★★★[ARENA] - benefits of adding ARENA to SWTOR★★★

[Xarimath]

Signed.

Like it.

[Stryeth]

In OP, I pointed out all the reasons why arena should be added to this game.

 

This post is my thoughts on HOW arena should be added, and how it should be different from WoW.

 

 

 

1. Arena SHOULD NOT reward players with better gear or advantages of any kind

 

WoW's battleground gear (honor point gear) was one tier below that of arena gear (conquest point gear)

 

WoW awarded people with high arena rating with better gear (tier 2 weapon at 2200+ rating etc).

 

DON'T DO THAT. People don't play arenas for gears. People play arenas for competition. Rewarding gears based on rating would not be good for competition and would cause casual players to become antagonized against arena.

 

I believe arenas should reward no better gear than warzones. In fact it should be made so that it does not award commendation or valor of any kind.

 

Warzones should be the platform where people grind their gear. Arena should be a place where people can put their character to the test, once its geared.

 

 

 

 

 

2. Arena dailies / weeklies

 

Since SWTOR arena doesn't reward arena points, adding it to the current daily system would be a good idea to encourage participation from large majority of population.

 

Having large majority of players participate will have two benefits:

 

*The top players on the ladder can gauge their performance in comparison to all other players.

 

*More data is generated to see the current state of balance in the game

 

 

For this purpose, arena daily/weekly should be something that should be quick and not time consuming - "Win one arena match a day / 5 arena match a week" should suffice.

 

So in the end, one daily for ilum, one for warzone, and one for arena. Sounds fair.

 

 

 

3. Arena SHOULD reward players with titles and cosmetic changes.

 

Self explanatory...

 

 

 

4. publicly available data

 

This coincides with point #3 of my original post.

 

WoW's arena armory only shows players, teams, and their ratings on the ladder.

 

But for SWTOR, I think it would be beneficial to show all of the following data publically.

 

*Rankings of 8 classes according to: percentage frequency in top200 (or whatever rank), DIVIDED overall percentage frequency of class representation on ladder.

 

 

 

*List of most popular team comps on top200 to study class synergies

 

*Win loss ratio % of every class vs class matchup (for 1v1 arena). There are 8 classes, and therefore 36 (8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1=36) different matchups, including mirrors. This ratio should be updated close to real time and be used as a "balance weight" in 1v1 ladder (explained below!)

 

*To avoid accounting for data from older balance patches, the data should either be wiped after every major content patch, or it should only show data less than ~1 week old.

 

 

 

 

 

LASTLY...

 

5. 1v1 arenas

 

The goal of 1v1 ladder would be to provide data to help shape 1v1 balance of the game.

 

I firmly believe given enough time and effort from playerbase/bioware, all 36 matchups in this game can be maintained close to 50:50 (at most 60:40) ratio as possible

 

1v1 ladder itself can potentially be 'extremely balanced' with weighted point gain/loss system, even if not all matchups are 50:50 balanced (explained below!)

 

 

 

1v1 in this game is not completely balanced, and some classes such as tank assassins and marauders are very powerful in 1v1. How powerful are they? We won't know until we have some numbers generated from 1v1 arenas.

 

However 1v1 in this game is nowhere near unbalanced as it is on WoW. "Hard counters" exist in WoW - i.e. cataclysm warlock has 0% chance to win against DK, no matter how skilled he is.

 

I've played and watched streams of many "dueling tournaments" in SWTOR, and haven't seen any such "hard counters". On my focus guardian I've faced and beaten every good tank shadows and sentinels on my server. My belief is that if played correctly without mistakes, all class in game have a fighting chance against any other class in the game. This is why I think 1v1 arena will work in SWTOR although it won't in WoW.

 

Adding 1v1 arena will be beneficial for promoting 1v1 balance, since we would have raw data and know specifically which matchups are the least balanced. Why should we balance 1v1? If you balance something in a smaller scale, it will most likely be balanced on larger scale. Same reason holds for why all new products of science / technology are experimented and produced on smaller scale before being produced on larger industrial scale.

 

Thus if something is balanced in 1v1 set up, there is a pretty good chance it will also balanced in 2v2, 3v3, and 8v8. The converse is not true.

 

 

 

Next question is how to balance the 1v1 LADDER (not necessarily the classes) as closely as possible? WEIGHT system!

 

 

 

A class is "rewarded" for winning a harder battle vs its counter class. Likewise, reward is less if a class ends up beating the class it counters. This approach would allow class distribution on the ladder to be roughly equal even if the matchups themselves aren't completely balanced.

 

This approach is only valid in 1v1, since there are only 8 classes / 36 matchups to balance. It would be much harder to implement this even in 2v2, since number of comps and matchups increases exponentially with more players.

 

 

When balancing actual classes, prioritize fixing most unbalanced matchups first, then see how changes affect other matchups

 

50:50 = perfect balance - mirror matchup

60:40 = pretty good balance - leave things as is (minimum target goal for all 36 matchups)

70:30 = unbalanced - there are issues to be looked into

>80:<20 = very unbalanced - needs to be fixed first

 

 

I think it's a great idea and your suggestions are very good. You've obviosly put alot of thought into this. I wonder if BW has even seen this post, or if they just play ignorant..

 

How about we send some kind of petition to BW with a list of emails from the players who would like this idea? Then they might at least look at the idea and give it a thought.

 

EDIT: If BW are reluctant they could create a test server for this purpose.

Edited February 6, 2013 by Stryeth

[DarthGile]

Organized 1v1's would be amazing (KOTOR Taris deathmatch flashbacks!). Back in February/March '12, I remember so many player-run tournaments. The problem was that it was quiet clear which class was better at 1v1's. Marauders and Assassins always won. It's very hard to balance arenas when most of the time it turns out to be "rock,paper,scissors" between class balance.

[EatenByDistance]

Arenas should be added to ToR and dev support for this kind of PvP is long overdue. Edited February 6, 2013 by EatenByDistance

[Alue]

Awesome post.

Same for me as for many other replies, the only reason I want back to WoW is the possibility of playing Arena.

Please implement into SWTOR BW!

[Zajfien]

Pass on Arenas. NO thank you.

 

Objective based WZ maps and maybe 1-2 TDM maps > Arenas.

 

Arenas are breeding grounds for skilled players...but they are also breeding grounds for a terrible community with a dash of class OP outcry.

 

yep what this dude said

 

i pass also

[Atramar]

SWTOR won't go e-sport in any near future. imagine, stadium, 10 000 crowd watching 16 big screens, wage of a game 20k per win.

hutball, 5:5, tight game, team 'super ciuties bunnies' (or whatever that girl gaming squad was called) is about to score, boom, ball carrier crashed to desktop, healer got DC, stealther got demoted to 'free to play' and kicked out of RWZ.

unless random crashes are part of fun

[Crerin]

This is a great idea, and if some people don't like it, well they aren't the gamers it is intended for. I know a ton of people who would be a lot more into swtor if it had something of this sort. It is not for everyone which is why the gear should not be better or faster to get from it. It is a great idea for competition though any negatives are far outweighed by the positives and repetitive play value of an arena system.