I didn't realise how bad PvP was broken, until tonight - and why nobody does RWZ's

[funkiestj]

 

But really, the one of the biggest flaws with the implementation of RWZs was the lack of a matchmaking system. It's completely demoralizing for a new team to be destroyed by the best team over and over again.

 

While RWZs took some pressure off regular WZs, the scheduling problem is there in regular WZs too. You really should not have a bunch of terribad scrubs/n00bs going up against a 4-man premade from one of the strong teams. There are way too many games where on side have 0% chance to win.

 

To make a PvE analogy, it would be like being randomly thrown into story mode / hard mode / nightmare mode. It is a waste of time to try a flashpoint/op you don't know very well and are severely undergeared for.

 

If the strong teams want more folks to join RWZs, they need to do more community building (e.g. organize matches with balanced teams) while we pray for a match making system.

[iSoldat]

I asked some of the ranked players why they weren't queuing RWZ instead of NWZ and their response was, "the Queue doesn't pop." So i thought about it for a second and realized that if they weren't face rolling pugs, the RWZ Queue might actually pop. But I digress, they don't really want to Queue RWZ, because they can't Min/Max or twink their alts as fast.

[Smashbrother]

How many times do I have to explain myself... Yes I got outplayed, I understand that. It is the way in which I got outplayed, the way in which the game teaches people to outplay others, that I wholeheartedly disagree with. I could learn how to outplay people in exactly the same way, but the very essence of that type of gameplay is poor design. If it was just a case of learning how to outplay others too, I'm sure more people would have stuck around, but people clearly didn't like the type of gameplay they were seeing, they didn't like what other players were capable of doing. That isn't just a L2P issue, that is a gameplay issue.

 

If the best course of action when playing competitively is to lock someone out of combat making them helpless for prolonged periods of time, then that is bad design. Yes I'm sure being beaten in that way put lots of people off, but that fact it put so many people off, means there is more to it than just hundreds of thousands of players throwing their dolly out of the pram. If you get beaten in a way and it disgusts you and puts you off, if you have any kind of integrity you are less likely to want to learn how to beat people in the same way. I know lots of good people who would prefer to stay out of Ranked WZ's than to stoop to a level of gameplay they find demeaning. I even have friends that will only do pre-50 PvP whilst levelling alts because they think the state of level 50 PvP is so bad.

 

The signs are everywhere, people do not enjoy high-end PvP. The more competitive it gets the less they seem to enjoy it. It's easy to just blame everything on L2P when you don't want things to change, but surely even you want what is best for the game? And if that means making high-end PvP less of a CC spike damage fest, then that is exactly what needs to be done. If you don't want your precious game to fail, then things need to change as they clearly are not enticing people to play in the games current state.

 

And no matchmaking does not fix bad design, it just hides if from people until they start getting higher up the ladder. Competitive PvP really is terribly designed, and this game won't thrive until it is changed.

 

 

I don't want some game where all pvp boils down to is everyone spamming aoe/damage spells all at once, and whichever side has more players at the fight wins. THAT takes 0 skill. I haven't personally played GW2, but from what people have said, and the few videos I've watched of it, their world pvp boils down to

 

1. bring more people

2. spam aoe

3. ???

4. profit

 

I enjoy pvp where a smaller team can win against a larger team because of coordinated use of CC, guard swaps, and good heals/cleases. The only other MMO I've played with any length of time was WoW, and dear god was the CC in that game beyond anything found in this. I remember being feared for like 30sec while dying to dots, or stun locked to death. SWTOR's cc is no where near as bad as WoW's. But yes, I do think BW should revert the recent resolve change so that when I pug WZs I can be white barred immediately and proceed to **** faces on the bads.

 

I'm not a fan of getting rid of gear dependency in this game. If I wanted to play a game where gear doesn't matter, I'd go play Counterstrike, Starcraft, Street Fighter, etc. The gear gap in this game is also nowhere near that bad. You can literally lose your way to BiS pvp gear in SWTOR. I have 3 50s in full WH gear, so I know how the grind is. It's not that bad, especially if you planned properly and maxed your comms before hitting 50. However, I do think BW should make it so getting a certain level of gear (say WH), will unlock it for all your legacy chars. The whole game is built on making alts and legacy, so I think it's fair to allow people to purchase WH gear with credits once they've bought them normally.

Edited November 3, 2012 by Smashbrother

[Doomsdaycomes]

While RWZs took some pressure off regular WZs, the scheduling problem is there in regular WZs too. You really should not have a bunch of terribad scrubs/n00bs going up against a 4-man premade from one of the strong teams. There are way too many games where on side have 0% chance to win.

 

To make a PvE analogy, it would be like being randomly thrown into story mode / hard mode / nightmare mode. It is a waste of time to try a flashpoint/op you don't know very well and are severely undergeared for.

 

If the strong teams want more folks to join RWZs, they need to do more community building (e.g. organize matches with balanced teams) while we pray for a match making system.

 

 

I'd just like to point out, the flaw in that analogy. In PvE, if your team fails, you get -nothing.- Also, a flashpoint/ops can take 30 minutes to 3 hours depending on successes and difficulty, where as a WZ is no more than 15 minutes. They are simply not comparable.

 

PvP rewards failure -because- it's expected. Win or lose, a good player get's atleast 80 comms. (Bad players can get 40-80, unless they suck so much they couldn't get 1 medal). They also spend much less time in any given situation (so the likelihood they are hit the same team, atleast in normal wz's, is lower than trying to compare being stuck trying to do a nightmare Op)

 

Even in ranked, where medals are harder to get with good competiton, 50 comms isn't hard (that's 150 normal comms btw.)

 

Can't compare PvE end game to PvP end game, two different worlds.

[Smashbrother]

2. He's right about the CC.

 

Resolve is a joke. It never worked, EVER. What they've done with the recent changes, was to make it completely and utterly retard proof. You don't need skill to chain CC people anymore, and the clutch plays that we used to pull off due to baddies spamming stuns, especially in Hutt Ball, are completely gone. All coordination is taken away, as far as Resolve is concerned, and they've made it so people don't even have a chance to actually do anything when chain CC'ied... when I say do anything, I'm accounting the HUMAN ERROR as far as stuns are concerned. Plenty of times before the update, overlapping stuns would give you a full Resolve bar early in the fight, which would cost the other team the fight, but as of right now, none of that happens. You have take it like a man, no matter what, and this literally means that you stand there, like a idiot, looking at your toon get his *** beat for 8 sec without being able to react.. Which directly leads to the second point.

 

Nobody likes that baddies don't need to coordinate stuns anymore due to the recent resolve change, but that wasn't what the OP was saying. OP was complaining that it's "cheap", "disgusting", "no integrity" that good teams can coordinate ccs in order to lock someone down. The recent resolve change has NOTHING to do with that.

 

3. He's completely right about the DPS.

 

The DPS in this game is a joke. When I say that, I mean in a herp-a-derp sort of way. Due to so many baddies crying about healers, TTK in this game is so fast, most people die in one stun lock, and healers can do jack **** about this. This is only made worse by the Resolve system, which doesn't do **** for you as mentioned above, and everyone and their mom only running with Mara/PT/Tankassins. This of course means that calling out targets generally means that they die within a stun. This doesn't change at all when you're doing Warzones against top teams.. Take a look at Alderaan for example - Alderaan Civil War is one Warzone that's decided on kills, which means that having two really good teams fight each other, generally results in nothing but a giant stalemate, in which the DPS trade kills on squishies, and the Tankassing spend their time going in and out of stealth to prevent caps as their teams are coming back into the fight. This might be fun, once or twice, but it does nothing but highlight the stupid, unbalanced game mechanics of the game.

 

 

 

Edit:

 

Just wanted to say again, I play a PT. You guys know, that I know, what sort of DPS I'm talking about. Nobody survives more then two stuns when I call out a target.

 

This is an entirely class balance issue, and not a dps issue. I'm sure if you played one of the non OP classes you wouldn't be complaining about dps being too high. Lowering burst dam and healing like the OP wants, is also not going to change how CW ends up being a giant stalemate either when two similar teams play. I'm not entirely sure how that one should be fixed, because it's seriously not fun. Same with 0 door VS.

 

4. He's completely right about gear and group composition.

 

You guys wanna know why most of the top ranked groups actually dissolve? Because one or two persons leave their team. That's all it takes. If you want to compete against the top people, YOU HAVE TO HAVE a certain composition, certain gear set up and you have to have those people on at the same time.. This does NOTHING to promote the game - nothing at all. Actually, it completely kills it, and you'd have to be blind not to see that for yourself. Our group broke up because our Assassin couldn't play anymore, and finding a person with his skill level and gear was pretty much impossible. Even if the skill level is there, most of the time the gear wasn't, which means that the player couldn't roll with us. This is sad on many levels and it just makes whole guilds and teams leave the game as soon as one of the members gets tied up doing something else.

 

He actually didn't say anything about group comp, but I totally agree with you on that point. I want to be able to dps on my commando and sage in RWZs but I'm stuck as healer. I love healing, but gosh darn I want to change it up occasionally, but I can't. But this issue is one that EVERY competitive game has, and very very few seem to be able to solve. WoW had the same issues with FOTM arena teams--RPM anyone?--and pretty much every MMO has OP and UP classes. The only game I know of that managed perfect or near perfect balance in a competitive environment was Starcraft. Even fighting games like SF/MK will have OP chars and UP chars. It's just the nature of the beast, and I've no idea how to solve it to achieve near perfect balance.

 

 

You people can laugh at him all you want, and L2P him all day long.. However, that does NOTHING to change the current situation of the game. It's nice and dandy that you point fingers and tell people to go play GW2, while game such as that, are ANNOUNCING e-sport competition that are doing nothing but making people want to play them. While, at the same time, SWTOR is nothing but a laughing stock in the MMO community, and majority of you are doing nothing to change that. People such as the OP, who are genuinely interested in this game, and provide meaningful and thoughtful feedback, should not be ridiculed and made fun off. He pays his money's worth, he plays the game and he and his buddies give you elitist bastards something to do. You guys need to realize, to have a successful game, everyone should be having fun, not just the people who can pump endless hours into it.

 

I laugh at the OP and tell him to L2P because he is directly complaining about coordination. He calls a team that uses grenades and coordinates cc "unfair", "no integrity", "disgusting". If you don't want to get flamed, don't insult your betters.

 

And this is why SWTOR needs to add arenas where you're just given a standardized set of gear, and you just deathmatch. This will satisfy all the whiners who can't be bothered to play objectives.

 

edit - BW also needs to fix how you gain/lose rating. Part of the reason why I quit--besides no x-server--was that I'd get like 2 points for winning and lose like 20 when we lost, even though my personal rating was the same as the opposing team's. This makes is hard for alts to get ranked up, and is incredibly annoying.

Edited November 3, 2012 by Smashbrother

[MidichIorian]

I doubt that this had to do with gear if the majority of your team's players were in the 1300 range. The other team probably had more routine, a better strategy and superior team composition. It's not like they're doing 2K more damage per hit just because they have 70 more expertise.

 

I've played a few other games on a high competitive level, as in top teams on Gamebattles and against MLG pros, and even if you're playing a game in which everyone has the exact same stats as yourself it's going to feel like you are playing a new game for the first time when you are up against pros on a weaker team. You can steamroll all of the good players online but it's a completely different story when you play the world's best.

[arunav]

However, I do think BW should make it so getting a certain level of gear (say WH), will unlock it for all your legacy chars. The whole game is built on making alts and legacy, so I think it's fair to allow people to purchase WH gear with credits once they've bought them normally.

 

I think this is a really good idea, as long as you can't use it to PVE with. That would really mess up that side of gear progression.

 

I commend you for getting WH on 3 50s. I couldn't bare to do it on more than one. It's just not fun to me, and would bet a lot of other players feel the same way.

 

They are probably not posting on this forum, however.

[United_Strafes]

Title: "I didn't realise how bad PvP was broken, until tonight - and why nobody does RWZ's"

 

Guys rolling a Sentinel, guys saying PvP is broken for some other reason, guy you crazy?

Edited November 3, 2012 by United_Strafes

[NathanielStarr]

Such broad generalizations. Some f2p players will enjoy them, some wont. Just like the current population. f2p players wont deal with the gear gap at all until they hit 50, and by that time im sure they will have chosen to sub or not.

 

Well I would say that since it hasn't paid off in live and hasn't kept them playing so since they will be at ground zero and expected to pay extra if they want to do them. So I think it's a good guess that PvP as it is hasn't kept that many players playing.

[Sweeet]

I laugh at the OP and tell him to L2P because he is directly complaining about coordination. He calls a team that uses grenades and coordinates cc "unfair", "no integrity", "disgusting". If you don't want to get flamed, don't insult your betters.

 

OK this right hear explains why you are being so defensive.... I'm not insulting anyone but Bioware. I take my hat off to players such as yourself who are willing to put the time and effort into learning how to play the game to its maximum potential, I really do. I have the utmost respect for the skilled players who kick my butt in RWZ's.

 

But just because you are good at something doesn't make it right. It is clear as day that high-end 50 PvP is putting people off the game. Putting them off. This is a core gameplay issue not just a L2P issue. Just because you can learn how to be skilled in a broken PvP environment doesn't stop it from being a broken PvP environment, do you not understand that? Are you saying that the hundreds of thousands of players who have quit over PvP are wrong?

 

I get it, you love PvP just the way it is, but it is not doing the game any favours and if you genuinely can't see that by now, then I doubt you ever will.

Edited November 3, 2012 by Sweeet

[Bryanseven]

Kudos to the guy who played on the top teams and is honest about agreeing with the op about the state of pvp.

 

I agree that the main points the OP was making are true...it's not the grenades, cc, gear imbalance by themselves...it's the combination of the three contributing to low ttk and no fun.

 

I'm not a pvp genius, but even I can see that making the central mechanic to winning a game who can co-ordinate the ability to not let other people play is bad game design. Co-ordination is not a fault, skill and co-ordination SHOULD be the final and most important standard in deciding who wins. Coordinating the ability to cc someone to death however is where bad design rears it's ugly head.

 

Here's a thought, I realize that CC in this game is a neccessary play component to allow squishier classes to avoid death and a valuable tool to bring down healers, but what if instead of constantly trying to remove the other players ability to play by making them stunned, slowed, mezzed etc you had an ability like an acitve dodge to use on the marauder trying to melt your face...and in the using of said ability you were draining your rescources...so healers dodging couldn't be healing....or dps dodging couldn't be dps'ing...either way the net effect is the same the player being forced defensive is no longer using rescources to achieve their offensive goals. Better still there could be some give and take, you could return fire and try to force the other player defensive. It allows everyone to play the whole game and seems like more fun to me.

 

This would enable there to VASTLY fewer cc abilities and make there use much more clutch, reserved for objectives and dire situations. It would make smash spams (insert fotm attack here) much less frequent because there was less rage / focus available, the ridiculous I'm just going to stand here and heal through this flame thrower / 2 lightsabers pummeling me repeatedly less frequently seen, and lets everyone have at least the illusion of a fighting chance.

 

Just a thought off the top of my head, but the premise is this, use an active ability that enhances your defense or gives a power up at the cost of your rescources instead of an active ability that removes anothers ability to act on a cooldown.

 

Something like a dodge, power up (like adrenals were) or active block would become the strategic game deciding ability instead of the stun, mez, root, but like I said always tied to rescources...so you can be VERY hard to kill...but not be able to accomplish much otherwise or or be relatively easy to kill but able to accomplish much.

 

If you wanted to make it even more skill oriented make it positional...ie, you cant dodge attacks coming from behind you and if your intended powered up attack is out of range oh well.

 

From a star wars standpoint.... It would make the whole gameplay a little more subtle, there would still be big flashy abilities going off but they would be less frequent and more intersting because of it, like the movies.

 

From a tech perspective, not having 16 people spaming lightning, raining missiles, shooting flamethrowers and making the ground glow constanly would befinately be easier on peoples video cards, and increase framerate.

 

From a gear gap standpoint, the ability to effectively manage rescources is not tied to gear, you get no more rage / force, energy / ammoor less heat from having better gear, so it would lower the bar at least slightly for people without much in the way of gear. You can't do as much damage, but you can dodge or power up just as well as anyone else.

 

From a world pvp perspective, it is worth noting that every player has the same amount of rescources with a few small exceptions from 1 to 50. Your ability to increase the rate at which they regenerate is better at higher levels....but at least the pools are NEARLY Identical across the board...that would give lower level players (within several levels at least) a fighting chance to try and defend themselves against a higher level player trying to gank them.

 

Crowd control abilities can remain, just with their frequency of use and thus overall duration dramatically reduced...want to wait in stealth and gank someone at the respawn in huttball? You can...you just can't do it every 30 seconds.

 

Healers still heal the same, and DPS still does the same damage, in full offense...but should look out because unloading to focus down a player or Heal their team will leave them vulnerable to attack.

[warultima]

Most of us know the state of weak ACs like operative. But there are still people playing fotm Mara/Sin/PT that really dont know how to play and gets slapped all the time and think it will be ridiculous to buff anything other than Mara/Sin/PT.

 

To keep themselves relatively better than most classes, they must try to spin things around including telling BW how overpowered operative / sage DPS is and how merc DPS is totally fine.

[Crawelc]

DPS operatives are not in a bad place right now. I really dont understand why people are still complaining about them. They have the 2nd highest mobility right behind combat/carnage. On top of that now that my buddy who is a dps scoundrel is almost min maxed he gets 10k openers frequently, thats 10k damage in a global cooldown while the opponent is flat on his face.

[DanteDeLaRocha]

Cheers on your post Balmuck. Fantastic.

 

The consensus from the "everything's fine" crowd seems to be that the only reason that they are successful and you are not is because they want it more. They put the effort in to get the gear and you did not. All that's needed is to fix the problem is to just TRY HARDER! At a good 5% warzone win rate, if you play a good hundred matches (if you haven't given up by then) you should have enough comms to buy you some nice gear. What these folks fail to realize is:

 

>>> Not everyone wants to be a twitchy, mouse-turning, hyper-optimized, focus firing PvP Gerbil (yes I stole that) <<<

 

I played 50 PvP today for the first time in a long while since I've had the 8/9 Weekly quest for several months. The first thing that stood out was the lag. I never noticed 50 PvP being more laggy than sub but I did today in several matches. While the battles were lagging I could do nothing but watch my health bar drop by 5k chunks and could do very little about it. I did manage to squeak one win out of three to get my weekly done mostly being carried by my team. But it's just... not... fun. If it's not fun people won't play. And no matter how badazz you are, if there's no one around to see it, it just doesn't matter.

[anwg]

Cheers on your post Balmuck. Fantastic.

 

The consensus from the "everything's fine" crowd seems to be that the only reason that they are successful and you are not is because they want it more. They put the effort in to get the gear and you did not. All that's needed is to fix the problem is to just TRY HARDER! At a good 5% warzone win rate, if you play a good hundred matches (if you haven't given up by then) you should have enough comms to buy you some nice gear. What these folks fail to realize is:

 

>>> Not everyone wants to be a twitchy, mouse-turning, hyper-optimized, focus firing PvP Gerbil (yes I stole that) <<<

 

If that's the case, then there's no need to complain how others are better, right?

[warultima]

DPS operatives are not in a bad place right now. I really dont understand why people are still complaining about them. They have the 2nd highest mobility right behind combat/carnage. On top of that now that my buddy who is a dps scoundrel is almost min maxed he gets 10k openers frequently, thats 10k damage in a global cooldown while the opponent is flat on his face.

 

10k from a hidden strike eh. You have no idea what you are talking about.

[criminalheretic]

10k from a hidden strike eh. You have no idea what you are talking about.

 

I'm sure he meant 10k from hidden strike and the next 2 attacks that all have the exact same annoying "swching" sound effect.

[warultima]

I'm sure he meant 10k from hidden strike and the next 2 attacks that all have the exact same annoying "swching" sound effect.

 

Since you have no idea, I will explain this to you.

The knockdown from hidden strike is 1.5s which is the shortest single target stun in game. And the gcd from using hidden strike itself is 1.5s which means theres in reality no time to get in even 1 attack let along 2.

 

On top of that he said the 10k damage comes from 1gcd which means 1 attack.

 

Understand how the game works now?

[foxmob]

Since you have no idea, I will explain this to you.

The knockdown from hidden strike is 1.5s which is the shortest single target stun in game. And the gcd from using hidden strike itself is 1.5s which means theres in reality no time to get in even 1 attack let along 2.

 

On top of that he said the 10k damage comes from 1gcd which means 1 attack.

 

Understand how the game works now?

 

just so we're clear, 1 gcd = 2 attacks. the opener doesn't suffer from gcd. only the 2nd abil. 1 gcd = 2 attacks. that applies to both the one who initiates the attack and the one who responds (unless stunned, of course). of the purported dmg, I can say nothing. but 2 attacks in 1 gcd is normal.

Edited November 4, 2012 by foxmob

[ZomgAChicken]

Get rid of premades in regular warzones Edited November 4, 2012 by ZomgAChicken

[Technohic]

I am surprised while leveling a scrapper now at how quick I am starting to get around and move. I can move between nodes quickly. Nevermind the fact that I wind up spotting my team leave a node unguarded way too often and wind up going to guard myself, but that is ok, since stealth lets me guard quite well.

 

Now, if we start talking about the stats at the end, I will just say I don't get a lot of MVP votes even when I ninja cap one node and then turn to guard another node solo for the reason stated above, but oh well. Overall damage may be low there and I can go unnoticed no matter what I do, but I am just happy if I know I played well. (sometimes I don't and I know it, and I get really bothered.)

[foxmob]

DPS operatives are not in a bad place right now. I really dont understand why people are still complaining about them. They have the 2nd highest mobility right behind combat/carnage. On top of that now that my buddy who is a dps scoundrel is almost min maxed he gets 10k openers frequently, thats 10k damage in a global cooldown while the opponent is flat on his face.

to be honest, I just put wh gear on my scrapper, and I was amazed at how crappy the set bonuses are for scrapper/concealment dpers. I mean...compare the set bonus on eliminator gear for a vg/pt (major boost to railshot/hib - the big attack for the class). what do scrappers get? 5 extra energy. so...energy management, which isn't a problem in the first place, is now easier? srsly? what a crock!

[Crawelc]

10k from a hidden strike eh. You have no idea what you are talking about.

 

Shoot first 5200 back blast 4800 if you bothered to read what I posted you would see I said in 1 gcd as someone above politely pointed out.

 

Edit: and to quote the friend I am talking about "those are understatements"

Edited November 4, 2012 by Crawelc

[Crawelc]

to be honest, I just put wh gear on my scrapper, and I was amazed at how crappy the set bonuses are for scrapper/concealment dpers. I mean...compare the set bonus on eliminator gear for a vg/pt (major boost to railshot/hib - the big attack for the class). what do scrappers get? 5 extra energy. so...energy management, which isn't a problem in the first place, is now easier? srsly? what a crock!

 

To quote my buddy again "go for the pve set bonus"

[Smashbrother]

I think this is a really good idea, as long as you can't use it to PVE with. That would really mess up that side of gear progression.

 

I commend you for getting WH on 3 50s. I couldn't bare to do it on more than one. It's just not fun to me, and would bet a lot of other players feel the same way.

 

They are probably not posting on this forum, however.

 

Well to be honest, it's alot easier when you win 95% of your RWZ games and use legacy gear to xfer mods to your alts lols. I was also smart about it and capped my RWZ and WZ comms before hitting 50 which helps A TON. I also bought black hole pieces off the GTN to supplement my gear until I could get WH, because BH gear > recruit.