Wow. What an amazing video. I retract all comments. Please allow Illum to stay that way forever, and ever...

The Problem: As anyone who has read my other topic on the subject has read, the problem is Illum is entirely one sided. There is not enough incentive to do anything but hold the center if you are on the side with the greater numbers, and the side with the lower numbers basically can just take the other bases and sit there twiddling their thumbs because the massive zerg rarely budges from the center. This topic is some relatively simple solutions that would help with the problem. I don't hold these solutions up as the ideal for what Illum should be forever, but I do think they would be quick to implement and make Illum 320% more fun right now. And guess what! It doesn't even require PVE in a PVP zone. Part A: The Supply Chain- In the real world a military force that digs into the center of the battlefield and ignores all other positions is what one would refer to as, surrounded and cut off. In Illum its what we would refer to as the only people making progress on their dailies/weeklies. This is a pretty simple solution IMO. We set up something called the supply chain. Say you are Republic. What good is retrieving armaments if you don't control your base, and the territory you have to move these armaments through to get to your base (Southern Assault) is controlled by your enemy. So in order to collect armaments at central assault you need to control both Southern Assault, and the Republic Base. The point is in order to reap rewards you have to keep watch over your own territory. You can't just blob up in the center and expect the enemy to come to you. Part B: Pushing the front Line- While its really great that you can capture armaments as you control the center of the battlefield, wouldn't there be more rewards if you pushed farther deeper into enemy territory? If you control Republic Base, Southern Assault, and Central Assault pushing into Northern Assault and Imperial base should yield even greater rewards. Either an increased number of armaments or some new spawn. This would incentivize map control because lets face it... nobody is worrying about it much right now even with the Valor rewards. Part C: Imperial and Republic Armaments- They need to be separated as if they aren't one side will wait for the other to push to their base, intentionally not flip it, and then collect armaments. Imperials can only take Republic Armaments and the Republic can only take Imperial Armaments. Part D: Increased Defense Value for Your Side of the Map- This doesn't need to be NPC guards nessicarily. You could make it so accessing your side of the map requires going through a choke point where the defender has high ground advantage as well as turrets. At Republic base it would be a heavy advantage for the Republic. At Southern Assault it would be a light advantage. And visa versa of course. Part E: Respawn changes- You should be able to speeder in and respawn anywhere on the map regardless of who is in control. If your enemy controls the whole map you can only respawn/speeder in to your base. If you control southern assault you can respawn at your southern respawn. If you control northern assualt you can respawn at your northern respawn. Otherwise it would just be too damn hard to maintain a supply route. If you like the ideas, show your support! Respond saying which parts you like and why! Respond saying which parts you don't like (And more importantly why.) I of course like parts A-E for the reasons I already stated.

Summary of Yesterday's Events: Well yesterday I spent around two hours leading our forces in Illum. We were highly outnumbered, and attempting to take the center prooved to be suicidal, so we went and gained complete map control of everywhere but center. Other than a couple lone imperials this did not draw their forces out of the center. Several people mentioned going and doing something else as a raid as we tried to pick up more numbers. They specifically asked if there was any PVE content we could do, to which the answer was obviously no. There was some discussion of doing EV at that point, but in general the raid just started losing members. I lead them around a bit more re-capping bases the solo imperials took before we regained members, and the imperial forces had finally bled out a bit from boredom I think. We then made 3 pushes in which were still outnumbered, and still lost, but at least traded a decent amount of kills. After the 3rd push the raid collapsed and went down to 5 to 6 members. We went in a couple times, picked off lone armament hunters, then immediately retreated. After that they started catching on and moving as a group. At this point we started making suicidal pushes at them. Their forces had apparently depleted as well at this point, and let me put in there that the group which included Faate, Rhilia, Omega-X, and some other brave souls who's names I can't recall were straight up pro. Though they still heavily outnumbered us we were somehow managing to get in more kills than we had members of our group before we went down. We did this a few times until people finished their weeklies/dailies and then the ops fell apart. My Point 1. Obviously people asking if we could do things as a group. Directly relates to this topic. Had we been completely unable to take ANY keep in the moors I still could have said. "Yeah, lets go hit goldy." Or "Sure lets go kills some drakes." or "lets farm trees." or even "Lets go poison/cleanse the Hoardale." While this obviously isn't what we would want to do all night, it would give us something to do, to keep us occupied as we waited on more members. 2. People NEVER sit there at TA and watch all the other keeps fall like they sit there at center on Illum. The fact we were forced to hit center, or not have anyone to fight is ridiculous. Good open world PVP encourages map control not holding one point while the entire map falls as the stronger faction. A losing faction might hold out at a single point so as to sell their lives dearly, but the stronger faction never would. If Illum worked like the Moors I could have sent a scoundrel/shadow to keep tabs on their main forces while the rest of our group ninjaed a keep. And they would have actually given a damn. We would likely play a game of cat and mouse for awhile that would have ended in us holding at a more poorly guarded point we could take quickly (Like Isendeep or LC) and they would assault us there, or we would have ended up hiding out in something akin to elf camp if they had complete map control while they surrounded it and we traded fire. Anyway I think my point is clear. Even in real warfare the smaller force when put up against the larger force would try to cut off supplies to the larger force and generally harass them, or take up a defensive position and wait for the larger force to come to them. Not continually throw themselves against the place where the larger force has dug in. Its ridiculous, and its a horrible model for open world PVP. TL : DR I had fun last night, but not as much as I could have. These ideas would still greatly improve Illum.

I won't deny Cobra actually is good. He is a big name on my server in Illum, and he was in a huttball match that me and a few my guild-mates were in that closed due to our side not having enough people... as we were stomping the other side. Of course some of those guild mates are also big name PVPers on our server. Where I will disagree with him is that investing massive amounts of time into specific content gives you a right to speak on them where others who have invested less time have no right to talk. Illum is a valor farm and I hate it. Of course my valor rank isn't near as high as someone who really enjoys said content. If the only people who have the right to talk about things are the people who put huge amounts of time into them, then I bet post NGE-SWG was even better than pre-NGE, and Archlord is a great game! There is a reason every time I show up in Illum I can't wait to finish my daily so I can leave. And it isn't because it is such thrilling content. It is because I am so bored the only thing keeping me sane is talking to my guildmates on mumbe. Having good content in other areas is no reason to not improve horrible content like Illum. I think this game as a whole is great, don't get me wrong. This isn't a comparison of TOR vs. LOTRO, or a comparison of TOR PVP vs. LOTRO PVP. Its purely a comparison of Illum vs. Ettenmoors. I think public opinion is very heavily on my side that the Ettenmoors is better than Illum here, especially when you take out factors we aren't even discussing like class balance. The point is I think in addressing where they went wrong, Bioware needs to look to the parts people enjoyed about the Ettenmoors and copy some of them. If they copy some of the upsides and leave out the downsides I think they can easily turn Illum into something that blows both Illums current form, and the Ettenmoors out of the water. I've suggested what I think the two most critical factors that make Ettenmoors more enjoyable are.

Adding PVE content to a zone really helps with this a lot. When I log on to the Ettenmoors, and my faction controls the map, I go out and quest. When I log on to the Ettenmoors and the other faction controls the map... I go out and quest, or harass the enemy as they quest. I also have had a lot of fun solo harassing enemies as they try to take keeps. In one case I prevented an entire team from taking a keep because of cleverly timed hit and run tactics on my warg. Their entire team wiped because I kept silencing their healer. When I log onto the Ettenmoors, and we have a raid going, and they have a raid going, I ask for an invite and have some fun. When I log onto Illum and either side controls the map/has an overwhelming zerg... I leave. Thus why I almost am never in Illum.

Why is it so hard to understand that class imbalance is a non-issue in this topic? We are talking about what could be copied from the Ettenmoors to Illum in order to improve it. Those are: 1. NPC guards for control points. 2. PVE side-content. 3. Meaningful Rewards. Those are not: 1. Creep vs. Freep imbalances 2. Slow Combat 3. Personal grudges against devs and their girlfriends Lets try to keep things focused on the actual talking points shall we? PS. I mainly played creep, and ONLY played creep after Moria.

I'm sorry. Apparently dozens or hundreds of hours of playing fairly simple Open World PVP zones don't qualify me to speak on them. I'll be sure not to talk on this subject again until I have played 10 thousand hours of both Illum and the Ettenmoors and sacrificed my first born on the altar or Open World PVP Zones for Themeparks.

As someone who played before Mines of Moria, I would like to point out that Trolls didn't exist when the moors first came out. And I'm fairly sure they had a limit of 1 troll at a time when they did. I do remember the expansion well. It's what caused me to stop playing the Ettenmoors for a long time. We would have 5 of us for every freep and when the freeps did show up some idiot would pull a troll. That and I never hit level cap on my freep ever again after the first level increase. The PVE was just too unbearable. BTW Landroval was my server as well. Andius was my main but he was only in the moors pre-Moria. And I had one creep of every class but I enjoyed my warg Argmoor the most. I have no doubts Bioware can do better than the Ettenmoors with a half decent try, but as you said they have things they can learn from them. NPC guards for keeps, and PVE content to keep people occupied with the fighting is no good, are two things I think they should consider.

Concerns for game improvements are never pre-mature. As someone who has been here well before release I can say a lot of what was suggested on these forums, has ended up in this game. Thank people voicing concerns prematurely for the fact our lightsaber models aren't 3 times larger.

I think that would help the issue, but I have the feeling it would take it from waste of time... to semi-bearable. So I would support your idea, but I think further measures need to be taken, and I think the measures I've suggested are fine. PVE in a Warfront quickly turns in to PVP. The difference is you aren't just standing around waiting for a fight.

That is entirely irrelevant to the points discussed in this topic, except to say that Ettenmoors style PVP in TOR would be 1000x better as class-imbalance would be a non-issue. Nobody here is suggesting changes to classes to be more like LOTRO Player vs. Monster Players. The Ettenmoors shares it's basic concept with Illum, but... gives more incentive for map control as you can only turn in quests from specific control points, if you still control them. It also gives a huge reward for flipping bases. Something you couldn't do here because.... It is true. One time I popped out of a warzone, took the center map in around a minute BY MYSELF, and as the imps showed up the next warzone let me in. It was hilarious, but entirely broken.

I really don't think the design of the actual zone was bad it all. The biggest problem out there was balance issues. Balance issues are prettymuch a given when one side can be played from level 10+ and one side requires you to be max level or at least close to it, to be at all effective. TOR has perfectly balanced sides because aside from animations and armor appearance they are identical. The point of having PVE in a PVP zone is because open world PVP is about random encounters. You don't run in to random encounters all that frequently while out questing on the general map (At least I didn't.) but you do run into them frequently in PVP designated areas with decent rewards. Also if people are out there doing that PVE content and the action gets hot it will be easy to get them in the big raid. Right now if the action heats up in Illum I likely won't even hear about it because I could care less who's winning the zerg. Especially if I've finished my daily. If all we are looking for is mass scale battles we might as well just make 50 vs. 50 WZ PS. This game isn't supposed to be about PVP but PVP is almost a requirement for any MMO which involves combat. People spend a long time building up their character's and they like to see how they measure up against players. Its not like we are playing Harvest Moon Online. This game is filled with guns, lightsabers, and people who like to use them. As such it is prettymuch an expectation that they have PVP, and that the PVP not be lame. Whether they set up that expectation or not.

And if people enjoyed Illum you might see more people out there on one of the most populated servers in this entire game. There are currently 7 level 50's on in my guild. One of them is on Illum. Thats me. I'm doing PVE dailies. If you want big epic battles all the time give people a reason to come there. I would be in the Illum PVP zone right now if I could run quests for daily commendations out there. I know whenever I was out questing in the moors and someone called "FREEPS ARE PUSHING TR" "CREEPS ARE PUSHING LUGS" I would ask for a raid invite. Why is it that I don't even give a damn what is happening in Illum?

This is a topic that is meant to directly address the problems with Illum. The fact I draw my reference from another game does not mean that this topic isn't directly related to SWTOR. Also to all of you talking about class imbalance in the Ettenmoors. Yes it was a problem, but it won't be an issue here as this game uses mirrored classes. I'm not suggesting they take all the moster classes from LOTRO and pit them up against Republic forces, I'm suggesting they add side content to the Illum PVP area and give control points NPC guards. I generally PVP more than I PVE. I mean I played Darkfall for crying out loud. Open world PVP is actually about my favorite form of content in any game IF DONE WELL. But yes this is the only game I find PVE to be highly enjoyable in. I'm playing this as opposed to a pure PVP game because I like a variety of enjoyable content. PVP in this game isn't that great and I think most honest people can admit that if they are at all honest with themselves. We can only assume that as time goes on they will add more warzones, hopefully for dear god's sake improve Illum, and possibly add some other forms of PVP like pod racing or maybe even open space combat. (They did say they are working on a special project they won't give details on yet for space.) If there were no promise of PVP improvements I would drop my sub right now. By the way. 39 valor may not be 72, but you still don't get it without hours and hours of PVP. Its not like I don't take advantage of the meager PVP opportunities we already have at all.

I didn't ask them to bring in OP CC, or class imbalance. But the Ettenmoors got a lot of stuff right. One of the great things about MMOs is you can copy the parts of features other games got right, and ditch the crap. Just because another game did it doesn't mean you can't. Even the most original games rip off some features other games got right.

Cobra is actually famous on our server. Anyone who does Illum in our guild knows is name and say the best time to do Illum is when is is leading raids. I knew his name immediately. I'm not going to deny the main is the legend of Illum on our server. I still want him to explain why he thinks my ideas would not enhance Illum.

Its the PVP system from Lord of The Rings Online as is stated in the OP. Every important point about them in concerns to this conversation is also well covered in the OP. If there is something I didn't cover ask away and I'll be glad to elaborate.

I have a lifetime account as well, and I do go back to play in the moors on occasion, though I would rather be doing it here with a class I prefer, and a guild full of people I actually know. I would feel bad to suggest entirely changing the content if there was anything truly special about it that would be ruined by anything I am suggesting but I fail to see how my suggestion would do anything but keep what little upside there is to Illum, and add 500% more fun. That is what I am asking you to explain to me.

39. I'm not going to play ridiculous amounts of content that I HATE just to see why you like it. I've tried it on at least 5-10 occasions and been utterly miserable every time except for once. Whatever the case I don't care how much fun you have. Some people have fun listening to Justin Bieber, eating tofu, or playing Halo 2. What I want to know is WHAT makes it fun for over the Ettenmoors. Why do you think changing it is a bad idea? Obviously if you absolutely love it over the Ettenmoors I would assume you have a reason? What am I missing by not playing it more that would change my opinion if I had a valor rank of 1337.

No I haven't. I've played Darkfall, Freelancer, and a lot of other games with fun open world PVP though. I simply compared Illum to the Ettenmoors because they are incredibly similar. In order to make Illum as much fun as a game like Darkfall or Freelancer it would require a removal of factions. The Ettenmoors is a two faction system of PVP that is actually fun.

Ok humor me. What does Illum have to offer that makes it a better experience than the Ettenmoors. I really want to know. I'm playing TOR because its PVE content blows LOTRO out of the water, but from everything I've seen its bad excuse for Open World PVP is a joke. I've outlined why I think so, I would like to see some counter points beyond. "I like it, and I've played it more than you." No my character's name is Meuridiar so that his name/title can be Captain Meuridiar. I just hide his surname, and Tharak is his first name in RP. I've been to Illum on multiple occasions, utterly hated it, and left within 10 minutes every time except for ONCE when the sides were semi-even and I stayed half an hour before the imp raid fell to pieces and it resumed its usual state of monotony.

Two basically similar open world PVP instances. One insanely fun, and comes a long way to addressing the complete lack of any other form of PVP in Lord of the Rings Online and made for hours of fun, the other is so terrible I've almost entirely stopped bothering with it unless I am really desperate for PVP bags. Why do I love the Ettenmoors, but think Illum is one of the worst attempts at Open World PVP in the history of online gaming? Well let me cover the basic differences and similarities, and well see what you come up with. The Basics of Both Illum and The Ettenmoors: Both Illum and the Ettenmoors are open world PVP instances which take place on a map covered with a series of control points. Both are fought between two factions, with no neutral parties involved, and in both, the objective is to make kills for a major reward (Renown/Infamy or Valor) with minor benefits for holding more control points. That is where the similarities end. Ettenmoor Keeps vs. Illum Control Points: In the Ettenmoors there are a series of keeps. Some heavily defended (Tirith Rhaw, Tol Ascarnen, Lugazag) and some lightly defended (Isendeep Mines, Lumber Camp). You take control of a point by fighting your way past the enemy guards up until you reach the Captain General or Tyrant who controls the point. The guard can be considerable in the case of the larger keeps you fight your way through a lower and then upper floor filled with elites, and the CG/Tyrant is a full out boss that takes a full party or a very elite small party, and a considerable amount of time to kill. During this whole process enemy players can show up to defend their fort so it tends to make the transition of the map from one faction to the other a very slow process. On Illum the points fall very easily. The NPCs don't even fight back. I've ninjaed the center map by myself in around 1 minute before. You basically blow up undefended targets, that take no time to destroy. Ettenmoor Side Content vs. Illum Side Content: In the Ettenmoors the area outside the keeps are filled with NPC's and resources. Your starting area and the keeps under your control all give repeatable quests revolving around these NPCs and resources, so you can run around doing them when the action is not good. As the quests are only reapeatable every hour or so and hinge on resources and NPCs it also tends to spread players out quite a bit and keep them moving around the map. This means that if one side is too heavy of a zerg players tend to disperse around the map to do quests instead. While out doing those quests there is a high chance of player encounters given the whole map is a concentrated PVP hotspot. It gives a point to showing up even if your side is highly out-numbered. In Illum there is only one form of side content. In the center of the map are armaments. These are in relativly low numbers and ONLY in the center map. They count as kills toward your daily or weekly quest. As such whichever side has the zerg tends to cluster around the center map, while a few members might go out and ninja back any points that are stolen. Why This Means So Much: The Ettenmoors are a paradise of open world PVP. Players can spend all day there fighting for renown/infamy when the action is good, and running quests for great rewards when the action is bad. Even as a solo player or in small teams there is plenty of action to be had just running around gathering quest resources and having random fights with those doing the same. The fights over the keeps tend to be epic. During periods of high activity the forces arrayed against eacho ther are so massive that the NPCs guarding keeps don't mean much and there is a lot of keep swapping going on. During periods of low activity. It tends to be small bands trying to ninja keeps from each other, and can lead to some really interesting fights where even one well played character can make the difference between victory and defeat. On Illum, PVP is entirely one sided 95% of the time. It's either so many enemies you are just feeding them valor, or so many allies your presence is entirely unnecessary. The entire time in Illum is spent utterly dominating your enemy, getting utterly dominated, or sitting around the center map fighting over the extremely limited supply of armaments with team-mates. What Needs To Be Done: I think my opinion should be pretty clear by now for anyone who read the whole topic. Add strong guards to control points and in general just make taking them over a lengthier more challenging and involved process. Add quests to the Illum PVP area that can be repeated every hour or so in quantities that you can quest in Illum all day if you want to. Give them a worthwhile reward like credits, merc commendations, or daily commendations. Add NPCs, resources, and perhaps widen the Illum PVP area and spread out existing control points, or add more. TL-DR: Make control points harder to take, give PVE sidecontent to spread out forces and promote random encounters when one side has a massive zerg.

After a quick preview of the whole topic I didn't find anyone else who had said this so I think this is an important thing to add. In his second phase he has a non-removable debuff that disrupts ALL healing. I was sitting there spamming Emergency Medpack on myself and... nothing. It just went, "0", "0", "0". I even hit him with a flash grenade and still no healing by the time he broke out. I'm about to try kiting him as suggested here. Edit: Tried kiting him around pillars. Utterly useless. Then I tried seeing if I could identify the skill that gave the debuff. It was a easily noticeable and disruptable skill. The solution, as usual, was to kick my opponent in the nuts.

A speeder equipment page would be really sweet, but I don't want to call for too much in the way of speeder upgrades. Hopefully they implement a racing system at some point and I would rather they invest all their efforts in that. Don't want them feeling pressured to make regular speeders the same speeders we use in races. And I can see what you mean about it being difficult as the speeder goes from an item to an ability. There might be a simple work around though.

One problem I have always had with MMO mounts is when there is mount progression with the higher tier mounts being faster than the lower tier mounts, but you prefer the look of a lower tier mount over that of a higher tier mount. While I understand the idea of a money sink and rewarding bigger money sinks with faster mounts I think the solution is very simple in a game where all the mounts are mechanical. There should be items known as "Engine upgrade kits." One for level 40 and one for level 50. They would cost as much or more than a level 40 or 50 speeder and come from speeder vendors, or you could possibly make them items you would have to buy from someone with cybertech. Anyway you would apply an engine upgrade kit to a level 25 or 40 speeder. A level 40 upgrade kit would make the speeder require speeder piloting rank 2 and move at 100% speed, and a level 50 upgrade kit would make it require piloting rank 3 and move at 110% speed. Basically it turns your old slower speeder into a faster speeder. I know I would really appreciate this as I really like the look of some of the level 40 speeders, but I am a level 50, and have a 110% speed speeder. I really can't see how this could have any negative impact on anyone's gameplay. But it would enhance things for some of us.