[Economic Changes in Patch 1.1.5]

Those patch notes were really fun to read, I love the writing touch.

[HM Flashpoints with "Enrage Timers" only ... why?]

I'm pretty sick of enrage timers, as a tank. Sometimes you just get DPSers that aren't already decked out in gear and you just hit a brick wall that as the tank I can't do anything about. It sucks.

 

Enrage is a fine mechanic when it makes sense to have it in the fight. Throwing it into every fight "just because" sucks. The people killing the FP bosses slowly are the ones that need the gear from them the most. Once you're geared enough that you're never seeing an enrage timer anymore, you're pretty much done with Flashpoints anyway.

 

Just had a night wasted and a huge repair bill due to this, and it's pretty not fun.

[how would YOU handle population imbalance?]

You do what WOW did in thier open PVP area. You CAP faction populations per match. And you don't do INCREDIBLY STUPID THINGS LIKE give +300 bonus valor per kill with one side having a 3:1 imbalance on servers.

 

That's not open PvP. Tol Barad is not open PvP. It's instanced PvP in every way except how you get into it. But since it only starts at certain times, kicks people out to meet the population limit, actively lets you not enter to enforce it..

 

Yeah, it's not "open world PvP" at all. It's functionally a warzone. And yes, that would fix the zerg problem.

[Is valor stored in a SQL database?]

Umm any DBA knows that you have daily differential backups for storing data on this level. What do you mean no just no? Do you have any idea as to what you are talking about? Everyone is screaming for a roll back I'm giving BW advice on how to do this roll back.

 

And how do they do this rollback without destroying the levels and PvE progress done by everybody in the mean time?

 

"OMG ROLLBACK!" is not nearly as practical as it sounds. Doing it without causing so much collateral damage that it'll cause the forums to blow up isn't simple. They actually need to rollback only valor gained from Ilum.

[how would YOU handle population imbalance?]

lock faction creation if its imbalanced problem solved. theres no pvp in a game where you have to wait 2 hours for queue is there

 

 

And then your PvE players are furious that they can't play with their friends because you locked creation on the side they wanted to play on, and they quit in a huff. Population shrinks in a hurry.

 

That's totally not workable because this is not a PvP only game.

[how would YOU handle population imbalance?]

lets face it, the main issue with ilum is the fact that on most servers one faction outnumbers the other, which only compounds the issue by making the losing faction start to leave, and drawing in more of the winning faction for easy victory.

 

if you were given absolute power over trying to fix this issue how would you handle it?

 

you can not

-force faction changes on people.

-force server changes on people.

 

 

 

this is not a thread to criticise/praise bioware on how they are handling it, only about how YOU would do it.

 

It's impossible so long as anybody can go into the zone at any time. The best fix is to instance it and make it a warzone. (Or the fake instance that Blizzard has with Tol Barad/Wintergrasp, where it's still population controlled despite being outdoors.)

 

If you really want "open world PvP", this is what you get in a two faction game. There is no fix. You can try to bandaid it by giving buffs to the weaker side to try to make it at least playable, but that's the extent of it. As it stands now the imbalance will get worse because Republic players will quickly learn that going there at all is a waste of time.

[Post 1.1 Ilum PVP Issues Discussion]

Quoted because most of these are good ideas. Fixing this problem ASAP is very important, even if it means a short server downtime.

 

Pop imba has always been a problem but this really highlights it. There are a lot of ways to deal with pop imba, including: valor incentives to get a higher % of the underdog faction into the open world zone; hard or soft zone caps that keep the number of players on each side roughly similar; scaling buffs to NPCs in the area to give assistance to underdog factions a chance; scaling PC buffs to give underdogs more power directly. In the long run I think that valor buffs might be the most useful.

 

Hard or soft caps essentially turn it into a warzone... which is pretty much the only thing that fixes this in the end. Open world PvP does not work when populations are severely out of whack.

 

Numbers matter. People saying "oh it's your fault because we have 3 organized ops"... yeah that's nice. 3 ops vs 1 op is going to win every time no matter how organized the 1 op is.

 

I don't know why game designers make this same mistake in every game. If you don't control for population in the battle and one side severely outnumbers the other, then the whole thing falls apart.

[Post 1.1 Ilum PVP Issues Discussion]

MMO designers need to give up on this outdoor world PvP nonsense. It never works because dual faction games are never really balanced.

[Community Blog Post Discussion: New Year’s PvP Update]

So if the dailies are going to require PvPing, are there going to be PvE dailies somewhere else for people to do that don't want to PvP?

 

I know there won't be much support for that in a PvP thread, but there's lots of people out there who don't do PvP and never will.

[Shien Server Event - Republic Side]

Probably can't make it tonight unfotunately the timing just isn't good for me. But I look forward to future events!