But do you get comms in Ilum, Den or BH (for getting pvp gear)? I know you don't get any comms or valor out in the open world, and with such a gear progression based game it would be important to implement this if it's not already...pvping in one of these "open" locations should produce the same gains as WZs, so that peeps have the choice (I personally am not a big fan of WZs....too many years in SWG to get excited about 8v8 lol). I would add one other thing that is a real pet peeve of mine in this game and directly affects owpvp...not being able to talk to the opposition...this is a real fail on BWs part, I just don't see any logical explanation for not having this and I can name many reasons how this could help promote owpvp. And while we're at it, why not make a neutral "fleet" where both sides can mingle...this is a MMO after all and its all about meeting new peeps and developing friendships and fun rivalries. I suppose the Promenade on Nar Shadaa could be used for this, so maybe just making a fleet pass type deal here could work. Anyways, didnt mean to derail the idea in the OP...I think it's genius in its simplicity, but unfortunately the Devs have not shown a great deal of interest in pvp, specially non WZ pvp for a long time now...I sure hope I'm wrong...

Black Hole? I thought that was a PVE Operation...but thanks for the tip, will check it out. And yes, agree on your second comment, and with so many planets in this game one would think that owpvp would be pretty spread out, but the design is such that there is little reason to visit a planet once you've finished the quests there. If there was housing, pvp bases, etc. like swg then we would have much better owpvp...but the planets are too "railed" to have much room for that without interfering with the strict designs meant only for the quests. thanks much for your input.

About a month ago I leveled my first 50 but didn't think about going to Ilum because I remember a while back that it was closed down (at least the open world pvp area). But the other day it occurred to me to go over there and check it out for curiosities sake and I was able to travel to the pvp area and was able to drive around the whole area and flip the republic base! There was no one there at all...it was like a total ghost town...very depressing. Then I went back yesterday and saw that the republic base that I had flipped was still republic and I started wondering if somehow rep and empire players were being segregated into two different instances, but then I saw a warning on my monitor that an empire player was seen near the central location. So I drove over there and all around but couldn't find him. The point is that this confirms that both sides can still pvp there...or am I missing something? What exactly did they shut down then? Or did they open it back up but peeps just don't want to go there anymore. I've gotten pretty tired of the same handful of WZs anymore and even though I love parts of this game, without any open world pvp I just don't see myself playing this game much longer. And there has been absolutely nothing published by the devs to indicate any move toward owpvp...so I guess I'm just hoping to hear some great revelation that Ilum is back on line or something that will excite me about staying in the game. sulsa

I only skimmed through this thread so maybe someone already brought up this point, but there is another huge problem with expertise...or more accurately, the need to wear one gear while pveing and another while pvping, is that it has a profound detrimental effect to true open world pvp... and the fact that BW even incorporated this gearing system is just one more of many examples that they do not really understand what true open world pvp is. BW's idea of owpvp is isolating all level 50 pvpers on one world and there you go! Open World PVP! LOL TRUE owpvp should actually be called open universe pvp and then maybe the devs would understand it just a little bit better. TRUE owpvp is at its best when it is spontaneous, unplanned...where one minute your just doing some questing, ho-huming along thinking I'll just take it easy tonight and then you run into an overt player or 3, they kill you, you call some friends, you kill them, they call some friends....and 2 hours later your drenching in sweat and just had the funnest pvp in a long time. This was SWG at the beginning and towards the end. The problem with TOR is that because you have to use one set of gear for pve and another for pvp...this sort of spontaneous combustion will never really happen. This whole push to isolate pvp into WZs (Ilium was just one big WZ IMHO) just shows that either BW doesnt understand pvp, or what they really wanted to build was a pve only mmo all along, but knew they had to add pvp if they wanted to be commercially viable, so they kind of added pvp as an almost separate game, with its own terrain, gear, sets of rules, etc. etc....but didnt really understand that if you tie the both together in a seamless fashion then you have a phenomenal game. So the problem is not expertise in it itself, but the differentiation in gear usage. Bottom line, the only real solution is to forget about 2 sets of gear, make all gear the same for period, but just tier it so that folks that put the time and effort and money can get the ones with the better stats. SWG did it with no problem for many years. So you might say...its not fair that someone can get the best gear just pveing and will be as competitive with some you just pvped to get the best gear....then I would say, it doesnt matter because if all they did was pve then they are not going to be very skilled in pvp....so it becomes about skill and not gear...oh my, what a concept! So you might say....what about the peeps that put the time and effort to get the best pvp or pve gear...well I guess theoretically if they ever did implement this sort of change, then those that have the best gear would be able to trade those in for the best of the new gear...no biggie. Anyways, just some things to think about, cheers

What's annoying/frustrating is that what Tuxs is saying here are basic social mechanics that any MMO should have... this is a beautiful game that is being unnecessarily hampered severely by some misguided obsession that BW has with restricting and controlling where everyone goes and what they do. If they just removed some of the travel/moving-around-a-planet restrictions and implemented some of these very simple social enabling tools between factions this would be a much funner game. For anyone who played SWG, this sort of impromptu OWPVP was the norm not the exception, and that's because there were no travel nor communication restrictions at all (among other things, like quick travel mechanics, player cities and bases, etc.). And what's worse is that these implementations are not major projects...compared to the amount of man hours that they just put in to revamping WZs (which IMO is not going to bring back the fleeing PVPers), what Tux and other suggest would represent a drop in the bucket in man hours. In other words, this would be the best bang for their programming buck, but they are investing in the wrong direction with 1.2 Anyways, kudos to the OP and all involved for pulling off an event like this! Good luck with doing more of these...I would love to see how these turn out and learn some tricks to use on our server.

True “open world” pvp is probably not possible in SWTOR Unfortunately, I think the problem with "open world" pvp in this game is going to be much more difficult to fix then many people think...because it's not an open world game structure to begin with. Look at the way that players are "railed" through the gauntlet of planets...where every planet is strictly designed for certain levels only. After you’re finished your missions on one planet, there's really very little reason to go back once you leave it. Once you hit 50 there's only Ilum and instanced playing (WZs, ops, etc.). This is basically a single person game plopped into an MMO environment. The problem with the mindset that went into making this game is that, just like traditional single person games, the environment has to strictly control the players’ movements as he/she progresses through the quest lines. But this is where the big clash begins…because open world MMOs should not by any means try to control the players’ movements. For example, as I was leveling up as a sage, I was getting pretty annoyed by how the geography and transportation mechanics (where you can only get to other places on taxi, and only after you unlocked them) were designed to limit a player’s movements. The fact that you couldn’t just get to a planet and get on your vehicle and move around to any part of the planet map at will was a big let down from the beginning. At first I figured, well maybe this is just a helping mechanism for peeps just getting started. Then I got to Anchorhead and as I started exploring around, I started to get this elated feeling that just maybe the game did open up, so I got on my bike and exited the city to explore the wide blue yonder…getting happy flashbacks of the good old days of SWG…until I hit the “barrier”! When I realized that this deadly “exhaust” barrier (or whatever it’s called) surrounded the city, I just got sick to my stomach. Then it infuriated me…this obsession to control everyone’s movements had gone too far. This is when I realized that the advertisement that through this game we could live our own saga in a Star Wars universe was totally false…instead, what we are living is their saga, they way they want us to live it. And it’s such a horrible shame too…this is such a beautiful game, with such potential, but it’s like living in a crystal palace…everything looks nice but you can’t live in it, interact with it…it’s all just for show…like the player ships, just beautiful, but cant decorate and do anything to them that makes you feel like you’re actually living in it. So at the end of the day, just like a single person game, once you are done the quest lines, there’s little to do…and just like a single person game, once you’re done, then it’s off to the next game. If BW ever hopes to keep this game going for many years, where the same players keep paying month after month for many years, they will need to redesign the environments on each planet (or at least a good number of them) so that it is a truly an open universe…but I doubt this will happen. Let's take the early version of SWG as a contrast exercise...they basically built a true open universe where there were things to do on all planets all the time...there were reasons other than missions to go to other worlds even at maxed levels (player cities, mining resources, collecting hide, etc.). Thus players of maxed levels were found everywhere, all the time, which had the effect of opening up the universe by spreading the population throughout all planets. Add to this the player city bases, then later the various open pvp zones spread throughout different planets, and you could find good pvp on any particular planet at any particular time. The problem with SWTOR is that they took the phrase "open world pvp" too literally...basically confining open pvp to just one world, lol. Sure you could get on a pvp server (as I have) and you are overt in most of the planets...but the problem is that most of the end game population is bottled up on Ilum or WZs and there are no compelling reasons to spread them out throughout all the planets. The problem is not that Ilum failed the pvp community...it’s that having only one world for open pvp is what failed the community. And in order to fix that they would have to "open up" each world and give them good reasons for players to be all over the place all the time. But given the highly controlled nature of each world...I think it will be very hard for anyone to come up with viable ideas of getting players to planets that they have finished already. For example, even if the devs decided to implement player housing, cities, etc., the geography just won't allow for this…they would have to expand the limits of each planet to have enough real estate for player houses, etc. This thread was written a few months ago and is the best option to reviving OWPVP: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=234156 The problem is that it would require the creation of new worlds just for pvp…I don’t thing BW has the resources or the time to get this all done before this game is completely barren of players. The Devs should have taken this seriously when it was written back in January. Anyways, this is kind of a sad realization, given that this game could have had such potential if they had gone about designing the planets and geography in a different way...but I believe that they have gone too far beyond the event horizon to be able to pull back and redesign things so that it would be a true open universe. As it stands now, it is still a fun game on a part time basis...but it will never reach the level of player absorption (where you really feel that you are living in that universe) that SWG did for instance. I certainly don't see myself playing this game for as many years continuously as I did SWG.

I agree...current faction imbalance is the weak link to this concept. IMHO, if I understood this concept correctly, it is based on a linear battle, where you go from one planet to another, but the problem here is that it forces all players of both factions to always meet on one battle ground at a time. What is needed is a way to spread players out among different planets at the same time. For those who played SWG, faction inbalance was often an issue, but with its open architecture and quick travel mechanics, the smaller faction was able to incorporate rapid hit and run tactics. This forced the larger faction to spread out among different planets to search for the smaller mobile forces. It got to be quite fun actually and also had the benefit of reducing battle sizes to smaller groups. Applying this idea to the OP concept, perhaps mechanics could be put in place so that small teams can go "behind enemy lines" to several different planets and take over unattended bases quickly. This would have the effect of the larger force not being able to proceed on its galactic quest until it went back to that planet and reconquered that base. This means that the larger faction would have to spread its forces out over several planets to defend these bases, in addition to the main attack force that plowed forward. Or something of this nature...it's late and I didnt think about as much as I would have liked, but the idea is to spread out the population so that the smaller faction can move around and encounter smaller opposing forces. Either way, awesome job on this...I've been playing MMOs for about 10 years now and this is one of the best concept posts I've ever read. cheers.

Unfortunately, I think the problem with "open world" pvp in this game is going to much more difficult to fix then many people think...because it's not an open world game structure to begin with. Look at the way that players are "railed" through the gauntlet of planets...where every planet is strictly designed for certain levels only. After your finished your missions on one planet, there's really very little reason to go back once you hit 50. Once you hit 50 there's only Ilum and instanced playing (WZs, ops, etc.). This is basically a single person game plopped into an MMO environment...but I think there's been plenty of threads on this so I won't go into this issue specifically. Let's take the early version of SWG as a contrast exercise...they basically built a true open universe where there were things to do on all planets all the time...there were reasons other than missions to go to other worlds even at maxed levels (player cities, mining resources, collecting hide, etc.). Thus players of maxed levels were found everywhere, all the time, which had the effect of opening up the universe by spreading the population throughout all planets. Add to this the player city bases, then later the various open pvp zones spread throughout different planets, and you could find good pvp on any particular planet at any particular time. The problem with SWTOR is that they took the phrase "open world pvp" too literally...basically confining open pvp to just one world, lol. Sure you could get on a pvp server (as I have) and you are overt in most of the planets...but the problem is that most of the end game population is bottled up on Ilum and there are no compelling reasons to spread them out. The problem is not that Ilum failed the pvp community...it failed the whole end game community. And in order to fix that they would have to "open up" each world and give them good reasons for players to be all over the place all the time. But given the highly controlled nature of each world...the way even the geography "rails" players...I think it will be very hard for anyone to come up with viable ideas of getting players to planets that they have finished already. For example, even if the devs decided to implement player housing, cities, etc., the geography just won't allow for this. Anyways, this is kind of a sad realization, given that this game could have had such potential if they had gone about designing the planets and geography in a different way...but I believe that they have gone too far beyond the event horizon to be able to pull back and redesign things so that it would be a true open universe. As it stands now, it is still a fun game on a part time basis...but it will never reach the level of player absorption (where you really feel that you are living in that universe) that SWG did. I certainly don't see myself playing this game for as many years continuously as I did SWG.