I'm really excited to see what the the guys who made that game are doing with ESO. These Mythic guys BioWare absorbed are not the DAOC Mythic team. They are the team that got put in place when Mythic got bought out. But overall I think BioWare is getting a pretty clear message from the fanbase as it leaves. The exit poll I filled out when I unsubed this weekend really seemed to address those concerns. Only problem is I think they are in a playoff round and down three games to none. Its pretty much over at this point unless they somehow sell a million new coppies going into the winter to some undsicovered continent.

for the pve servers I suppose they are.

they have a nice little exit poll and will ask you what it would take to get you back. It will come in a e-mail and was worth answering at least to let them know where they went wrong in development and who to blame and boot off the EA development team. I'm just taking a peek around to see how fast this ship is going down.

anyone running on the warzone hampster wheel deserves what they get anyway. lack of faction based competition in the greater game world = lack of long term viability in the games core design. Here is hoping ESO makes a better go of it. I've given up on swtor now

got to agree with this but I'd also add they are probably fighting James's Boss who openly HATES on open world PVP. I just unsub'd before my renewal that was due on the 18th and been playing this game since before guild beta started. I gave them all the time I could afford to waste, but they just kept going in the opposite direction from what I wanted to spend MY money on. And no. not going back to wow because I haven’t been there in several years either. That was a big part of the problem for me. This just became the same stupid gear grind and that is a total waste of my time. PS no you can have my stuff. none of you left here are deserving.

My guild has camped half a dozen different bases multiple times on Jung-ma and never recieved a single word about it. And that's on a RP PVP server. I call BS on these noobs. Hell we have had advertised events hosted by fan sites doing exactly this for hours at a time. And we call this a patroll. We do it on a regular basis. I am not falling for this premeditated smear campaign.

im having fun in WZ's as a Vg tank

I beg to differ. When we dont get a significant response we right the night off as a loss and lament the carebearism of todays mmo genre.

wish I had a like button for that one This thread is a good example of the difference between a Massive multiplayer and just a multiplayer. Your faction is supposed to be involved and work together to secure areas. Its a failing of the players to generate that level of social interaction require to remedy the problem. Not specificly the guys getting ganked but the whole damn factions disinterest in territory control. And BioWare my be at fault here for removing any tangible reward for actually doing what the game design calls for. Which is respond to Tat in force and eliminate the threat.

i'm thinking the ranked WZ's will be where people are trying and the regular ones will be there for everyone else to face roll through. Or work through to get into ranked WZ's. They do have story mode for ops that are pretty simple and acessable. Looks like they are doing the same thing with WZ's.

sounds mostly like diluted game systems and a loss of direction to me. I smell the slide to ftp right around the corner with this much focus on trying to please Everyone and Anyone they can drag into the game. Not preaching doom and gloom here. Just coming to the realization that the mmo landscape has forever changed from the premium gaming experience I enjoyed a decade ago, to a competition for the generalized mass audience. Honestly I have no crafting endgame and less coming with buying augment slots. And there is NO open world pvp in sight which pretty much kills doing anything but grinding gear progression in instances (WZ or OpS). Those are representational of multiplayer games like BF3 and Counter Strike. They do not take into account Open Persistent worlds that are THE defining feature of MMO's. The game is totally dependent on little segmented instances of 8-16 people.

I think Mr. Vogel hates open world pvp. There is probably some some technical roadblocks as well but I could see the remnants of an open world reward system when I was in beta but it looks like it got sidelined in favor of shoving us all into ilum and Warzones. Then ilum failed to work right so they yanked that too. There was a lot of great ideas and support put into Mr. Ohlen's thread a while back, and I did hear Mr. Erickson say something about open world pvp drops on the guild summit. But I think there are some hurdles to get through with pvp development due to the pve centric nature of the game, the company and community. In all honesty I see swtor declining as pvp oriented guilds continue to pull out of swtor. The guild I am in is holding strong atm and we help keep our server active but without pvp support from BioWare we cant hold out much longer.

yep mine too. Just needed to get expertise up over 1k asap.

doing hardmodes in a all trooper guild just fine. Nice to have a sage heals now and then but we can get by without. The idea that you can only do stuff with "The Optimum group" is a bunch of crap but the followers eat it up like candy.

Where are we at with the reintroduction of open world pvp reward in swtor. I think James got a lot of good feedback from his previous request for input from the community, but I have only seen the removal of incentives that encourage non-instanced pvp in swtor. Is there disagreement about the worth of open world pvp at the Production lvl in the studio?

its always like that in every mmo launched. A new game pulls in a ton of people who play the heck out of a game and they needed to accommodate them. Now many of those people ran out of content and play less often. Some have moved on looking for the next new game to explore. Others like me just play less often and shorter hours. Its good to see new people starting because that is what will keep a game a alive.

Quitters never win : Winners never quit

There is a huge difference between fighting to farm valor points or dailys. And fighting for the prosparity and survival of your faction. People that are asking for BW to reintroduce Open World pvp are asking for design changes that happend pre launch to be looked at. Stuff happend and BioWare had to nix open world pvp systems. What launched was a temp solution since they messed stuff up during beta and broke open world. Its still not anywhere near to being fixed yet. But they had to go ahead and launch so they put in a temp solution for Ilum and pretty much turned off the open world system for the rest of the galaxy. Some little bits are coming with 1.2 and they will keep working on it. The reason I and my guild hang on Ilum is to pick up the buffs for when the WZ queues pop.

we have a blast on Jung-ma and its pretty busy. A few guilds run by fan sites are there and they make some special events.

here's another suggestion to add to the pile for open world systems inspired by my time in old schoold DAOC and Shadowbane. Open world pvp objective proposal objective sites: Forward Observation Posts (FOB) Description: A small base consisting of a command bunker, observation tower and turret defenses. The bases should be place in remote underutilized areas on Tatooine, Alderan and Hoth. These bases should become vulnerable during prime server times indicated by a global notice on that particular planet instance. Once the base becomes vulnerable a four person strike team needs to capture the base and seal themselves inside. One on the command console, one on each of the two turrets, and one on the door. That group has effectively gained control of the FOB. They must begin to set up a raid group and hold the base for a period of time. (1-2hrs?) The attackers must breach defenses, blow the doors, enter the facility and kill the strike team. Preventing the opposing faction from gaining the benefits of owning the FOB. The defenses could be a shield generator between the two turrets on top of the command bunker. Then the turrets, and finally the doors. This should rely on a combination of ranged player attacks and the use of artillery. Once the strike team is down that is it for that node till the next reset. If you get the node everyone in the raid group gets some points. If you hold the node your raid group gets the bonous. If you break down the generator, turret and doors the attacking raid group gets points respectively. If they bring down the strike team they get the bonus. . Offensive Artillery: Mortars created by weapon smiths using rare materials with an effective range of 40-60 meters. Setting one up would be a channeled abillity. The Mortar is then taken over by a cybertec who uses a purple grenade (consuming a biometric crystal) to fire the device. Laser Cannon:Portable turret created by Armormech and Artifice together as channeled ability using appropriate materials. Fired by anyone as a channeled ability. Same range as Mortar. (consuming a rare crystal) Defensive Artillery: Turret Defense operated by by one of the strike team with an effective range 20-70 meters. Placed on opposite sides of the command bunker with a 270 degree firing radius. Shield Generator: must be taken down to get effective destructive firepwoer onto the turrets. (Acts like guard in pvp) Observation Tower: this is where the fight on the ground by defensive forces should be controlled from. Good visibility of overall battle field and coordination with scouts about enemy troop movements. Door: Much like the mechanic on Voidstar that can not be taken until at least the Shield Generator is down. I haven’t mentioned the role of ground troops much but this is what its all about right here. Using artillery to break down the defenses and then rushing the door to blow it open. Reward: Rewards need to be group oriented with tangible benefits that player can see in everyday gaming performance. An Expertise buff. Point system that adds up within a guild to allow access to future guild ships, banks whatever else you got planned. Access to certain restricted flashpoints or operations through a redeemable points system. Set it up with point/medal rewards for each objective and a bonus going to the victor. Role of Ground Forces: Intercepting the attackers on route from various spawn points. Seting up and defending offensive artillery. Destroying offensive artillery. Protecting/attacking the door. Protecting/neutralizing the stirke team. Notes: Open world pvp in swtor suffers from zerg rezing. A system of stacking debuffs for each pvp death needs to be implemented to create attrition of ground troops. The Death shroud from Shadowbane is a good example. Effectively nullifying a players expertise for 180 seconds and if a death occurs again before that debuff is gone a second stacks for an additional 5 mins. The whole idea is inspired by mine fights from Shadowbane as well. If you guys still anyone on the team from Wolfpack they would probably have some good input on things I didn't go into as well potential for reward systems. This is just some ideas I had and I wanted to put them out there because this is THE most important aspect of the game to me. It is the kind of thing I have gravitated toward as End Game in pvp centirc mmos since the beginning of this genre. I really want to see swtor be the best game it can be. There is a lot more that could be considered for this such as limiting numbers so that the zone does not crash or preventing one side from overpopulating the planet so that the other side cant log into the planet instance. But that is stuff the devs need to do because they know the engine limitations. One through I had was if the Objective could be randomly placed while the game is live and a server message went out. People would know that on Thursday, Fri, Sat, Sun between 6 pm and 9 pm a couple of nodes would pop up, but not exact location or zone. That might give a Race to cap aspect to the scenario creating an overall sense of fairness to getting people into the appropriate planet instance.

actually when you do that players crate their own alliances which end up being exactly like factions. This is why I prefer the bolster using NPC forces and turrets. It worked well for the time I was in doac and that was coming from Asheron's call Darktide were we had fully open pvp. One of the things I would like to see EA/BioWare get behind is using the existing worlds for endgame pvp. We need to get some capture nodes going for Tat and Alderan. Those places are fantastic and as the population matures we need to revitalize these areas. And we really really need to get some limited incentive going for open world pvp. I am pretty sure the original intention of merc coms was open world pvp reward but it got shelved in early beta I guess. It was not a factor by the time I got in for the first weekend and successive guild betas. If we can get credits toward BM gear or a new tier of open world rewards on the existing pvp planets (even in a limited fashion) it will go a long way to revitalizing end game. Give us something to do with resources like siege devices (portable artillery pieces) and let us have some 20v30 and 40v40 ish wargames in the dune sea or sunset ridge areas as well as the vastly underutilized areas of alderan and hoth. I can also respect that this a pvp server specific request but ther must be some way to keep the flags for hiding from pvp working on the pve servers. The daoc system of bases with a npc (boss) who had to be knocked out to claim the base was great fun especially when you factored in the siege machines.

Ilum is only a portion of the problem that I saw develop thorough beta and solidify in the release version of the game. We still have the issue of Open World PVP on the rest of the pvp enable planets. Ilum being just one of them. The game was built for FvF war on these worlds and the merc coms seem to have been the intended incentive. I would like to know what the plans are to correct the hole left by that midstream concept change for open world pvp.

yes it does, but all this only addresses arena style pvp. I am wondering what the heck happened to the concept of Merc coms and actual pvp on pvp servers. At this point they have no real reason for pvp servers or factions. There is a huge design flaw they are dancing around because somebody changed the design concept quite late in development. Its not too late to fix this but they better start taking about the deficiency and own up to the development screw-ups. If they intend to drop faction based combat in the open world then say so. Because right now they have essentially abandoned it without really discussing the matter. And if a dev gets a hold of this the my question to you would be, "What are you doing to replace the incentive for open world pvp. And what the heck are merc coms for at this stage in redevelopment of pvp"?

I really wish we could have a discussion about open world pvp where we knew we were talking about all the contested planets and not just Ilum. It looks like Merc-coms were intended rewards for open world pvp but what happened there? Why cant we have rewards for battles on Tat, Alderan or other pvp enabled planets? Is there no mechanism for rewarding kills within your lvl bracket to reduce farming of lower lvl players. Was the pvp community just not worth the effort in making a system to reward honorable kills and not pharming lowbies? Or will the game just not support that lvl of activity on the contested planets?

I was very disappointed to see them blow off open world pvp. I really think Gabe is dropping the ball with respect to keeping player conflict as part of the full SWTOR experience. Relegating it to a side show or mini-game, such as Warzones, pretty much makes all the servers pve servers. We are losing the point of having pvp servers at all here. All those people on pvp servers are there because they want player competition in the open world. Not just a side show akin to the space game we have. And that is all that warzones are. And tbh Ilum is no different. Why are they not introducing some of the rewards for open pvp into the planets from Nar Shada onward? That is where the open world pvp takes place. Give us some kill quests there. And give us a bit of valor for fighting legitimate enemies. That is where they need to start trying to put the Wars back in Star Wars.