Another PvP Thread (Constructive Improvements and Suggestions)[Wordy]

[Roak]

So, I’m level 50 and I do the pvp. I’m going to offer some free consultancy here to vastly improve the endgame pvp aspect of the game and lets hope Gabe, or someone at BW takes a look at this thread (or a thread with similar ideas) and gets something added to the game before all the pvpers leave and swtor becomes another “it had potential but...” game.

 

I’ll start by laying out my main issues and will go on to offer an indepth solution/set of game mechanics to take swtor pvp to another level. My issue is... world pvp.

 

I raised all these issues pre-launch as I’ve seen this play out before but it seems the developers of mmos do not want to admit that pvp, both instanced and world, is a massive part of mmos for many players.

 

Also first up, to go on a little tangent before I get right into it - we have 2 types of commendation, warzone and mercenary; mercenary is supposed to be for world pvp but I’ve not seen any from there, I’ve bought all my champion bags through converting warzone commendations, so basically we have warzone commendations and 1/3 warzone commendations – there really doesn’t seem to be any reason for merc commendations apart from the artificial throttling of warzone commendation gain, what’s up with that? If you’re going to add world pvp currency surely it must be gained in the world, as it is you might as well get rid of them all together, lower the rate of warzone commendation gain from warzones accordingly and make the bags cost just 200 warzone commendations as the current system adds nothing and is an unnecessary complication to the warzone gear grind.

 

~o~

 

To the Rub

 

Something I said pre-launch; instanced and world pvp should be separate and have their own respective progression methods, this is something I maintain. The current warzone progression is fine in my opinion, the world pvp systems are none existent. Valor is ok, the ranks are ok and the gear grind is acceptable and the norm in the modern item based mmo so nothing needs changing there. However, it does need a separate level 50 queuing bracket though, make 2 queues, a 10-49 and a 50 only and a lot of people will be happier.

 

Now the meat of this wordy post, world pvp. I want to cover 2 things, the first one is an individual scoring system for world pvp, the second is addressing the (lack of) world pvp objectives we currently have.

 

Disclaimer: My suggestions are all just that, broad stroke suggestions that would require play testing and balancing should anything like them ever be included in the game , so please bear that in mind when reading. I’m trying to push the concept more than the actual hard coded details.

 

~o~

 

Individual Player PvP Rating

 

Concept:

 

Players gain or lose individual pvp rating when winning/losing fights with opposition players when in the world (in pvp zones on pve servers and in any world area on pvp servers, totally unaffected by warzone play on any server type).

 

Method of Gain/Loss:

 

• Players start the game with a rating of 100
  
• Killing an enemy player grants you 10% of their total rating
  
• Being killed by enemy player(s) causes a 10% loss of total rating
  
• Kill rights to be determined through play testing (as in who gets the reward for a kill)
  
• Groups share the reward from a kill (this should encourage small group vs small group and discourage the zerg, I’ve expanded on this below)
  
• Gaining rating milestones gains you a world rank (and protects your accumulated rating, again see below)
  
• Rating atrophies (within a rank) at 10% per week
  
• Can only gain/lose rank from/to the same player 3 times in any one day
  
• Killing an enemy that has used some kind of healing on themselves grants a 2% bonus
  
• Ranks offer bonuses (rank titles, exclusive armour/weapon skins, crafting schematics etc)
  
• Exclusive titles for the top rated players on each faction (supreme commander, commander in chief, grand moff etc) once players have achieved a predetermined rank, updates to highest rated individuals when weekly quests reset. Other title possibilities here too, Imperial executor for most kills in a week for example.
  

 

Ranks:

 

(for illustration purposes, would need play testing to determine)

 

1. 100-2000
   
2. 2000-10000
   
3. 10000-20000
   
4. 20000-50000
   
5. 50000-100000 (weekly exclusive titles become available)
   
6. 100000-250000
   
7. 250000+
   

 

Kill Rights and Scoring:

 

• 1 vs 1 - straight up winner takes 10% of losers rating
  
• Group vs 1 - group shares 10% of losers rating (would encourage 4 man group vs group pvp I think, and discourage 16 man zergs (4 man would gain 2.5% of losers rating each, 16 man would gain 0.625%). This also rewards healers and damage alike the guy in the group keeping the dps alive is taking an equal share of the spoils and not penalised for playing support as usually happens.
  
• Group + individual or + other group vs 1 – determined on how much damage each group does to the target (would require pay testing/balancing)
  

 

Examples:

 

Alice (rank 1, 100 rating) vs Bob (rank 1, 800 rating). Alice wins, goes to 180 rating, Bob drops to 720 rating.

 

Alice (rank 2, 9700 rating) vs Charlie (rank 3, 10200 rating), Alice wins, goes to 10720 and rank 3, Charlie goes to 10000 (only loses 200 because his rank 3 is safe).

 

Alice (rank 3, 10720) goes on holiday for 2 weeks, week 1 atrophies 10%, goes to 10000, week 2 loses nothing as her rank 3 is safe.

 

Rewards:

 

• Rank titles: republic/imperial cadet/soldier/colonel/general/admiral etc
  
• Exclusive weekly titles: highest individual rating (grand moff, commander in chief), highest weekly kills (executor/cleaner/Emperor's Hand etc) highest healing, highest guarding, best kill/death ratio etc.
  
• Exclusive gear skins: (slightly better stat enhancements (no additional forced stat gear grind please) that you can slot into your battlemaster pvp gear that also change the skin of the gear so it becomes [rank x] battlemaster [set name] gear (think, battle damage, blood stains, trophies hanging off it etc).
  

 

I’ve tried to suggest something that is relatively easy to implement for the devs (most of it is just metrics, the only extra assets needed to implement the above is the extra gear skins).

 

~o~

 

World Objectives

 

When I saw the illum map I thought awesome, I bet we have to secure our own base, work our way across the map to get the 3 points in the open in turn and eventually take the enemy base for some kind of reward, what I saw when I got there was nothing of the sort. However, small changes are all that is needed to make it fun.

 

Note: for players who haven’t got to that stage yet illum is basically a circle jerk where opposing factions take turns in destroying/repairing the objectives to quickly complete daily/weekly quests, there is no pvp.

 

Here are my suggestions to vastly improve the zone:

 

• Make it so you can only take the points in order, for the republic to be able to take the middle point they must have their own base and the southern point secure (this makes 2 points the focus of the map at any one time – offence and defence for each faction)
  
• Add a terminal to each point on the map that requires constant interaction (will expand on this below) to take or secure the point. Keep the destroy vehicles thing, just add an extra command post type vehicle with the extra terminal in.
  
• Add defender rewards for holding a point (example: 5 merc comms/min for being in pvp combat within200 metres of a terminal that is under attack)
  
• Dynamically spawn npcs that drop bonus reward chest keys (example: key opens chest once terminal is secure, chest is lootable for 5 minutes by any attacker that has been in active combat in the zone within the last 10 minutes, contains merc comms, possible gear loot etc) when attacking a point that is being defended. To elaborate: this is to encourage attacking when there are players to defend instead of sniping the zone in the quiet part of the night. If chest reward could be scaled on attacker/defender ration that would be awesome but don’t know if that is overreaching the games capabilities too much.
  
• Taking the enemy base locks the zone for 1 hour and gives a faction wide, planet wide (possibly server wide) buff for 2 hours (examples: +10% pve loot +2% pvp rating gain +10% xp (if similar objectives can be added to all planets), +5% expertise etc).
  

 

Terminal interaction:

 

• Each terminal takes 5 minutes of constant interaction (cast bar) to take the zone, meaning 1 person is out the fight interacting with the terminal to take it. Other faction members must protect the person doing the interacting.
  
• Terminal resets to 0 at 50% rate, so a terminal that was used to 99% and was then left would take just under 10 minutes to reset to 0.
  
• Defender interacting with terminal resets it at 200% rate, so terminal used to 99% and then used by defender would reset to 0 in just under 2 minutes 30 seconds.
  

 

Development Impact:

 

The above should be fairly straight forward to implement, spawning of terminals and chests, key holder npcs, some additional game rules and score keeping for the zone. The dynamic stuff maybe more difficult but come on, this is BW surely they could do it

 

~o~

 

Please feel free to bump, critique, flame, or add any kind of input/changes to these suggestion, more engaging world pvp is better for the game as a whole, even if it is not the individual players personal choice of endgame.

 

Let’s see if this even remains on the first page for more than 2 minutes.

 

TL : DR: Add individual player pvp rating for world pvp and make world pvp objectives worth fighting over.

 

Thanks for reading

Edited January 4, 2012 by Roak

[Roak]

[reserved]

[Roak]

aww, page 3, no replies. too wordy, bad ideas, or too much general apathy/lack of hope BW will implement anything to improve world pvp?

[Aetla]

Sweet mother of mercy i think this is gonna be my 100th time:

 

Combine questing zones for Real Open PvP (RoPvP)

 

• Space ports, trading centers, medical center ish places are hubs and PvP restricted.
  
• No armor penalty, repair cost for PvP deaths.
  
• Temp immunity for PvP victims (Breaks on damage)
  

 

Rewards,

 

• Valor for each kill.
  
• No loot no XP + loot loss for being killed.
  
• Accessing PvP items via gaining more OPvP valor points.
  

 

Proper motivation is killing more not afraiding of being killed.

 

Warzones,

 

Level capping i think works like a charm, there's no logical benefir neither a motivation of putting lvl 50 beast and lvl 10 babygirls into one cage and expect them to "compete"

 

So, here's my suggestions

 

10-19

19-29

29-39

39-49

50

 

And we should able to select desired warzone. I mean i do not like huttball and die for Void Star. Well then give me an option Bioware?

 

GG all guys n gals

 

My two cents,

[Bullsith]

I agree with most but the raiting loss. They tried something like that in EQ2 excuse for PVP and what happen? You had only IWIN groups that stayed near safe spots engaging anything they were certain they'd beat. So no, none of that please, cause the moment someone starts doing it, everyone does.

[Aetla]

I agree with most but the raiting loss. They tried something like that in EQ2 excuse for PVP and what happen? You had only IWIN groups that stayed near safe spots engaging anything they were certain they'd beat. So no, none of that please, cause the moment someone starts doing it, everyone does.

 

That's right!

 

Proper way of motivating player is kill and win. If you lose a fight and lose something. Point, valor, money, gear...

 

You just trigger a foolish self defence mechanism and people do not take risk. Look for guarantee wins and such absurd stuff.

 

If you kill you get the point or something.

 

BUT

 

If you're ganked, being killed etc

 

None xp, item, money, armor penalty&lost is required. Do not punish the victim. Just encourage him to get his revenge and reward the winner

 

Proper motivation is hone your skills and kick **ss next time and get your revenge.

Edited January 4, 2012 by Aetla

[Roak]

bit of a sneaky as the forum is busier this time of day, come on bw, give us something to fight for!