f13.net

If you liked plains battles in daoc ilum might just be for you. It seems pretty sparsely populated,  but I had real fun today 12 vs 12 or so. Seems like it's steamroller or be steamrollered based on today's experience. I'm not sure if you have to hit an enemy to get points or not.

Lucky you, on my server its a conga line of imps doing circles around the middle point collecting armaments.  Takes about an hour to do the daily.

On my server it's 50 Republic guys killing two Empire guys and then spam emoting their corpse.

Illum is going to be retarded for at least another month or two before it reaches a proper critical mass of population. It was the same at the start of WotLK and Wintergrasp, it was the same at the release of DaoC.


The problem is going to be when you have a bunch of servers with population/participation of like 3:1 in favor of one faction.

It look like your party/ops must be the first to hit and the biggest damage dealer to enemy.

I must say, sometimes when you get these two huge armies of 40+ battling each other for terrain you can clearly see how it would be amazing fun.... if it wasn't for the pathetic performances. It's not a computer thing, we have all sorts of ninja PCs in our guild. It's either the engine or the netcode. Basically, when things are finally about to become amazing, FPS start dropping in the 2 - 5 range, slideshow style.

Disheartening. Unless they manage to pull off something really unexpected tech-wise, open PvP is just fucked. What a damn waste.

There is some sort of pause when someone dies or the area switches. It does seem...odd.

The problem isn't just population balance... it's the lack of fun for the underpopulated side. In wotlk wintergrasp horde outnumbered us, so I frequently had 2-3 stacks of tenacity. We didn't really have a shot at winning (superior numbers win every time over stronger individuals), but it was fun fending off a 1v3 gank and killing 'em all.

In current Ilum my experience as a tank is... "spam aoe taunts and maybe mortar volley / other long range aoes from a distance, or instantly die to the much larger empire zerg". I often still die before my smaller group gets a kill as Ilum slows my FPS to a crawl and don't really have any ways to kite or escape a zerg unlike stealthers / casters. As soon as I die I stop getting credit for kills. In summary I do a lot of corpse runs and kiting / running away to MAYBE get a kill or two before dying? Eh, I'd rather level an alt.

I finally tried this last night. It pretty much blows unless it's close to even sides and there's more than 3-4 on each side. Otherwise it's just one side or the other circling around getting armaments in a totally grindy and dull way that is livened by the occasional fool on the other side volunteering to be chum for the sharks. I know this is generally true for world PvP but this is an especially bad case of it. If they put armaments at all three assault areas, that might complicate and spread out patterns of player movement. When there start being 100-200 +  bored level 50s on servers this is just flat out not going to work.

No. Half will log in Alts to be farmed in a dark corner.

Want the truth? A lot of players on the PvP servers are just rerolling Empire to stop the crap. They don't care about winning easy, as long as they don't lose easy.

So thing are only gonna get worse, never better.

Ilum needs to be implemented like Wintergrasp.  A battle every 30min with a set population. 

Beyond that, MMO players have shown that they crap in sandboxes and don't deserve them.

I don't think so. I've been solo in a bunch of furrballs and gotten points. How much you get for a solo kill I dont know as I haven't gotten one but I've gotten anywhere from 50 -200 valour from a partial. It didn't seem to change much when I was in an ops grp. Sometimes however I didn't get any points when I did hit them but I just put that down to bugs.

I tried this some yesterday, and I won't be going back unless they change something.  Circling around hoping to be lucky enough to grab a crate spawn, and occassionally having 5 seconds of a fight as someone wanders in is just plain not fun.  I'd rather just take even longer to gear up for PvP.  Maybe if you shared credit for crates in an ops group I'd go to get the daily done, but it was just not fun at all. 

Sharing credit in an ops group would be such a basic, simple change (maybe plus a faster respawn relative to the number of players in the central area) that would help a lot. It would create an incentive to be grouped up, etc.--the pace now is agonizing and boring and is yet another reason to just hate the whole level 50 experience.

The whole expertise stat seems pants on head to me. Why give a 20% advantage to someone?

Course I just respec'd my agent into the I win button spec.

The whole pvp stat thing was introduced by WoW in order to separate pvp and pve gear, without it you either have raiders dominating with their gear or having to pvp for upgrades depending on where the superior gear comes from.  That 20%  advantage would be there regardless, expertise just makes it apply to pvp only.

The way to avoid the source of this particular problem seems beyond obvious.

It's not pants on head. it's the only way to give awesome items for pvp to pvp players without allowing them into raids and high level pve content, which makes sense. In fact, what I hate is the opposite. Top tier pve items are better (even considering the expertise they don't have) than pvp stuff, and it's questionable but possible that they are all around better than the top tier pvp items in pvp, factually making up for that expertise 20% missing. Which is pants on head.

If you don't want someone to pvp his/her way into top pve results, you shouldn't allow people to pve their way into top pvp results.

Yeah some of the pve set bonuses beat out whatever bonus you lose from expertise, they should just make the set bonuses the same.

It's pants on head when you consider that, while NPC foozles don't care when they get facerolled by AWESOME PURPZ, the players strangely enough do. The very concept of "awesome items" plain doesn't make sense in this context, if you buy into PvPer's claims that all they really want is a challenge and a level playing field.

Whether that gear can be then also used for something else is secondary. And even then the whole "someone could pvp his/her way into top pve results and/or vice versa" aspect is ... yeah, what a terrible and game wrecking thought. Does anyone but the poopsockers really care?

Ok, so you don't like the genre, what does expertise have to do with it? might as well be against aim or crit while you are at it.  Everyone cares, getting better gear is basically what MMOs are about, some people want it for pve and some for pvp and it's better to keep the progression separated.  It's not complicated.

Remind me again how a 20% expertise item is less stupid than a DAoC ToA artifact?

Gear progression works in pve because you progress to harder pve. Gear progression in pvp would only make sense if you weren't still facerolling the brand new level 50s.

If pvp gear were basically the same as pve gear and had no expertise - so pvp people could raid in it - why is that bad?

And vice versa for pve gear?

The level playing field is supposed to come in when Raiders PVP in their gear.  The problem is nobody's sat back and reexamined everything and has, instead, blindly followed WOW's lead - which is 1) game-specific and 2) very flawed.  In some cases following the market leader is exactly the WRONG approach, and this is one of them.

The original concept behind PVP gear was to let everyone compete on a level playing field.  Dedicated PVPers were getting curbstomped by PVE raiders in the pre-BC days.  PVP players bitched very loudly - and rightly so - that their experience was getting fucked-over because they didn't want to raid, just PVP.  So Blizzard introduced the Arena & honor system to get PVP gear in the BC era.  Great, right!?  

No. Now there was an "Easy" way to get raid-level items. Lose 10 arenas a week you still got rewarded with points with which you could buy gear.  Gear that was, in some cases, best in slot.  Meaning raiders "Had" to PVP to get the best items because that does matter to raid success.  

Honor points for lesser gear (BGs) meant you got rewarded for standing around AFK in BGs for enough points to get gear.  This was often a better choice than the Heroic Dungeons that were a nightmare to run for casuals.  Ooops.

Kneejerk response: Resilience!  Now PVP gear was less useful for PVE because chunks of the stat budget were used on a PVE-Usless stat and the lack of a survival stat in PVP meant your ultra-high-end PVE gear would give you SOME advantage in superior DPS but your survivability was in the shitter.  A fucked but acceptable middle ground.

Neither would have been required IF Blizzard had simply rewarded points differently. The way they said they couldn't track but TOR does.  Y'know: Defense points, kill points, goal points, damage-marks, Heal-marks, etc., instead of the "All or nothing"  system for win-loss Blizzard uses.   That way a good player on a shitty team still gets bonus rewards per match in addition to the win/ loss of the match.

However, because BW/EA hasn't stepped-back and examined the whole history and the WHY's they just copied the result.  So; fucked-up dual-loot system.  There's no reason for it, I agree.  A PVP player and a PVE player in TOR should be able to get the same gear via different methods.  Either will take a long time and the medal system means if someone's AFKing their way to loot it's going to be a damn long grind. (And longer still if they'd implement a proper /reportafk system.)


It's not: see above for reasons done.

I'm sorry but the idea that tor is somehow different than wow is patently ridiculous.  It is the exact same game and if they tried the same thing wow already did it would fail as miserably here as it did there.  A pvp stat is a necessity.  And if you are against item progression in MMOs then just give it up, you lost the war about a decade ago.

Isn't that operating under presumption that pvp stat isn't just another fail as well, which requires to pretty much ignore the complaints people bring against it?

Just because WoW currently does it this way doesn't mean that's a necessity. Blizzard's ways to tackle the problems aren't perfect nor often even good, as evidenced by the very fact they routinely abandon them for other solutions in hope these work out better.

What problems exactly? You can't give pvers and pvpers the same exact gear because they are two completely different activities that are impossible to balance against one another, the whole "20% advantage" thing is simply not understand that the advantage would be there regardless of whether there was a pvp stat or not.  The only two things people seem to be suggesting here are a)not having a pvp stat at all which is obviously retarded and doesn't work and b) getting rid of gear progression which is like getting rid guns in an fps.  It's not a perfect system, but anyone who played mmos before a pvp stat and is arguing to go back to that is simply wrong.

I'd say the way i see it, neither would have been also required if Blizzard directly tackled the core problem -- and that is people getting curbstomped due to the gear advantage.

It could be as simple as scaling down the range of attributes provided by the gear while in PvP situations -- which is, when you think about it, merely another aspect of what the game already does to the player's stats when it attempts to work around up to 40 levels of difference.

That is, once again, ignoring WHY there is a PVP stat.

So long as BW/EA doesn't get a hair up their ass about raiding in the same manner Blizz does, it's not a problem.  "Wah.. my players are skipping my dungeons and PVPing for gear instead."  So? They're still playing the game, that's the most important part, not massaging the egos of your devs.

IF they're skipping one in major favor of the other it's a design problem, not a user problem.  Same as all other instances in life where people circumvent or subvert designer intent.

The design problem IS interchangeable gear.  If players are pvping not because they want too but because they need the gear to raid that is a problem, if they are raiding not because they enjoy it but because they need the gear to not get raped in warzones that is a problem.  Separating the gear lets players focus on what they actually WANT to do rather than what they feel they must.  It has absolutely nothing to do with massaging the egos of your devs or skipping content, it makes total sense to not force players into something they don't want to do in order to compete in their preferred playstyle.

PvE: players help each other with heals and buffs, and deal damage/cc to the targets they intend to kill.
PvP: completely different.

with this nonsense out of the way -- the gear simply improves character's performance in these areas. Regarding balance, i take it that by "balance" you mean that a damage/heal output/survability bonus given to the item for PvE purpose could be considered too large/whatever when used in PvP situations. That can be true, but note the games already deal with this issue, and the way they do it is through modification of how the same skill works differently when used for PvE and PvP.... instead of giving you two entirely separate sets of skills and expecting you to swap your skillbars every time you intend to switch between these two experiences.

They do it this way because the latter approach would be obviously retarded and cumbersome; yet when it comes to the equipment you're willing to accept it blindly, and claim it's a necessity. But it's not.

No, the whole "20% advantage" this is there because some people suggest it's pants on head retarded to give that large advantage gap (especially when it's applied to multiple areas, resulting in the overall gap few times larger) for combat situations where the targets are other players; who don't enjoy being pitted in combat against enemies that can kill them with 100% certainty and without any risk thanks to said gear advantage, that outweights anything else brought to the table.

In other words, where you say "it would be there anyway" the counterpoint is "and that's the stupid part, it shouldnt' be there". Mind you, it is not argument against having "gear progression" at all, but rather against that progression being implemented in a way that negatively affects the experience, to the point where it appears to outweight its positives.

You are not serious with this idiocy are you? Hai guys RTS and FPS are exactly the same because you press buttons!

There is no problem of interchangeable gear here. There is instead two underlying, separate problems -- one is people getting raped in warzones as result of gear disadvantage. The other is disparity in difficulty of obtaining the gear between PvE and PvP.

Making separate sets of gear isn't really addressing either of these problems, but is just a kneejerk reaction to the ways player devise on their own when they try to deal with them.

It addresses the problem of players being forced to do something they don't enjoy in order to compete in the thing they do, and it works perfectly at that. 

Bad analogy is bad.

RTS and FPS are different genres. Single player FPS and multiplayer FPS are not.

Now, which FPS was it that had the bots so good they could kick people's asses in single player just as good as people in a PvP match? one of older Unreal Tournaments, iirc?

That's not addressing the problem; that's breaking the thermometer because it shows you have a fever.

(the players with gear disadvantage still get raped in PvP, and the difficulty of obtaining the gear in PvE remains unchanged)

Yes, players with inferior gear get raped in pvp that's why you want to get the better pvp gear.  Yes, raids are hard, thats why you want to get the better raid gear.  I feel like i'm arguing with someone who's never played an MMO before. 

And here i thought the "cockstabbing is necessary part of the design to keep the player playing" was also an idea we got over some years ago.

Funny how no mmos except wow have needed the pvp stat as a crutch.

The two games i've played since WoW came out (rift, DCUO)  both had a pvp stat.  Well the two that didn't implode before the whole thing became an issue anyways.

The cockstabbing depends entirely on how hard that gear is to get, not in having the gear progression itself.

Well no kidding, you either have the cockstabbing or you don't. If you don't and the gear is not hard to get then there's a good chance your players won't be putting up with getting raped and teabagged in PvP just so they can get some equipment for raiding. And then hey, suddenly there's no need for silly hacks like pvp stat. Who would've thought?

Yes there is, one method is always going to be easier than the other there is no way to make them absolutely equal and players are going to feel like they are being forced to take the easier method every time.  When you have a problem of players being forced to do something they don't want "but only for a little while" is not a solution.

Do you see SWTOR players uniformly participate in either PvP or PvE only while they level up, to get their gear? It is after all identical equipment from both sources, without any "pvp stat" on it. And since there "must" be always the easier way and the players "must" follow it whether they like it or not, the behaviour you describe should be clearly present, right?

Just as alternative theory, the difficulty of both routes --while never absolutely equal-- can be brought close enough the players' own preference for either PvE or PvP may actually have impact on which activity they ultimately choose. And when that's not the case then it's a sign of actual, mentioned earlier, problem. I.e. the sign one of the ways to obtain gear is considerably harder than the other. To the point where this difference may outweight personal preferences.

This isn't unlike the PvP class balance, in a way -- when you see everyone play sorcerers, something is amiss. And the devs are generally expected to address it through buffs/nerfs to individual classes to bring them closer to one another, not through a patch that makes the sorcerers only playable on the map for Huttball (or say, on Thursdays) Even though that would be also a "solution" to the issue.

No, their goal is leveling not gearing up.


Or they can just simply separate the gear into pvp and pve which works perfectly instead of trying to balance two completely different playstyles.  I simply do not get why having separate progression paths for pvp and pve is in any way shape or form a problem in any way.  You are asking for incredibly complicated solutions to something thats already been solved.

Again, it's not really a (big) problem itself; it's just a "solution" that doesn't fix the actual, underlying issues, but if anything makes these issues worse.

The "incredibly complicated solutions" i'm asking for (which in large part aren't different from what the game already does with the player's stats) are to address these.

edit:

Leveling is also possible through both PvE and PvP. If the players indeed feel that they must only use the easiest available route and it's never possible to make the routes similarly appealing to them, they should uniformly flock to single leveling approach, leaving the other unused.

Gear progression warping PvP is something I consider an "intended fault" of MMOs. They motivate people to get gear by allowing them to own or get owned.

Having a PvP stat on gear was a good solution. It allowed some mismatch between PvE and PvP mechanics to be addressed. In WoW the fact that DPS was too high and players too fragile. It changed the delicate balancing between two play-styles for which had the easiest path to the carrot, or forced people to engage in a play-style they didn't want, into two separate paths of progression each with their own reward which extends longevity / grind of the game.

DAOC solved this problem like 10 years ago people, with stat caps. Of course that was before they turned around and broke it again themselves.

Aside from stat caps, Daoc pre-ToA still had gear progression - but through interesting procs or adding to stats you haven't capped because they have only marginal utility.

Key thing here was diminishing returns, the difference between the various sources of gear was aesthetics and one or two percent. The differences in swtor are much larger, which encourages designers to use easy design crutches rather than solve problems.

People keep boldly stating that end gamers will do anything for 1 or 2 percent. The evidence from diminishing returns games says not. End gamers will do anything for the 10 or 20 percent on offer from each tier in games like wow that have exponential returns, but that is both a rational and avoidable reaction.

DaoC pre-ToA also had the added benefits of it's spellcrafting system and the fact NOTHING was BoP/BoE. Pre-ToA there was no 'B' at all.


You could and would very much actually finish gearing up in DaoC.


Until they broke it with ToA of course.  :why_so_serious:

It was of course broken pre-TOA for hybrids, but hey. SWTOR doesn't *have* those so it would be pretty much perfect for this system.

Like a full suit was saving your thane either way.

My understanding is that DoaC didn't have to worry about protecting PvE progression because there wasn't any... until TOA.

The only progressing was getting to level 50 and grinding crafting to a point where it was useful.  ToA was just pants-on-head stupid.  Leveling gear on a specific mob at a specific time in a specific area?  Right.  And the gear use abilities were overpowered to the point that they became a necessity.  The popularity of the Classic rules servers generated a brief area of renewed life for the game showing just how little most players wanted to PvE for their PvP fun. 

Shame that the lessons of the past seem lost on many developers.  If someone could couple the strategy of DAoC with the fun of WoW, we'd have a very enjoyable pvp mmo. 

Daoc had gear progression. It went DF-Epic-Spellcrafting-SIepicdungeon. Dragon gear fitted in somewhere as well.

The point is, it didn't consume the game in it's infinite maw because higher tiers were slightly better, not orders of magnitude better.

Why are there stats in PvP at all?  Why is this such a hard solution?

Baseline it.  Allow stat trade-offs if you want to get fancy.  That's it.  Everyone shares the same stat pool.

Give nifty toys, lateral upgrades, and fancy looking gear.  Everyone wins.

If they remove expertise, raiders will destroy everyone with Rikata gear.  The point as I see it is to separate the pvp grind from the pve grind.  I'm already seeing people forgo pvp gear using raid gear and they are doing absurd damage.  The benefit of expertise is that it gives you more dps and you take less damage from players.  I'd much prefer that it act as a damage reduction only, but that's just me.  People are already dying too fast in pvp. 

I do not believe the majority of PvPers want a level playing field. They want the arbitrary stats = skill. No offense, but I suspect in the RPG world, not many will participate in PvP unless gear = win. This is not RTS or FPS. Keeping them quarantined in a progression all by itself is likely the safest option.

You're correct.  Most people in pvp are terrible and will only continue to serve as sheep if they perceive that the gear grind will make them more competitive.  What results is a system where the better players still dominate, but the established bad players now have a chance to beat the new bad players.  I didn't realize just how terrible most players were at pvp until I started playing my shadow more.  I laugh out loud every time someone runs away while I repeatedly backstab them for 4k.

Right, but if you don't have the gear for dungeon level 20, you do dungeon level 4 or whatever you're geared for.  Level 4 dungeons don't throw level 20 mobs at you, but mmo pvp areas will allow this type of disparity.

What gear represents in this context is "I play more than other people, and so should be better than other people". E.g., it's the same stupid design pit that all MMOs have been wallowing in since the first DIKU was launched: the people with the most surplus time get the most power. It's not just PvP, it's PvE too, since most boss fights are elaborate choreographies that you master the same way you mastered what to do when playing Dragon's Lair on a coin-op machine: with quarters, time and memorization.

If PvP was twitch, and PvE was against AIs that didn't have a choreographed routine but instead had a more random or unpredictable repertoire of behaviors and tactics, most old-school MMO players would quit in a heartbeat. I happen to think there might be another group of potential players who would be attracted to that design, maybe enough to compensate for the loss or even grow the player base, but for the moment, poopsockers and poopsock designers continue to be trapped in a horrible, co-dependent relationship.

I agree.  Playing more SHOULD make you better just by virtue of practice.  Why should the more practiced players also have the benefit of a gear boost?  It makes no sense to me beyond the fact that MANY MANY MMO gamers play the game for loot rather than fun or challenge.

Give me mounts, titles, appearance gear, or maybe a self heal or additional purge.  Maybe ship mods or something for my companion... crafting recipes? Anything.

No, I mean I enter naked or dressed to the nines and I have the same stats as the next guy.  Gear shouldn't matter at all in PvP.

Giving everyone a standardized set of gear would be wonderful... assuming the classes were balanced.  That's the other issue.  

There's a disconnect here because we have two different types of people. Some want an (old school) FPS-like even playing field competition in PVP, while others see gear progression as a core part of the MMO experience. The problem with the first idea is that it would reveal very quickly who was good at the game and who was not; after the keyboard turners got wrecked a few times they'd just stop queuing. Of course, the goal of SWTOR isn't to be an eSport so excluding a large segment of your customers from something they may enjoy because they happen to suck at it is pretty stupid; imagine if all of the raiding content was as hard as Algalon, Sinestra, HM Rag, etc. and the devs just told the raiding community to L2P.

Allowing gear progression in PVP is key because it lets people know that they can get better if they just keep at it. Using a PVP stat keeps the two progression tiers (raiding and PVP) reasonably separate, so players never have to debate if it'd be easier to do one to gear up for the other. SWTOR is, at it's heart, a WoW clone so expecting something vastly different is unreasonable.

I agree with your first statement, and won't heavily argue the second, but SWTOR is not that game. It was never pitched as the challenging, eSport, new MMO revolution; it's WoW in space. You guys are barking up the wrong tree here.

I wasn't expecting anything different.  Just commenting about those that did.

Which is what DaoC did in a round about way, while still giving the people their skinner box (thats what it's called right?) fix if they wanted it.




The thing with pre-toa DaoC gear progression, it wasn't BETTER gear, it was WIDER, if that makes sense. Like an Item from the Shrouded Isles expansion (the one before ToA) made it EASIER to hit the caps, but you still couldn't break them. It just meant you only had to buy one fancy jewelry slot item instead of two.

Like in Swtor, my secondary stats are about the same as the top end PvP/PvE gear, except the top end tier gear has another like +40-60 aim/endurance per piece. That's like an extra 2000 hit points if I collected the new suit. It's pure inflation.

DaoC didn't have that (till ToA again). Once you hit the stamina cap in DaoC, that was it, no more for you. All the stats, all the resists and etc had hard caps. If you were on a budget, you could let a few resists slide, because of how the cross realm damage tables worked out, it wasn't the end of the world.

Excellent point.  Once you hit the stat caps, the only thing gear did was grant special abilities that had to be managed. 

DAoC did a lot wrong but more right.  Shame those lessons haven't moved forward. 

We had a jugg with 10k hps and the opposing team had one with 20k hps. We lost.

They really need to introduce a crafted PvP set/mods into the game so folks can walk into pvp with at least some baseline expertise. When I cue for random BG's and see 6 folks coming in with 10-12k hp I just groan because I know it is going to be a longggggg match.  I don't begrudge them though, they really have no other option.

What I despise is folks who give up the second they get 2 capped in Alderaan or get a goal scored against them in huttball.  I see that behavior a lot and it is pretty douchetastic.  The one nice thing about server-only BG's is you can identify and call out that behavior pretty easily.  You can also talk to folks on the other side in if you are playing same faction huttball which leads to some funny exchanges between folks who were your best friend last game and are now out for your blood.  There is one marauder and one operative in particular who are my best friend when we are teamed together but are totally after my blood when we are on opposite sides.  It's actually kind of cool because you really can develop friendly rivalries.

Unfortunately, mmo has infected previously level playing fields, so the chances of seeing that in mmo is nil.

I like to pvp enough to remember why I don't pvp in gear imbalanced games.

I totally go after stealthers when I'm against them. Or the person I know will complain the most. Or the person who will melt.

Or <Slap in the Force>  :grin:

Well duh!

I realized Nebu might have stated a fallacy earlier. The two piece bonuses on the pvp and dungeon armor are different. So you might want two pvp pieces if you raid and you might want the dungeon pieces if you pvp. So they made another decision people should bitch about.

Man, I might be done with this whole game after tonight. I'm on a server with a 4-1 imbalance in favor of Imps. For whatever reason, tonight, they were fielding full Battlemaster-geared toons everywhere. Warzones were like that too. In Ilum, they had us outnumber at all times and generally outgeared. Just pointless, dull, unfun in the most excrutiating way, and yet, you can't not do it if you have any hope of ever being able to do it. The only brief moments where fun broke out was when it was Republic v. Republic in Huttball. In the meantime, I don't much enjoy the Hard  Mode Flashpoints either. I think it's time to see a bit more story via alts and then it's over and out.

Welcome to the club.  :awesome_for_real:

The pop imbalance is especially bad if there are only enough pvpers on your side queuing to field enough people for one WZ... then you'll get to enjoy being outnumbered due to people randomly leaving / not taking the queue as well while facing battlemaster premades from pvp guilds. Fun for the whole family!

The only 'solution' is to queue with a premade yourself - I have yet to lose a game when queued with 3 other pvpers in a balanced group, even without voice comms. Having 4 somewhat-geared people in a WZ who know how objectives work is a half-win by itself... especially in huttball (where the weaker side can win if they use their CC and pulls/jumps/knockbacks well).

I picked empire thinking we'd be outnumbered but with the better pvpers, as it tends to happen in most games.  Silly me.

I had a hard time getting this whiny bitch in my ex-guild to understand why this is a bad design (I dropped out after this convo) even if they were to impose pop caps in Ilum. I was like, look: either a) we're getting rofflestomped because there are way more of them, and when they rofflestomp us they gear up far faster and then it's like a positive feedback loop, the imbalance gets worse and worse and worse and more and more difficult to correct unless there are enough ridiculous masochists willing to endure weeks of dying every ten seconds to earn points at a minimum rate or b) you impose pop caps in Ilum and then Empire has very long queues and they get frustrated and quit. He was like, "So what's the problem if they get frustrated and quit? Ok by me!"  Yeah, sure, it's tons of fun to circle around on your little scooter clicking on boxes all night.

No, allowing gear progression means you have a game where only a handful of people will play, and it will stagnate as those who don't devote their entire game time to it walk away.

It takes a very special person to accept being kicked in the balls / punched in the taco over and over to reach an 'acceptable' level of possibly, maybe winning.  All it does is punish the undergeared person and their entire team.  Every match that person is in they are a liability.  Further, they're completely ineffective, if not dead too quickly, to be able to learn enough to improve their skills.  They have to reach the baseline before to begin matching people who have had all that time to learn.

It's nothing more than a Korean grindfest mentality applied to PvP.  And using WoW as a defense is silly, as it's probably their worst system consistently across expansions.

The entire theory that gear progression tempts weaker players to try to earn the advantage relies on your weaker players being total retards who somehow do not realise that the better players will also be progressing their gear. An in an exponential power gain system like SWToR or WoW, the practical power difference will never change significantly. This isn't like EVE or DAoC where as progression continues, the advantage is eroded.

This is like that time your five year old kid brother says 'in five years time I'll be older than you!'.

One thing to remember: PvP gear allows non-raiders a viable method to access "end-game" gear.  It's an amazing grind, but it can be done.  It's not even that amazing of a grind, I am valor rank 43 after about 3 weeks of PvP playing a few hours in the evenings and on weekends, mostly just to do my dailies.  Since there were battlemaster's literally 2 weeks out in the game I imagine another month of consistent play and I will be a battlemaster.  I already have a complete set of champion gear save for my helm so I am going to start investing in battlemaster bags so when I hit 60 I will probably have a lot of the battlemaster set.  Even in full champion gear (which is dead easy to get with weeklies) I don't feel underpowered.

This.  My entire guild had full champion sets before trying most of the hardmode flashpoints.  It's a nice alternative gearing mechanism and the gear is decent enough that you don't have to lug two sets of gear around.  Which reminds me of a new peeve I need to post in the other thread... a gear switch tab/macro!

Battlemaster bags are unique - you cant even store one in cargo and pick one for personal bags.

Yes.  So enjoy having 6 pairs of champion boots in the meantime.

Well crap.  :heartbreak:  That puts a kink into my clever plan.

I don't care if PvP offers a method to get gear for PvE (equivalent preferably, not best-in-slot, but if content is doable without it doesn't really concern me).  I only care if PvP offers gear which impacts relative PvP power.

1) If I enter a PvP match as a newbie will I be curbstomped? (y/n)

2) Is it mostly because of gear disparity (y/n)

If (1) yes and (2) yes, then your PvP is shit.  That's all the thought most people put into whether they like PvP or not.  Nothing else matters until you get past (2).

But don't you guys get the pvp stat on that gear was put there to prevent this exact sort of behaviour, and ensure you do your PvE progression properly through the PvE, so no one gets butthurt :why_so_serious:

Columi gear is essentially identical to Champion pvp gear with expertise substituted for either surge, power, alacrity, or crit.  This means that pvp gear works fine for pve, but that pve gear will be slightly better on the same tier.  Also the set bonuses vary (pvp set bonuses target pvp utility)

I had a nearly orgasmic experience today in ilum.

I completed my weekly in about an hour or two having twenty vs twenty fights. It brought back some of the best field fights I had in daoc. It was glorious.

Actually there is a cap (best in tier gear) and the developer can control how easy that is to reach, how long it remains, and how much progress the loser can make towards it. If there is some progression even for bad players on losing teams, and the cap is not ever changing, then the system works. The hardcore PvP people tend to hate it though as they like the imbalance, and always want more carrots to chase, so they'll complain about it lacking challenge, being rewarded for "face-rolling" and lack of incentive when a large part of what they dislike is people catching up to them. Which only becomes an issue if the developer gets sucked into their version of the story.

Eve is not a good example of eroding advantage, given there's groups blobbing around in ships that take years to acquire and represent hundreds to thousands of dollars of real world wealth.

Really PvP gear should be hopeless for PvE, superior for PvP, and have a reasonable ceiling to achieve. Everyone reaches the plateau, some fast and some slower, and then you have balanced (outside of class issues) PvP with no contagion between play styles.

Yeah, that sounds like my one good time there too. Just great. And then there's about fifteen times roughly as fun as getting a colonscopy.

I think weekly reset the next few weeks will be the best.

Yeah we had some great fights too (although they were laggy as all hell).  I did go from Valor rank 43 to 46 in about 2 hours, so that was nice....