stuff like directly reward people for giving honor, give players flat BE for each honor they get, or give really exclusive and desirable content at high levels. Because people respond to incentive, right? If you go too far you would start seeing things like begging for honor, boosting, honor trading, players threatening to report you if you don't honor them, etc. There's a lot of stuff that is counter-intuitive that we do to reduce the potential for people to game the system. Like we don't tell you who gave you each honor, even though on the surface you would think that would help promote closer bonds between players.