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[Column] Star Wars: The Old Republic: To PVP or To Not PVP, That is the Question
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
This week, Star Wars: the Old Republic announced the end of PVP Season Three to coincide with the launch of Game Update 3.0: Shadow of Revan. They also announced three tiers of rewards based on the Rating players will acquire during the season of play. Today, we'll take a look at the game's PVP options and see where the fun is.
Read more of Jean Prior's Star Wars: The Old Republic: To PvP or to Not PvP? That is the Question.
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Comments
"If I offended you, you needed it" -Corey Taylor
PvP is a bit of a dissapointment in this game.. sure they managed to make the most fun map i've ever played. Huttball
but having the Star Wars brand it's kind of expected to have big epic battles wich they have none.. everythings just 4v4 or 8v8
I had fun once, it was terrible.
World PvP is the only way to feel truly "massive". However, it's never been done right. Even a world as large as ArcheAge's world is way too small to make it work.
MASSSSSSIVE world size. World housing / Player Cities. Non-dedicated areas for PvP...
Next, Totally revamp the resolve system and get rid of the stun wars in general; you spend many fights totally locked out of your character via chained cc, roots and interrupts, you're globalled dead, then you have a nice full white resolve bar ticking away while you're behind the gate waiting to run back. Best way to do this is a full resolve bar would reset your cc- break and remove the majority of the lock- out hard stuns; or at least don't count spawn area waiting for the gate to unlock against the resolve white bar ticking off.
Lastly and this is a biggie - unlink the dev connection between balance and nerf. Instead of nerfing class a for pvp, why not see about how to build class b or c up a tiny bit? It doesn't have to always be " remove skill that works or lessen damage." That's the lazy guy way. You're developers at one of the largest game companies in the history of humanity - don't be content with half ass lazy fixes.
I just love taking my fresh 55 into pvp and getting destroyed sometimes even 3 shot by one guy.The Brave Do Not Fear The Grave
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
I thought it was a given that SWTOR's main focus obviously isn't PvP, they just don't have the engine for it and a good PvP system to support that side of gameplay.
SWTOR's main focus is PVE, but then again they need to pump out content a little faster.
But the acronym MMMORPG now currently means Microscopic Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. Kappa.
star wars is about large scale battles regardless of the era. However that engine really F'd them over in the long run. The warzones are ok for getting the gear but all your doing is getting gear to do more warzones to do more warzones to do....more warzones...Ilum wasnt bad but the paper engine couldnt handle it.
The biggest issue with tor is it so instanced everything is a loading screen to a loading screen and it just ruins the game.
Gsf was an even huger let down. You look at swg open space pvp and tors starfox instanced crap its just sad.
I dont understand why in 2014 were going backwards? swg was so open and really felt like star wars your in tor feels like your in a frozen painting that your running through to load into another painting that doesnt move lol.
Developers need to start putting out games that max out the graphics and the performance capabilities instead of putting out something that could run on the original Super Nintendo hoping that a wider audience will have access to it. Ps4/ xbox1 are pushing the realism and complexity boundaries and making light year leaps forward; PC Mmo's should be doing the same.
I really like the core idea of PvP in the game, the abilities for all classes are generally fun to use in PvP and there's a good balance of quick reaction time and strategical thinking.
However, a number of problems have plagued the PvP since launch:
1) Crazy amounts of CC. "Stun Wars" as it's often called has always been a problem in TOR. Almost every class has several hardstuns as well as other controlling effects like roots and slows. There are no diminishing effects and the resolve system is wholly unsifficient, as you're likely almost dead anyhow if your resolve meter is full.
Ironically, the resolve system used to work in a totally different (and much better) way shortly after and before launch in this game.
2) Crazy amounts of burst: a problem that isn't exclusive to TOR, but it's a bad trend in many MMO's nowadays. Even with the best PvP gear on, you can literally walk into a situation where you are hardstunned and globalled (killed 100-0% inside the global cooldown of 1,5 seconds and therefore totally unable to act).
Pre-launch, BioWare's idea for the PvP was that each fight would take a while and that you would have ample chance to make a comeback or turn a situation around. This was true shortly after launch and was tons of fun, but everything about that promise went to hell quite fast. They've never managed to turn it around again.
3) Too much healing. Of course due to points 1) and 2) this is currently necessary, but again far too much focus is being laid on having that quintessential healer with you for PvP. Luckily there's also the PvP tank in this game, which puts a little bit of variety in there.
Healing and therefore practically having infinite healthpools is one of the things that actually causes there to be a need for massive burst and CC however. But obviously there's no turning back from this one.
4) Unbalanced mechanics. TOR follows the FOTM format quite heavily (though I came back after a year and assassins were still FOTM just as they were back then, so in that case it's more like flavour of the year lol).
More importantly though, they've always had a ton of trouble getting certain stats and resistances working correctly to mitigate or reduce damage.
We started off with the surge rating stat giving batshit insane crits to certain classes, then they had problems with expertise (basically something like WoW's resilience) giving newbie players the shaft.
Defensive stats used to be crap in PvP all-around, thankfully they made shield rating more useful, but defense rating is still shit.
Recently they've made it so everyone gets bolstered, even at the level cap. But this has caused some players to start nerfing heir top-end gear in order to be bolstered higher than normally, an absurd situation.
Right now expertise is also too weak against dots, which they have made uncleansable for the most part. For reasons...
5) Grinding tier after tier of gear. Opinions may vary.
6) Wrong focus. For a game that wants to include as much Star Wars lore as possible, the focus on small-scale arena and battleground PvP is completely out of whack.
Worse still, a bunch of stiff-headed elitists keep resisting any change to that model.
Instead they should be focusing on introducing more massive, immersive battlegrounds that are reminiscent of the epic battles from the films and have some true bearing on the war between Empire and Republic in the game.
The engine is the biggest limiting factor there, but it needn't be like the Ilum battles at the start of the game. They can make it entirely instanced ala Alterac Valley for all I care.
Feel free to use my referral link for SW:TOR if you want to test out the game. You'll get some special unlocks!
If I were a pvp oriented player and not into ranked pvp I wouldn't get this next expansion. Staying at level 55 will most likely keep me at the levelling bracket and that's where I had the most fun in pvp anyways.
That is unless EA decide to make 55-60 a bracket of it's own that is. Still I'd be surprised if ranked wasn't for 60 only.
nailed it!
I had fun once, it was terrible.
I agree with everything there. I fucking love SWTOR PVP but it definitely has a bunch of quirks. And my dream is world pvp, especially somewhere on Tatooine, but there's no incentive at all to visit planets you've out leveled, let alone fight people. Right now, world pvp is all about you wanting to challenge yourself, have fun, or just be a general dickhead if you attack a lowbie.
Warzones in my opinion are great. Objectives in PVP is great. And I think they did it right, too. I've played a lot of MMORPGS but none of them have grabbed me as much as SWTOR in terms of pvp. And one of the things I dislike, too, is the stun-game you talked about. However, one of the changes in this discipline system is the change of the 'cure' ability, it will now cure stuns but have a longer CD and apparently, while this is sort of in right now, player dots can't be cured away but you can still 'purge' them on yourself, by using a purge ability which is supposedly separate from the cure ability. Anyway, my biggest wish right now is more pvp maps, more things to explore, while I can easily have fun right now in PVP. I don't see myself enjoying it for far too long thinking about 3-4 months into the expansion pvp-wise.
P.S: Nerf dem Guardians/Juggernauts, Bioware! /cry
As a hardcore pvper disappointed is a huge under-statement of how I felt about SWTOR's pvp at launch. If anything their inability to add any meaningful open world pvp features makes it worse now imo, no matter how many instanced WoW style bg's you throw at it.
The game just doesn't appeal to me from a pvp perspective at all, though I just came back for my first time since launch this month. I haven't pvp'ed once, nor will I, just doing the story missions and enjoying what I missed the first go at a faster pace.
21 year MMO veteran
PvP Raid Leader
Lover of The Witcher & CD Projekt Red
I also hate the dedicated PvP stat. On the other hand, making PvP weapons useless in PvE is the only logical next step. The claim that you need the PvP stat to prevent PvE raiders from cleaning everybody's clock in PvP also works the other way around. I don't want to be forced to grind PvP to be competitive in PvE raids.
Wildstar unfortunately failed on both counts, with high level PvP weapons also being BiS for a large part of the initial PvE raids. Since you can easily get carried or win-trade to max, this is an asinine design decision.
Once again I am baffled by the comments by MMORPG staff and their decisions. Why, again, is a non-PvP player writing a column about PvP? I certainly appreciate the disclosure up front, but it happens so often at this website that I begin to wonder if ANY of the staff at MMORPG actually enjoy PvP, and why can't they be assigned to write columns about it?
Can anyone point to me an article on this website about a MMO game's raid content written by someone who hates raiding? Or how about an article about a game's leveling method written by someone who hates leveling? I haven't seen either of those articles on this website. Yet, I consistently see PvP articles written by people who (to their credit) admit they don't like to do it. It's been going on for years.
While I'm sure the author tries to be fair, you must realize that many PvP players typically have a different attitude in the game. Do you find PvP players generally offensive, for example? Do you wonder why they call so many people 'CARE BEARS' and 'NOOBS' or other variations? Thier outlook on gaming, gameplay, and social interactions are so foreign you chalk it up to people just being rude, immature, or some other form of social deficiency. What you fail to realize is that they just have a very different outlook on the game, and that there probably is no way to bridge the gap, try as you might, to give a fair review of the PVP system unless you are a PVP player. Or to put it better, it is hard to give a review of the PvP system to people who like to PVP. You can probably do a fair job of providing a review to people who don't like to PvP, but your review simply isn't going to cut it for those who do like to PvP, as they are simply a completely different kind of gamer.
Since this has been going on at MMORPG for years, the only solution is to perhaps have one review by the typical non-PvP player, and then another article (or a companion article or co-author) done from the perspective of someone who actually likes PvP. Since nobody at MMORPG appears to like PvP, this might require an additional hire but would certainly service a dedicated community.