Why I'm done with PvP

[supertimtaf]

Welp, discussion blew out big way. Oh and there are new names that I haven't seen in a long time here.

 

the theorycrafting discord is happy to accommodate more regs focused discussions and we are/have considered taking steps to promote that further

 

That's gonna come out of nowhere, but maybe just... Promote the theorycraft discord somewhere in the first place, because I don't recall seeing a recent thread talking about it, much less having a link to it apart from this one. A few steps can go a long way in making sure misinformation doesn't spread, because after all, that's why this discord was made in the first place if I had to guess. Pretty sure if you'd ask a yellow person on the forum, they even may accept to pin this somewhere usefull.

 

Right now every mmo has this kind of discord anyway, but most are easier to find than just "asking the right person to get an invitational link". And I'm sure there are links around, but I haven't found them for the five minutes my dumb eyes have searched. And in case what I mentionned already exists, then my bad.

[TrixxieTriss]

Here you go. This is the link for the Theory Crafters

 

https://discord.gg/jqWyBcw

[supertimtaf]

Here you go. This is the link for the Theory Crafters

 

https://discord.gg/jqWyBcw

 

Did you have that ready for when I would ask ? Or is it that easy to find ?

[KendraP]

If what BW was planning for ranked had absolutely no bearing whatsoever on what they did to regs, why would they wantonly apply exactly the same penalty both places.

 

Trixxie did not, to my memory, suggest a blanket lockout. Their original suggestion, to my understanding, was something along the lines of my suggestion to up the W/L ratio, that I (along with trixxie) was making before they threw the baby out with the bathwater.

 

Instead of listening to reason, they took the easy or lazy path, or they chose to listen to blowhards.

 

But you guys enjoy your wasteland that grows more devoid of semi-decent players every day. And for once, I'm not talking about ranked.

 

Oh and btw, my hypothetical concern about unofficial channels being moderated by some third party is valid.

 

Oh and double btw: if bw didn't want to be accused of such preferential treatment, maybe they should have an official channel that is equally active and considered as some unofficial third party moderated nonsense.

[TrixxieTriss]

Did you have that ready for when I would ask ? Or is it that easy to find ?

 

I just went to the discord theory crafting servers welcome page and copied the link. FYI, I already had it opened because I was reading there too,

Edited January 22, 2021 by TrixxieTriss

[Nickodemous]

This is the dumbest post I've read in a while and the perception of what players think goes on in the theory discord is so removed from reality I don't know where to begin. Just join it yourself if you want to read what goes on it's not like it's a private server.

 

I love u too!

[mike_carton]

I know you like to play forum pvp with me,...

 

How did I live all these years and not hear the phrase “forum PvP” till now? And I’m a Newsgroup veteran!

 

Oh, btw. What she said.

[supertimtaf]

How did I live all these years and not hear the phrase “forum PvP” till now? And I’m a Newsgroup veteran!

 

Keyboard Warrior is a term that once was widely used here, it's not so far from that. But agree that forum PvP is a less agressive one for sure.

[Darth_Tofu]

As you may know from reading previous threads, there has been a lot of blowback from casual players about changing unranked PvP into all or none, in other words you only get points for the daily and weekly if you win. We players have pointed out the faults of this system that is geared toward the casual players bearing in mind that "serious" PvPers have ranked warzones to play in.

 

1) The growing number of PvP guilds/teams going into warzones against PUGs and stomping them. This is the Pros vs. Joes where the Joes rarely win and so get nothing.

 

2) Warzones that set up 3 vs 4; a team with a healer vs one without; a team that has idiots who abandon objective leaving them unguarded, players that do nothing or leave despite the lockout timer; players actively working for the other team. I have seen all of these so that despite their best efforts, players on such a disadvantaged team cannot hope to get a point.

 

3) The long queueing time for warzones, and now GSF seems to pop up just as often. For those of you that have played GSF in the past, let that sink in.

 

4) The fact that the time/reward ratio including consideration of Socialite CQ points now vastly favors GSF and flashpoints.

 

5) The complete lack of CMs to attend to this issue. We did get a drive-by management reply that basically said they did this to reduce toxicity in warzones. When we pointed out the above issues and that the all-or-none system has contributed to MORE toxicity in unranked, there has been a deafening silence from the CMs. Therefore I conclude that they will not change the system and continue to ignore us so these threads that raise legitimate concerns from the paying community will (as usual) trail off into the aether.

 

The sad part is that on the rare occasion that we get two equal teams I still have a lot of fun in the warzone and if I lose those close competitive WZs I don't mind that I didn't get a point because I had fun. But that 10% to 20% is not worth the aggravation of the rest of the WZs where there is no way that my team can win despite the best efforts of most (or all) of our team. It is just a time-sink with no enjoyment and I think that I could have speedrun a Kuat instead of this.

 

Thank you for clearly articulating my feelings. I just wanted to jump in and say I agree completely, I'm considering leaving the game due to the pvp turning to such a dumpster fire after 6.2

[snave]

Thank you for clearly articulating my feelings. I just wanted to jump in and say I agree completely, I'm considering leaving the game due to the pvp turning to such a dumpster fire after 6.2

 

I'm going to attempt to address each of these points in as a constructive manner as possible seeing as you get forum warnings now for just pointing out that some posts are silly.

 

As you may know from reading previous threads, there has been a lot of blowback from casual players about changing unranked PvP into all or none, in other words you only get points for the daily and weekly if you win. We players have pointed out the faults of this system that is geared toward the casual players bearing in mind that "serious" PvPers have ranked warzones to play in.

 

1) The growing number of PvP guilds/teams going into warzones against PUGs and stomping them. This is the Pros vs. Joes where the Joes rarely win and so get nothing.

 

A growing number of PvP guilds and teams queueing is literally the best thing that can happen. If there was just one of them in the queue you'd have a 50/50 to be on their team so over time that would balance out to a roughly equal benefit / harm ratio for you. If MORE PvP guilds and teams start queueing up as a group then this dramatically increases your chances to be with one AND against one. This increases your chances of having a game where players listen, attempt to win and even if they just want to number farm that means you have at least 50% of your team doing that effectively so you can by Mr Objective and win the game for you team.

 

2) Warzones that set up 3 vs 4; a team with a healer vs one without; a team that has idiots who abandon objective leaving them unguarded, players that do nothing or leave despite the lockout timer; players actively working for the other team. I have seen all of these so that despite their best efforts, players on such a disadvantaged team cannot hope to get a point.

 

That's from players leaving the queue and is something that is managed by........implementing a lockout timer to stop being from doing this. The other points you make are rarities rather than default behaviour, and these rarities have always existed in PvP and will continue to exist in PvP regardless of lockout timers or whatever else can be implemented. It's hard to manage player behaviour inside the warzone. Seeing as the point of this thread is to ask cup in hand for some more rewards for losing, I'd like to point out you're just as likely to benefit (win wise) from this behaviour if the players are on the enemy team as you are to suffer from it when they're on your team.

 

3) The long queueing time for warzones, and now GSF seems to pop up just as often. For those of you that have played GSF in the past, let that sink in.

 

I have no clue what server or time you're queueing up for PvP on but this is demonstrably untrue on the Darth Malgus server. I've queued at pretty much every hour of the day and got a pop relatively quickly. The first pop might take a little bit longer if there are games going on but once I've had my first games all others come in a very timely fashion. I've also queued on Star Forge and Satele Shan during their off peak hours (because I'm in the UK and obviously there's a time zone difference) and never received any issues getting pops. This to me seems demonstrably untrue.

 

4) The fact that the time/reward ratio including consideration of Socialite CQ points now vastly favors GSF and flashpoints.

 

I'm somewhat of a PvP purest who feels that players should play PvP because they want to, not because it's efficient at grinding CQ but I would like to see some additional incentives to get CQ guilds queueing up as teams. The problem with incentivising CQ is that these players are more than happy to sit at their keyboards spamming crafting for 10 hours if it's the most effective way to get points so rewards points for losses in PvP will lead to the spamming warzones and doing nothing so they can lose more efficiently. I mentioned on my podcast this weekend that I'd like to see the CQ integration with PvP greatly improved upon and we floated out a few ideas but just making it more attractive for CQ grind literally makes the things you're already complaining about worse.

 

5) The complete lack of CMs to attend to this issue. We did get a drive-by management reply that basically said they did this to reduce toxicity in warzones. When we pointed out the above issues and that the all-or-none system has contributed to MORE toxicity in unranked, there has been a deafening silence from the CMs. Therefore I conclude that they will not change the system and continue to ignore us so these threads that raise legitimate concerns from the paying community will (as usual) trail off into the aether.

 

I'm not sure what you've reported to the CM's as unacceptable behaviour and the issues you've pointed out above are hardly anything substantial. If you have some examples of the actions you're referring to I'd be interested in hearing them, assuming there's proof

 

The sad part is that on the rare occasion that we get two equal teams I still have a lot of fun in the warzone and if I lose those close competitive WZs I don't mind that I didn't get a point because I had fun. But that 10% to 20% is not worth the aggravation of the rest of the WZs where there is no way that my team can win despite the best efforts of most (or all) of our team. It is just a time-sink with no enjoyment and I think that I could have speedrun a Kuat instead of this.

 

The sad part is more premades in the queue and more PvP guilds trying to increase the average level of play in warzones is the fix to your problem yet you view it as a roadblock. It's strange how you list premades and player behaviour as the reason you lose games yet say you only get good games 10-20% of the time which is far from how that should work out in practice.

 

The issue with PvP stems from the removal of 8 man ranked (and I'm not saying bringing back 8's permanently fixes this - it wouldn't), when they removed 8's every PvP guild in the game died within a month and the only ones that had any form of population were husks of their former selves. Players had no avenue to progress and learn PvP like they do when they join a raiding guild for example. This issue has never been addressed or rectified so I've had to stand around watching regs descend into the clown fiesta you see today. We need MORE premades, MORE PvP guilds, MORE groups that try to actively win games, the casual PvP base that makes up the majority of posts on this forum simply do not understand how to fix the issue, or how they are the issue themselves.

 

We talked about regs for a bit on the podcast recently, I think this is the time stamp for it:

[supertimtaf]

We need MORE premades, MORE PvP guilds, MORE groups that try to actively win games, the casual PvP base that makes up the majority of posts on this forum simply do not understand how to fix the issue, or how they are the issue themselves.

 

While I do fully agree with this, one thing to note still is that peoples who left will not reinstall the game just because "pvp got better", and a big part of the decent/good players we had back in the days will not come back. If you want more peoples to try to win, and to try to get better, you need incentives to play, and even more reasons to win. Because even with high end PvE players complaining about the lack of new PvE content, they will not suddenly get into PvP by sheer boredom.

 

So how do you do this ? Well then, first things first, you'd have to make peoples interested in this game mode. This goes a long way, but could help tremendously.

 

First thing is well, you know it, overall balance. The existence of, like somebody else mentionned in another thread, S-tier specs and meme-tier specs doesn't help in making PvP fun for everybody. No matter if this is ranked or unranked, a hatred sin will simply not have fun against strongs juggernauts, or lightning sorc. And while perfect balance will not exist, I think working on this could help a lot in making sure that everybody could get a chance no matter the fight. That's also part of the fun, no ?

 

Another important thing that will make peoples into PvP is... Well, you've guessed it, rewards.

While I fully agree that some rewards should be kept exclusively for ranked, I think that the overall PvP in this game lacks an important quantity of rewards in order to make peoples want to play.

If it were only me, I'd give more ranked rewards in the first place, just way more quality cosmetics, titles, mounts, flairs, as well as a specific currency, PvP commendations (I said the forbidden word ) in more than generous manners.

I'd also make sure that unranked would give its fair share of rewards, be it in the form of 306 gear (because how are you expected to get into ranked and win to get rewards if you can't even gear with unranked ? ) and said PvP commendations.

 

The goal with these commendations is to exchange them in the end for rewards. Sure, less fancy and eye-catching than ranked ones, but rewards nonetheless. Cosmetic gear/weapon, color crystals, titles, housing decorations, mounts... All of this is there to make sure that you'd have a reason to at least try PvP. Making sure that wins reward way, way more than losses is also a sure way to make peoples interested in playing correctly and learning. Heck, even letting win-only daily/weekly quest wouldn't hurt as much as right now.

 

If you really wanted to make sure that players would be incentivized to go into ranked for the best rewards, then do what was previously done until S6. I mean, give cool VFX to ranked cosmetics. FX on weapons, mounts, animated flairs... Anything *at least* as worth as cash shop items, to make sure peoples want them.

 

You also mentionned Conquest, which I do agree could use a little bit of a buffer for PvP.

 

Cross-server Queue could do some good as well for EU servers, as even tho DM is doing fine population wise, Leviathan and Tulak are struggling to keep a steady number of players into PvP and else. And I'm not even talking about the abyssimal skill of most on these two servers.

 

But you cannot hope that players will get into PvP "just for the sake of it" currently. No matter if they're good players or not. There is just too many good reasons to not PvP, or simply to few reasons to enjoy it when compared to other gamemodes.

 

I still believe that Swtor has the most potential to have fun and amazing PvP gameplay above other mmos, but it keeps breaking and cracking with a lot of non-management and poor handling of anything close to it. This needs to change if we hope to see a return of the success it had back in the days.

 

All of this to say that, while more players WILL fix the issues mentionned by the OP, atm peoples will NOT get into PvP only because it's "fun", if you ever find it better than it was in 4.X and before, of course. There needs to be something more.

[Aricin]

I'm going to attempt to address each of these points in as a constructive manner as possible seeing as you get forum warnings now for just pointing out that some posts are silly.

 

The issue with PvP stems from the removal of 8 man ranked (and I'm not saying bringing back 8's permanently fixes this - it wouldn't), when they removed 8's every PvP guild in the game died within a month and the only ones that had any form of population were husks of their former selves. Players had no avenue to progress and learn PvP like they do when they join a raiding guild for example. This issue has never been addressed or rectified so I've had to stand around watching regs descend into the clown fiesta you see today. We need MORE premades, MORE PvP guilds, MORE groups that try to actively win games, the casual PvP base that makes up the majority of posts on this forum simply do not understand how to fix the issue, or how they are the issue themselves.

 

While I play the game almost every day i dont come here daily. I disagree with most of your points and for me the argumentation is flawed.

 

SWtoR is a casual game for casual players - there is no argument here. Go look through the history of the game to see the damage done catering to "hard core crowd" specifically PVE / Raid crowd, but not exclusively. Acknowledged by players & devs.

 

The "hard core" pvp guilds left the game not because 8v8 ranked was removed, because there was no population to sustain 8v8 ranked - which was the reason the modus was disabled. The same 4-5 groups playing each other again and again. Remember fleet spam asking to queue ranked? Still happening. Stop trying to make it happen.

 

I dont have a magic wand, but for me pre mades do not belong in unranked. Not trying to brush all pre mades with the same stroke, but those pre mades that normally play ranked and come into unranked are most of the time toxic. Non arena unranked is about objective based game play and time and time again you can see the premades there to farm kills and nothing more.

 

That does NOT encourage more players to try out PvP . All the while when the mode itself is already not as rewarding vs other game modes - loot / conquest etc. It does NOT encourage casual players to stick with it and get better.

 

the immediate fix would be to enable solo queue only for unranked and then look at how objective based game play is rewarded before bringing back group queue.

[snave]

While I play the game almost every day i dont come here daily. I disagree with most of your points and for me the argumentation is flawed.

 

SWtoR is a casual game for casual players - there is no argument here. Go look through the history of the game to see the damage done catering to "hard core crowd" specifically PVE / Raid crowd, but not exclusively. Acknowledged by players & devs.

 

The "hard core" pvp guilds left the game not because 8v8 ranked was removed, because there was no population to sustain 8v8 ranked - which was the reason the modus was disabled. The same 4-5 groups playing each other again and again. Remember fleet spam asking to queue ranked? Still happening. Stop trying to make it happen.

 

I dont have a magic wand, but for me pre mades do not belong in unranked. Not trying to brush all pre mades with the same stroke, but those pre mades that normally play ranked and come into unranked are most of the time toxic. Non arena unranked is about objective based game play and time and time again you can see the premades there to farm kills and nothing more.

 

That does NOT encourage more players to try out PvP . All the while when the mode itself is already not as rewarding vs other game modes - loot / conquest etc. It does NOT encourage casual players to stick with it and get better.

 

the immediate fix would be to enable solo queue only for unranked and then look at how objective based game play is rewarded before bringing back group queue.

 

This is a very common misconception that I believed is just people who weren't there repeating something they were told once.

 

8's was more active than SR and TR combined, even at the very end it was still more active. The reason that 8 participation was on a steady decline was because season 1 hadn't started and many teams decided they'd had enough of "kickballs" and were doing other things until the start of the season.

 

Just so I can explain this to everyone who wasn't around at the time. When server merges where announced there was a guild summit held on teamspeak where approx 30-50 guild leaders discussed which server would be the "PvP" server, TOFN was chosen and everyone migrated there for 8's.

 

The guild I was part of, Reality Check, had 4 SEPARATE 8's teams (5 if you include another one that was made up from players in other teams). That's one guild fielding 32 players in ranked, that's more than there are teams in team ranked now. You mention 4-5 teams playing themselves? That would be substantially more than are active in team ranked now.

 

Much like you see with the year long ranked seasons now, participation drops as time goes on and people are bored / want to do other things. 8's didn't even have a season and when the season was about to begin they removed it from the game. The flaccid line of "oh no one played it" is just patently false, we literally had a forum with multiple guilds with multiple teams ready to start again with season 1.

 

Also if you read my post I specifically say that the permanent return of 8 man ranked would not work / be a good idea.

 

I'd love to see these ranked premades you talk about coming into regs and spoiling it. How on earth do you construct a statement lamenting the death of team ranked then make out hordes of marauding team ranked teams are now running amok in regs, it's laughable.

 

Premades farming kills in regs (as I mentioned on the podcast AND in my post, which I'm guessing you skimmed) isn't inherently a bad thing. DPS and kills creates pressure which is the name of the game in regs, whether you're creating pressure somewhere else on the map by stalling at the enemy node or keeping the enemy team tied up at mid while others try to cap the other objectives, it's pressure in both cases. For sure some premades play like bumholes and over commit but you think replacing them with 100% random players changes that? You think that the people who are damage focused will suddenly be like "yup I'm not going to care about dps anymore"? They'll still do it but they'll do it less effectively because they no longer have support.

 

If YOU don't want to join a premade, if YOU have problems with it, that's cool but I have no idea why people think it would make regs better. Currently the state of the player base is the worst it's ever been, not because of lockouts, not because of rewards, but because the mentality of pvpers has gone from "how do I get better and win" to "gimme gimme gimme I stood in a map for 20 minutes gimme gimme".

 

Unliked ranked there are many guides on reg pvp in this game, many videos, many highlights, many streamers. There are no PvP guilds to help this knowledge flow into the game, there is no PvP infrastructure and that is the root cause for this descent into nonsense.

 

In my experience, regs is as active as ever and since the lockout introduction the quality of games has increased SUBSTANTIALLY. I queue solo most days I stream and prior to the changes I'd completely given up on regs because of the absolute clown fiesta it had become.

 

Most days when I queue up I'll see a couple of different premades (assumptions based on guild tags and coordination rather than concrete proof) and assuming it's not one of the unlucky coin flip stomp games - which they are sometimes and they always will be regardless of premades - the games are now decent with players listening and calling.

 

Making regs solo queue only is not smart, not effective and within a month you'll have the same posters here on the forums saying the same things when they lose. This forum is detached from reality most of the time and really the only reason I post here is so if new players / players interested in PvP are reading they don't get pulled into the fantasy world which exists here where every game is them and 7 random players versus omega Chad premades who somehow simultaneously cause the posters to lose games by farming numbers AND make them unwinnable because they're in a premade. The amount of paradoxes in the arguments made on this forum is truly something to behold.

[DavidAtkinson]

This is a very common misconception that I believed is just people who weren't there repeating something they were told once.

 

8's was more active than SR and TR combined, even at the very end it was still more active. The reason that 8 participation was on a steady decline was because season 1 hadn't started and many teams decided they'd had enough of "kickballs" and were doing other things until the start of the season.

 

Just so I can explain this to everyone who wasn't around at the time. When server merges where announced there was a guild summit held on teamspeak where approx 30-50 guild leaders discussed which server would be the "PvP" server, TOFN was chosen and everyone migrated there for 8's.

 

The guild I was part of, Reality Check, had 4 SEPARATE 8's teams (5 if you include another one that was made up from players in other teams). That's one guild fielding 32 players in ranked, that's more than there are teams in team ranked now. You mention 4-5 teams playing themselves? That would be substantially more than are active in team ranked now.

 

Much like you see with the year long ranked seasons now, participation drops as time goes on and people are bored / want to do other things. 8's didn't even have a season and when the season was about to begin they removed it from the game. The flaccid line of "oh no one played it" is just patently false, we literally had a forum with multiple guilds with multiple teams ready to start again with season 1.

 

Also if you read my post I specifically say that the permanent return of 8 man ranked would not work / be a good idea.

 

I'd love to see these ranked premades you talk about coming into regs and spoiling it. How on earth do you construct a statement lamenting the death of team ranked then make out hordes of marauding team ranked teams are now running amok in regs, it's laughable.

 

Premades farming kills in regs (as I mentioned on the podcast AND in my post, which I'm guessing you skimmed) isn't inherently a bad thing. DPS and kills creates pressure which is the name of the game in regs, whether you're creating pressure somewhere else on the map by stalling at the enemy node or keeping the enemy team tied up at mid while others try to cap the other objectives, it's pressure in both cases. For sure some premades play like bumholes and over commit but you think replacing them with 100% random players changes that? You think that the people who are damage focused will suddenly be like "yup I'm not going to care about dps anymore"? They'll still do it but they'll do it less effectively because they no longer have support.

 

If YOU don't want to join a premade, if YOU have problems with it, that's cool but I have no idea why people think it would make regs better. Currently the state of the player base is the worst it's ever been, not because of lockouts, not because of rewards, but because the mentality of pvpers has gone from "how do I get better and win" to "gimme gimme gimme I stood in a map for 20 minutes gimme gimme".

 

Unliked ranked there are many guides on reg pvp in this game, many videos, many highlights, many streamers. There are no PvP guilds to help this knowledge flow into the game, there is no PvP infrastructure and that is the root cause for this descent into nonsense.

 

In my experience, regs is as active as ever and since the lockout introduction the quality of games has increased SUBSTANTIALLY. I queue solo most days I stream and prior to the changes I'd completely given up on regs because of the absolute clown fiesta it had become.

 

Most days when I queue up I'll see a couple of different premades (assumptions based on guild tags and coordination rather than concrete proof) and assuming it's not one of the unlucky coin flip stomp games - which they are sometimes and they always will be regardless of premades - the games are now decent with players listening and calling.

 

Making regs solo queue only is not smart, not effective and within a month you'll have the same posters here on the forums saying the same things when they lose. This forum is detached from reality most of the time and really the only reason I post here is so if new players / players interested in PvP are reading they don't get pulled into the fantasy world which exists here where every game is them and 7 random players versus omega Chad premades who somehow simultaneously cause the posters to lose games by farming numbers AND make them unwinnable because they're in a premade. The amount of paradoxes in the arguments made on this forum is truly something to behold.

 

I simply cannot disagree with this and I did my best to try and say something , anything to disagree...

 

I started PVP around mid 4.0 when guilds like Take a Seat was running lots of premades and basically destroying every other team in unranked. I was farmed by you guys so much...

 

It was frustrating , but the quality of games was much better back then. Marking healers was something so basic, people would get angry if it wasn't done in time. Also, calling... that was like breathing air .

 

Today it's just a clown fest of chicken running around dying in 2 seconds and then opening threads here about how garbage PVP is . how op certain classes are but they rarely seek information about how the frick to improve at this game.

 

You never see that. It's always the premades, the OP fotm classes, the dps farmers . It's always these things that ruins their games, but they never look at themselves ask the question: " what can I do to up my game ?

 

The guy you just quoted is a perfect example.

 

Also as you said, this game just doesn't do anything to help you learn to PVP... I don't know about other MMO's like WoW . but the guy you quoted might be right when he said that SWTOR is just a super casual game. I feel the same way...

 

Space barbie collectors, hardcore RP and story players .. This is what 90% of the SWTOR playerbase is and a very small % of the remaining 10% plays pvp and an even smaller number plays ranked. It's the truth . and as much as it pains me, they don't focus on the PVP side at all.

 

Even gsf has some kind of intro platform to learn basic things, pvp has nothing of that except the streams that the majority of newbs won't watch cause they have to search for the info themselves.

 

So there we have it. It might have been different when 8 man ranked was alive and you were close to starting a proper season. I wasn't around then so I have no idea.

[TrixxieTriss]

@Snave Interesting points of view.

Maybe things have changed since before mid December as your experiences in regs differs from mine. It might also be a server thing as I know DM has a different pvp culture than SF and SS. Or it could be a time zone thing where most of the clowns login when Im able to play.

 

Your take on ranked 8s was nostalgic to read. I do agree with you that 8s was not pulled because there weren’t enough people. Even on the APAC servers we had enough teams on Dalbora and the guys on the pvp server were going to reroll because Bioware wouldn’t merge us and they didn’t have server transfers then. Then they pulled 8s which killed the APAC pvp server. Sadly Bioware decide it was more economical to save money and lose 3 quarters of the APAC player base by merging us with the US, which put a death nail in all ranked pvp for the APAC player base. The lag, plus the culture shock was huge on both fronts.

 

But back to the present and things are different on the US servers than DM. I’ve tried a few reg games on DM to see for myself and there is a different culture. What works on DM is people seem to want to play as a team and communicate to win. That doesn’t seem to be the case on the US servers. They are as divisive as American society is at the moment.

I wish I could permanently play on the EU servers myself. The culture is closer to what Aussies are used too and similar to what the APAC servers were like.

[Savej]

I've played from launch just about every day. I used to put in at least 1 or 2 hours of pvp on guardians and sentinels (and juggs/maras). That hit a hard stop with 6.0. The balance was worse than ever and the gear impact combined with the amount of required testing of non-intuitive and sometimes hard to get game changing items was a huge headache. Gear has not become about "play your own way" it's "get and use specific items or lose badly". And we're in a situation where you pretty much need the right classes, too - specific classes have much better options and did/do much better than my favs. This hasn't been fun.

 

The changes in 6.2 are good as far as I can see. I like the lockout timer and I'm fine with only getting the quest rewards for winning. Those mean that people will try more and they will focus on objectives more than kill farming. Removing rewards or going back to giving losers and winners similar rewards will bring those issues back in spades. I also like that the most ridiculously problematic huttballs were removed from the qs. The balance changes seem to have fixed the initial problem with shadows/sins but other balance problems are still very apparent (operatives and snipers should have their own queue/wzs where they can play against themselves - my pov).

 

But I don't feel qualified to get into any depth on balance, I haven't played enough pvp lately. Most of what I have done with PVP has been in the non-75 game - that has problems too of course (much higher dps #s for everyone in the lowest bracket is silly) but the premades are less of an issue and my favorite classes still do well without needing massive support and specific matchups.

 

Premades have always been a problem in swtor. I'm pretty sure they're the main reason players quit games early and why queues die. Experienced players who aren't in a premade know they will get spanked horribly and they don't q after they see what they're up against; some of them will join a group but most just won't play. In short order most of the non-grouped players will be the inexperienced players and the disparity between the premade and randoms just increases. The more they are encouraged to win, the more players are going to want to be in a premade. In that way the recent changes have inspired more grouping. But at the same time more grouping ultimately reduces active player counts and hurts the qs. The solution to me is obvious: stop people from grouping for pvp. I would suggest offering a separate q for only those that want to group but I know that q will not pop. The number of premades that sincerely want to fight other premades is very small.

[supertimtaf]

*snip*

 

We're all more or less agreeing with you. I mean... Most of us at least. And gods do I miss the TOFN days... Or simply any days before 5.0 when servers were still somewhat full everywhere.

 

Still, what we need overall is just more players, and better skilled ones at that. But how d'you find that ? How do you make peoples into PvP ? This I would like to have your opinion on that. That's why we're all here after all.

[-Bob-]

I remember ranked 8's being pretty active, server mergers boosted it a little, my guild was always getting matched up with " Hey I'm MVP" and they always stomped us pretty hard. I also remember the never ending preseason and everyone getting bored with it.

[Llacertus]

We're all more or less agreeing with you. I mean... Most of us at least. And gods do I miss the TOFN days... Or simply any days before 5.0 when servers were still somewhat full everywhere.

 

Still, what we need overall is just more players, and better skilled ones at that. But how d'you find that ? How do you make peoples into PvP ? This I would like to have your opinion on that. That's why we're all here after all.

 

I second this. A lot of us newer pvpers don't know anything about the ranked 8v8 days, and it was very eye-opening to read a first-hand account.

[snave]

Your take on ranked 8s was nostalgic to read. I do agree with you that 8s was not pulled because there weren’t enough people.

 

8's was 100% for the reason "not enough people". When I briefly spoke with Charles Boyd in the London cantina I said "bring back 8's" and he replied "no one played 8s". The misconception about population stems from bioware looking at the end of the timeline in a vacuum and not contextually looking at the data whatsoever. This is something I call "pulling a bioware" and it's something they've messed up continuously since launch.

 

Just to clarify this point. If you imagine that no new raiding content was released for 3 years, bioware logic would dictate the reason people aren't playing it is because they don't like the game mode, not that the content drought is the cause.

 

We're all more or less agreeing with you. I mean... Most of us at least. And gods do I miss the TOFN days... Or simply any days before 5.0 when servers were still somewhat full everywhere.

 

Still, what we need overall is just more players, and better skilled ones at that. But how d'you find that ? How do you make peoples into PvP ? This I would like to have your opinion on that. That's why we're all here after all.

 

You create a culture that feeds into the behaviour you desire, you do not "bribe" players and pray they also display the correct behaviours. The behaviour that we want is an increase in not necessarily player ability but the desire for the player to WANT to improve their ability. Rewards in game function much like financial incentives IRL and pretty much every study I've read about motivation / performance relative to financial incentives show the same result - the people will do what gets them the reward REGARDLESS of whether the method used is what the incentive was meant to increase.

 

The changes to the win / loss rewards for me are very good, and necessary. The changes to lockout are also very good and necessary. The goal I would aim for is for players to be motivated to have some agency in their own performance - much like when you first start a brand new MMO - people look for guilds, for friends, for mentors, for rivals. The posts I read here are people looking to get rewards for losing because they don't want to look for guilds, friends, mentors and rivals. It's far easier to blame some in game system than to take ownership so the only option is to create in game systems that force you to.

 

Not to waffle on too much here but asking "how do you make people PvP" is somewhat of a leading question. You could add the RPM mats to regs, make it so you get them even if you lose, and that would certainly make people play regs but you'd just see teams of people trying to lose the fastest way possible in order to obtain the mats.

 

The question should be more along the lines of, "how do we rebuild the pvp infrastructure" and in my opinion that starts by not rewards losers and by punishing leavers.

 

I went into some more ideas on the podcast I linked earlier but a briefer summary would be along the lines of:

 

Displaying unranked rating (before people panic about this I don't mean literal ELO, achievement points, win / loss ratio something like that) so players can at least try to be competitive and held to a standard.

 

Krea thought of making it so guilds can "conquer" warzones, so much like with conquest you can be the conquerors of a planet, the same thing with warzones. So for example you load into a huttball and it displays "blah blah guild grabber of giraddas balls" or whatever fluff you want.

 

Tie performance into conquest results. I'd like to see something along the lines of, queueing in a group from the same guild increases CQ points by X% with points only being rewarded for wins.

 

I'd like to see "unique" rewards for unranked, or even the possibility to earn limited amount of ranked comms from the games, something like "win X games with a guild team" and you get an extra resource grant.

 

I can probably pull more ideas out of my rear end for this but for me the main purpose for any change made is to alter the behaviour and motivational triggers for taking part in pvp, not to simply throw resources at them and hope they stick.

[supertimtaf]

*snip 2, the reckoning*

[...]I can probably pull more ideas out of my rear end for this but for me the main purpose for any change made is to alter the behaviour and motivational triggers for taking part in pvp, not to simply throw resources at them and hope they stick.

 

We're roughly on the same page for this -making peoples interested in playing correctly PvP-, because if 5.0 has taught us anything, it's that you have to be carefull in how you give something to players, else they're just gonna throw games as long as they win rewards. I'm all in for letting the quests and rewards be win-only, but only if you have meaningfull rewards along with it. Because that's how you will have players want to keep playing/winning.

 

There needs to be a much, much bigger focus on what you give to players for playing unranked. Even gear-wise, it's baffling how Bioware expects you to get 306 gear with ranked PvP, and not with unranked. Logic would dictate that you usually gear up to enter ranked, not to enter ranked in order to gear up. That could use change as well.

 

 

On another funny note, I love how accurate your description on how Bioware handles data is. And I hope that Jackie or any community team member stills reads this thread. This is a really good way to depict one of the reasons Bioware is out of touch with its players.

[Aricin]

This is a very common misconception that I believed is just people who weren't there repeating something they were told once.

 

8's was more active than SR and TR combined, even at the very end it was still more active. The reason that 8 participation was on a steady decline was because season 1 hadn't started and many teams decided they'd had enough of "kickballs" and were doing other things until the start of the season.

 

Just so I can explain this to everyone who wasn't around at the time. When server merges where announced there was a guild summit held on teamspeak where approx 30-50 guild leaders discussed which server would be the "PvP" server, TOFN was chosen and everyone migrated there for 8's.

 

The guild I was part of, Reality Check, had 4 SEPARATE 8's teams (5 if you include another one that was made up from players in other teams). That's one guild fielding 32 players in ranked, that's more than there are teams in team ranked now. You mention 4-5 teams playing themselves? That would be substantially more than are active in team ranked now.

 

Much like you see with the year long ranked seasons now, participation drops as time goes on and people are bored / want to do other things. 8's didn't even have a season and when the season was about to begin they removed it from the game. The flaccid line of "oh no one played it" is just patently false, we literally had a forum with multiple guilds with multiple teams ready to start again with season 1.

 

Also if you read my post I specifically say that the permanent return of 8 man ranked would not work / be a good idea.

 

I'd love to see these ranked premades you talk about coming into regs and spoiling it. How on earth do you construct a statement lamenting the death of team ranked then make out hordes of marauding team ranked teams are now running amok in regs, it's laughable.

 

Premades farming kills in regs (as I mentioned on the podcast AND in my post, which I'm guessing you skimmed) isn't inherently a bad thing. DPS and kills creates pressure which is the name of the game in regs, whether you're creating pressure somewhere else on the map by stalling at the enemy node or keeping the enemy team tied up at mid while others try to cap the other objectives, it's pressure in both cases. For sure some premades play like bumholes and over commit but you think replacing them with 100% random players changes that? You think that the people who are damage focused will suddenly be like "yup I'm not going to care about dps anymore"? They'll still do it but they'll do it less effectively because they no longer have support.

 

If YOU don't want to join a premade, if YOU have problems with it, that's cool but I have no idea why people think it would make regs better. Currently the state of the player base is the worst it's ever been, not because of lockouts, not because of rewards, but because the mentality of pvpers has gone from "how do I get better and win" to "gimme gimme gimme I stood in a map for 20 minutes gimme gimme".

 

Unliked ranked there are many guides on reg pvp in this game, many videos, many highlights, many streamers. There are no PvP guilds to help this knowledge flow into the game, there is no PvP infrastructure and that is the root cause for this descent into nonsense.

 

In my experience, regs is as active as ever and since the lockout introduction the quality of games has increased SUBSTANTIALLY. I queue solo most days I stream and prior to the changes I'd completely given up on regs because of the absolute clown fiesta it had become.

 

Most days when I queue up I'll see a couple of different premades (assumptions based on guild tags and coordination rather than concrete proof) and assuming it's not one of the unlucky coin flip stomp games - which they are sometimes and they always will be regardless of premades - the games are now decent with players listening and calling.

 

Making regs solo queue only is not smart, not effective and within a month you'll have the same posters here on the forums saying the same things when they lose. This forum is detached from reality most of the time and really the only reason I post here is so if new players / players interested in PvP are reading they don't get pulled into the fantasy world which exists here where every game is them and 7 random players versus omega Chad premades who somehow simultaneously cause the posters to lose games by farming numbers AND make them unwinnable because they're in a premade. The amount of paradoxes in the arguments made on this forum is truly something to behold.

 

Please dont presume I am new to the game. I played pretty much daily from launch until some point 5.0 then took a break came back some time before 6.0 and been more causal since then. Does that make my opinion more qualified, absolutely not, but also does not taint my eyes with some nostalgia. Pre server merge 8v8 ranked was struggling, and yes there was a stretch after server merges when the pvp population was alive, but that didnt last.

 

Further the was so much open win trading going on in ranked it was disgusting. Go google "swtor win trading" and you get tons of hits from 2012 - 2015 from Devs and content creators. There were boat loads of temporary and permanent bans. Call me a cynic but there is your population decrease of ranked players and combine that with BW lack of interest or ability to proper resolve win trading. In the end it was easier to can the modus.

 

You play SWtoR because you love/like SW and not because it has some great end game - PVE/PVP. There are tons of games that have way more competitive PvP than SWtoR. MMOs and their respective modus live and die by their population. And right now the majority of SWtoRs casual player base has zero incentive to queue for PvP. Those that dip their toe dont hang around to get better whether that is because its not rewarded compared to other modus or whether no body enjoys getting stomped.

 

Dont assume i am saying this because i cant take the heat. If you played at launch you would have had the opportunity to enjoy getting chain stun locked until death. Or even better, back then the matches were lvl 1-50 and the 50 in pvp gear was untouchable and could solo 4-5 guys lvl20-30. Or when "smash" was all the rage and you would literally have 10 jugs/guard in single match because it was the OP flavour of the month.

[Aricin]

Premades have always been a problem in swtor. I'm pretty sure they're the main reason players quit games early and why queues die. Experienced players who aren't in a premade know they will get spanked horribly and they don't q after they see what they're up against; some of them will join a group but most just won't play. In short order most of the non-grouped players will be the inexperienced players and the disparity between the premade and randoms just increases. The more they are encouraged to win, the more players are going to want to be in a premade. In that way the recent changes have inspired more grouping. But at the same time more grouping ultimately reduces active player counts and hurts the qs. The solution to me is obvious: stop people from grouping for pvp. I would suggest offering a separate q for only those that want to group but I know that q will not pop. The number of premades that sincerely want to fight other premades is very small.

 

This sums up my view better than i was able to express it. Specifically your last sentence.

[TrixxieTriss]

8's was 100% for the reason "not enough people". When I briefly spoke with Charles Boyd in the London cantina I said "bring back 8's" and he replied "no one played 8s". The misconception about population stems from bioware looking at the end of the timeline in a vacuum and not contextually looking at the data whatsoever. This is something I call "pulling a bioware" and it's something they've messed up continuously since launch.

 

Just to clarify this point. If you imagine that no new raiding content was released for 3 years, bioware logic would dictate the reason people aren't playing it is because they don't like the game mode, not that the content drought is the cause

 

Sorry, I should have put a time line. Because that’s what I meant by saying it wasn’t because there weren’t enough players.

RememberIng how long pre-season was and people and guilds getting frustrated and just leaving “till the actual season” started. So many were ready to come back and were just taking a break.

It’s like you said in the other post, people even leave ranked now after a few months because seasons go on for too long and they get burnt out or bored.

Bioware should have run one season at least before coming to the conclusion that nobody played it.

[TrixxieTriss]

The number of premades that sincerely want to fight other premades is very small.

 

I’m not sure if that’s true or not these days. I know in the past that wasn’t true for the people I used to premade with. We would actually try and queue sync against other premades so we were premade vs premade. What was even better was if they were our friends or guildies on the other team and we were all in team speak together (I’m showing my age again. Is team speak even around these days?).