Maybe this is how it works at Bioware...

[Tesseractual]

Imagine you get up every morning and go to work. You work at an office and are apart of a team, though that team doesn't really need to work together to accomplish anything. For your work, you aren't paid in cash money. Instead you are paid in office furniture which allows you to work more efficiently. The work itself is irrelevant. For the sake of argument let's say you file papers all day with big numbers on them that are never to be seen again by anyone after you go home.

 

As time goes on you collect more and more office furniture until finally you have a nice looking work space. You're still doing the same job you've been doing the entire time, nothing about that has changed. From time to time your fellow employees even tell you what a good job you're doing. Like any reasonable person you may begin to wonder what the point of it all is?

 

And that's the current state of PvP. It's kinda pointless. There's something that's been boggling me about Old Republic. The game takes place at a time of war and yet war is the furthest thing from everyone's mind. Warzones are "nice" but at the end of the day nothing is changed. It doesn't matter who wins as far as the story is concerned and it doesn't effect the rest of the players out there. And that's just fine for a that specific system, but we can't really be expected to accept warzones as the sole form of opposing factions interacting can we? If that was the case why not just make a large one faction system where the members get along just fine.

 

I was waiting to get to this post until I had fully explored Ilum. That turned out to be a waste of time though. If warzones are like working in an office than Ilum is like sending emails on the way to work. At the end of the day nobody cares who "controls" Ilum because there is no reason to control Ilum. In fact, if I show up to Ilum and it's (my faction) controlled I heave a sigh because there's nothing to do and nothing gained.

 

Now I understand this isn't a "Player vs. Player" game setting in the same way that Dark Age of Camelot was, for example, so expecting a heavy dedication to that mindset is asking to much. I just find more and more I'm asking myself what the point of it all is. Why bother PvPing if it'll just lead to more pointless PvP?

 

 

 

I think the best bet would be to make end game PvP occur on Ilum with far reaching effects for the rest of the player base. One formula I think would work out well is that on a preset period of time the "Battle for Ilum" is begun. During that time objectives would spawn and players would compete for those objectives. At the conclusion, the faction that controlled Ilum would get some sort of faction wide buff. Even the most simplistic system like this one would be enough of a reason for us to all PvP. As it stands right now I just don't feel like there's any reason to invest time in that part of the game.