This is directed to low level players and pve oriented players : One way to contribute to your faction is : Simply earning at least 15 honorable kills every PvP week (A PvP week in nostalrius is from start of Wednesday to end of Tuesday).
How does this help? The PvP honor system is very complicated to explain.
By creating a huger variety in standings that exist per week, ranking becomes easier.
The rank system uses your standing in comparison with other standings that exist in your faction to decide how many rank points you will get.
And because everyone also loses 20% of their rank points per week, it is required for them to be in a top x% in the standings to keep their rank or carry on higher. Here, we can see that a huge extra of people with a lower standing could help the rankers. Let me give you an example :
There were 1000 people with standing=(people with more than 25 honorable kills) last week.
Bob managed to get standing 100, that means he is in the 10% of people with highest standings/more honor last week. For that he will gain a good amount of rank points.
But if there were 2000 people with standing, whereas those 1000 extra characters earned just enough HKs to get standing, and so are lower by the other top 50% of pvpers, bob would also be in the top 5% instead. So he and everyone else in the top 50% would earn much more rank.
And lets not forget that the ones helping will also earn a rank scaling from 1 to 3 (Scout/Grunt/Sergeant) depending if they got some extra honor. (Rank 1-Scout is guaranteed)
Scout gets you an awesome faction tabard. Grunt gets you a rare trinket (no lvl requirement) and sergeant gives you a 10% discount on all faction vendors (including paying 10 gold less for a mount, 100g less for epic mount), with a blue stamina cloak.
Simple ways to get HKs:
For level 10-29: The lvl 10-19 and 20-29 battleground brackets are active, head to a city and ask guard directions to find a battle master! These brackets ussualy have twinks at both sides. Just stick to them and help them kill some enemy players, as long as you are around when they die, you will get 25 HKs in no time!
Also, you earn 1 mark for losing and 3 marks for winning. Remember that you can talk to the Alliance Brigadier/Horde Warbringer, and turn in 3 marks for honor and XP! It gives you xp only the first 2 times. This works for every different battleground and different level bracket, which means you can take advantage of this around every 10 levels.
For level 30-59: You can as well queue for battlegrounds, but it is generally less active. And since from now on, you will begin leveling next to opposed faction members..it won't be hard to just..you know..
You can keep leveling and take down some enemy players on sight when you can, in a whole week, there's no way you won't manage to reach 25 honorable kills. Or, group up with some people and start slaughtering everything you see, especially works well in STV and will get you the honorable kills really fast, can be fun too.
Amazingly I've seen even level 60s that had no rank, no comment here.
Oh, and your alts are characters too, they can also get standing like this. You can also be crazy and make tons of lvl 10 alts and join a BG on all of them once a week, that works too
Thanks to the fact currently both sides have literally over 9000 people who gained standing, it was possible for me to get rank 8 at level 49 without ever getting more than 40k honor per week, and cause I world pvped a lot while leveling. I know a couple of players who got rank 9 before dinging to 60, really awesome to get free blue sets at lvl 58. The lowest standing I saw someone having is 9116 in horde side, with 110 honor. It helps the rankers a lot, and makes your faction stronger.
Side notes: 1) If your character has no rank, he needs only 15 honorable kills to gain standing.(nvm its 15 for every case)
2) Damaging an opposed player before he dies is enough to get a honorable kill.
3) Being in a group/raid/battleground means you get honorable kills if opposed players die while you are just around (if anyone from your group did damage to him)
4) Opposed players which have their levels appear as gray to you do not give honorable kills to you.
5) You can also contribute even more by doing the same on your alts (other characters)
6) Press H to see your status regarding pvp
