Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
[SW:TOR]: PvP Thread. Ilum, you are terrible.
Posts
Exactly. There's also the "rich getting richer" problem here. It doesn't make sense, if you're trying to encourage competition, for the winning team to always get better rewards that translates directly into giving them better performance. That's not how it works in sports. If a team wins, they don't magically run faster, jump higher, and defend better next game. But in this game, that's exactly what happens.
They need to reward winning (richly!), but not by giving them better gear opportunity. Give them cool vehicles, sweet titles, ship enhancements, unique wardrobes, all kinds of awesome stuff. But don't gimp the losing players in a way that specifically targets their ability to compete.
That's just asinine, and one of the few things that Blizzard actually does wrong.
"There is not a man of us who does not at times need a helping hand to be stretched out to him, and then shame upon him who will not stretch out the helping hand to his brother."
Very few mmo's figure out how to reward people in a way that promotes desirable behavior from all parties.
Shit, very few games do it right. Developers are specialists in other fields than understanding people so it's not too surprising. Most of the advances you see in games development are trial and error relearning of ideas known about for decades in psychology. I always like reading pet theories of games developers.
There's also that even if a developer does know that it is better, most of the general population run into the "common social moral" runtime error with this kind of thing and just spaz out so you feel constrained in implementing it.
It doesn't surprise me that they went this route at all. I'm actually more surprised that it was the other way around for a while. I don't think this is a particularly special misconception on Bioware's part. It's more like they're trying to do what they believe is the right thing and fit in with everyone else. That's how I read this.
Doesn't make it not suck, this is one of those situations where their inexperience accidentally had them doing the right thing.
Exactly. The Ilum weekly was amazing for this. Even if people didn't win, they still stayed in the game because they were at the least working towards their armament weekly / daily.
I guess it's kind of ironic that the original Star Wars trilogy was an accidental masterpiece by Lucas, and now we have kind of the same situation in SWTOR. The sad exception being that Bioware is updating the game past the point of Unintentional Nirvana (or as close as they are likely to get, anyway).
"There is not a man of us who does not at times need a helping hand to be stretched out to him, and then shame upon him who will not stretch out the helping hand to his brother."
I freaking hate 1.2 warzones.
Now this has nothing at all to to with the healer nerf or burst being out of control. If I'm running with my normal group I like to run with, we're fine. But that's the problem, we're more than fine. We're an unstoppable death team. We won like 15 games in a row before I was like, "well, this is dumb, I'm going to go level my alts." While it's fun roflstomping the other team because we're in full BM gear and they're not, it's actually not fun. It's not fun at all. It's about as fun as using one of the hack programs that powerlevels your character to ridiculous so you can run around one-shotting everything. After about 15 minutes it's like, "OK, now what?"
It didn't really hit me that it was totally broken until I happened to run that one match as Gunnery, I did a few more Sunday morning. I'm getting 6k+ Demo Round crits. In healing gear. With no mods swapped out to minimize diminishing returns. With no trinkets/adrenals popped. This is vs Imps in full BM gear. Vs the poor saps in the new laughable recruits gear? Oh, and they want to gear up? Well good luck with that:
The best way I can describe the players in the new blue gear: The NPC's in DOTA/(damn kids and your LoL, off my lawn!). They serve a purpose, and maybe they'll even help meat shield you to victory.... But really they're just going to die over and over again.
GW2: Ish.5760 ~ Army Status [El]: 80 [En]: 80 [G]: 80 [M1]: 46 [M2]: 16 [N]: 41 [R]: 18 [T]: 10 [W]: 80
SWTOR: Ishie, Ish, Ishia, Ishianne, Ishiko, Ishii, Ishio, Ishiu @ The Ebon Hawk
It's also awesome that the new WZ is just another territories game. I think they even messed that up. It's fun but the 3 point V layout seems broken since the spawning points are right next to the mid. There's a map like this in warhammer that was a lot of fun that looks like this but the starting points are on the ends of the V. It forces you to cap one and move towards the point then fight your way around it to the last flag. The swtor map functions extactly the same as civil war 6/8 go mid 2/8 go to the side. What's really the point?
Anyway, at the very least grant more commedations for loosing, playing a 15 min game and getting stomped only to get 20-40 when the other side gets 80 - 100 means it could take someone who finds themselves on the loosing side often 2-5 times as long to get the same gear they are getting stomped with.
The gear is definitely a problem too, because a team of people in recruit gear can not even begin to compete against a team in BM or War hero. Not even close.
Having stats on pvp gear at all is so stupid. I said it since this game came out, the pvp is fun, but what they should have done is make it so everybody stats are normalized in pvp based on what class they are, permanently. The rewards for success in pvp would be cosmetic only gear sets that look unique and cool, titles, mounts, pets, whatever. Then you have a competitive playing field, with no worries about pve players bringing raid gear in and having an advantage or any of the other problems you run into.
Agreed. I was considering making the argument about being able to swap mods around to change secondary stats to optimize them, then realized they should probably go ahead and optimize them by default. We have enough choice already in talent specs.
All I want is a challenging match. I get enough advantage from experience that having a stat increase is unnecessary. It would also be fantastic hitting 50 on my Sage and hopping into an even playing field. I know how the warzones work, I know how to be useful in a group, I'm not really looking forward to 11,925 Coms worth of gear before I can not feel guilty about being carried.
GW2: Ish.5760 ~ Army Status [El]: 80 [En]: 80 [G]: 80 [M1]: 46 [M2]: 16 [N]: 41 [R]: 18 [T]: 10 [W]: 80
SWTOR: Ishie, Ish, Ishia, Ishianne, Ishiko, Ishii, Ishio, Ishiu @ The Ebon Hawk
Edit: took me over an hour to write this post because I got distracted at work.
I'd also like to see, actual objective based games. Alteric Valley was awesome before everyone got super over geared and it turned into a zerg. But even then if the defenses were tuned right it could also be fun to defend against a zerg if that was your cup of tea.
But the engine is so bad, this game can't handle too many people and npcs would most likely crash it.
Some follow up news from observations of play and feedback over the weekend. In the next couple of days we will be deploying a small patch that will address the following issues:
As discussed, minimum medals to gain rewards will go from 3 to 1 to better reward those who are backfilled.
Warzones will once again be shutting down when population imbalance is detected. This was an unfortunate bug where a feature of Ranked Warzones (in full team play it is not desirable to let one team end the game prematurely by quitting out) was incorrectly implemented globally.
Completion of Warzones will gain a large increase in the percentage of rewards it represents, so while scoring is still the primary driver, you will cease to see games that give no rewards if players have a minimum of 1 medal earned.
We are extending the time we wait for a full team of eight to better make sure Warzones pop with complete teams.
A huge thank you to everyone who played this weekend and provided valuable feedback and analysis.
Daniel Erickson
Lead Game Designer
and link
swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=410669&page=4
I only wish I wouldn't have wasted all the time having my Guardian be my first 50 and raiding/pvping on him and stuff, because Sentinel is so much more rewarding to play. So much more utility. I miss being able to taunt in pvp, but having the centering mechanics and all the other tools way more than makes up for that to me.
Any good builds that melt pvp faces?
Restricting arena gear to teams of a certain rating is pretty much what murdered wow PVP, as the lowest teams saw no incentive to play which threw the whole thing into chaos (because you need a large player pool for a healthy pvp environment)
"Yeah your team is 1700 which means now you get to face teams that have weapons statistically better than anything you can acquire, and you too can get that weapon if you can win X consecutive matches against them". It just meant a lot of teams when they hit the next (or first, in some cases) teir of gear that required a certain rating would end up quitting rather than get ground under heel
Hell it probably makes balancing out abilities that much easier too. And I have to admit that so long as you aren't solo queued against a pre-made (or the other way around) AND you just didn't hit level 50 and are banking on your group to carry you, the pvp can be pretty fun. I even like Novare Coast a lot. Generic? Maybe, but I like it a lot better than Civil War. Civil War, once you had just over double their points, you could just all hunker down and guard a single cap point. So long as they didn't take all three, you won, period.
With Novare Coast you can't win UNLESS you hang onto 2 the entire time. Plus the distance between points is enough that it's harder to reinforce. It's nice.
Yep. I love that the new Purple-black and Orange-black crystals have a rating requirement on them, and it should stop the hell right there. (OK, and my healing laser should take my color crystal's color, wtf Blizz?! And why does Blizz care!!?) I'm so good I can smack/shoot you in the face with a color you can't have that has the same stats as yours. Perfect!
Then again, at the rate they're throwing colors at us... They're going to run out quickly. Unless they start doing like Green-blue. Ooo, Blue-magenta would match my Chiss in her slave girl outfit...
GW2: Ish.5760 ~ Army Status [El]: 80 [En]: 80 [G]: 80 [M1]: 46 [M2]: 16 [N]: 41 [R]: 18 [T]: 10 [W]: 80
SWTOR: Ishie, Ish, Ishia, Ishianne, Ishiko, Ishii, Ishio, Ishiu @ The Ebon Hawk
GW2: Ish.5760 ~ Army Status [El]: 80 [En]: 80 [G]: 80 [M1]: 46 [M2]: 16 [N]: 41 [R]: 18 [T]: 10 [W]: 80
SWTOR: Ishie, Ish, Ishia, Ishianne, Ishiko, Ishii, Ishio, Ishiu @ The Ebon Hawk
Anyway... I started getting my battlemaster gear after only haveing centurian pre-patch. Why is there no Surge value on any of it. The only Surge I saw was on Gurdian tank set. It's really going to kill my Sweep damage on crits.
Hey Ishie I've seen you in the WZs often on Ebon Hawk.
I totally agree. I prefer the matches where the outcome is in doubt until the very (except for the RNG rolls for ties). Rolling a group because you significantly outgear is pretty boring, although it can be kinda fun to rack up huge damage numbers. I actually playing a premade because it's challenging even if I lose.
The biggest disappointment with 1.2 for me is the lack of foresight by Bioware. Any pvp veteran could have told them that disparate reward/punishment systems would lead people to give up. And a gear race is bad for pvp in the long run.
Only a couple occasions of being three shot by a war hero.
Was afraid that being a turret with no run and gun powers would be tough.
http://psionikubi.deviantart.com/art/OPENING-COMMISSIONS-366450436
I love my sniper. I wish I had made that character first. Damn dark side temptations!
"There is not a man of us who does not at times need a helping hand to be stretched out to him, and then shame upon him who will not stretch out the helping hand to his brother."
So while y'all have discussed the perspective of the War Hero geared team, from the other side it's even worse. Y'all get bored after 15 minutes. The poor shmucks you're beating on have a very good chance of seeing the score and saying why even bother, thus quitting pvp entirely.
Snipers/Funslingers can put out such massive numbers when ignored, and it seems like they're always ignored, I don't get it. Most underrated class in the game?
So yesterday's change seemed to definitely boost wz coms for winning too, not sure how many I'd get for losing since RNG decided to put the pantsonhead folks on the opposing team. I'm not sure what to do with commendations on that character (baby sage), I guess stockpile healthpacks.
GW2: Ish.5760 ~ Army Status [El]: 80 [En]: 80 [G]: 80 [M1]: 46 [M2]: 16 [N]: 41 [R]: 18 [T]: 10 [W]: 80
SWTOR: Ishie, Ish, Ishia, Ishianne, Ishiko, Ishii, Ishio, Ishiu @ The Ebon Hawk
Which made the 0 expertise sniper experience much better.
Healers are also fairly irritated and many are respecing dps.
Daily PVP missions give 99 Warzone comms and 99 Ranked Warzone comms. So you win 3 matches and you get those.
Weekly PVP missions give 99 WZ comms and 99 Ranked WZ comms. So you win 9 matches and you get the same thing as winning 3?
Does not compute.
Prior to 1.2 when there were champion gear bags you would get 1 bag for a daily and 3 bags for a weekly.
Now it's the same reward?
It just means that over time, you can get the equivalent of a bonus day of rewards. Since it only requires that you keep warzoning, it's not really any extra effort on the part of the player to fulfill it.
On a side note that last couple days as Alliance on Shadowlands pvp has been miserable.
I won't say that sorcerers are overpowered but in groups they are nasty. Chainlightning spam just sucks. (and it's so boring, why play if that's all you're going to be doing?)
I think there's just more sorcerers(dps) pvping than sages(dps) pvping. So it feels worse or it is worse for the alliance. Tons of Jedi shadow's though.
Not by me.
*stab stab stab stab*
Regarding the expertise "buff", someone made a post on the pvp forum running the numbers. Was pretty thorough. Turns out pre 1.2 mitigation was higher than damage. Now it is equal. This equalization is what caused the damage "increase". By the numbers, centurion and champion gear are worse than recruit and battlemaster. Don't wear champion or centurion gear in pvp. Don't wear pve gear in pvp either, you are asking for pain. The damage difference was extreme.
Healing gets a bit more from expertise because healing skills don't get as much from stats as damage does.
If anyone wants to argue with what I just said don't do it with me I'm just a messenger here.
Link? The problem with not wearing any champ gear is there is no battlemaster gear with surge on it (except implants, I think).
Most dps classes need a high level of surge to be able to put out decent dps. For instance, it's no wonder deception assassins are looked down on; if they wear full battlemaster they'll be terrible. Deception lives by killing quickly, period. If you don't have 75% surge, go home.
So on my sniper I'm going to have to lose out on some expertise just to swap out the enhancement slots for the crit/surge enhancements I thankfully already have from champ gear. I feel for people just coming up that don't have access to those enhancements.
"There is not a man of us who does not at times need a helping hand to be stretched out to him, and then shame upon him who will not stretch out the helping hand to his brother."
Watching players zip around the map while I'm usually stuck running while slowed up and down the ramps in a futile attempt to catch up, only to watch them zip off again is increadibly unfun.
I play it on my level 47 tank Jugger or ungeared level 50 healing sorc and it's like I'm playing an entire different game.
It's an archaic mechanism that exists only because previous mmos do it. The second one mmo doesn't do it and is extremely popular it will stop happening. That is...unlikely. It's hard enough just being a popular mmo, without also having good class balance and then pushing a new (new = risky) idea past the design stage into the finished product.
Behold!