Jun 16, 2011

Posted by in Blue Milk & Cereal, Columns | 16 Comments

Blue Milk & Cereal: Should There Be Arena-Style PvP In TOR?

No day would be complete without the breakfast of Jedi: Blue Milk & Cereal.  Every morning, Joanis and the team at Ask A Jedi will get Force-induced thoughts coursing through your head with delicious issues from around the galaxy! Join in the discussion below to make your voice heard!

Arena PvP: some people love it. Some people hate it.  Pitting a small number of combatants head-to-head gives the developers an easier time of balancing player-versus-player combat by minimizing variables.  This small-scale combat can be intense and visceral. However, in a class-based game like an MMO, it can often be frustrating.

For me, arena PvP always turned into a flavor of the month-based game of rock-paper-scissors. Some months, your class will be the best in the game, but after they nerf it, you might as well reroll instead of PvP.  While these are exaggerative statements, when your class is out of favor with developers, it can be extremely difficult to do well in arena-based PvP. One overpowered class doesn’t pull nearly as much weight in large-scale battles like TOR’s Warzones.

Despite all these gameplay complaints based on my own opinion, arena-style PvP does have basis in Star Wars lore.  From the gladiatorial arenas on Geonosis to the one-versus-one battles on Taris in Knights of The Old Republic, small-scale battles have always had their place in Star Wars.

Do you think there should be arena-style PvP in TOR? Or do you think the large-scale battles of TOR’s Warzones capture the heroic battles of Star Wars well enough?

Should TOR feature Arena-style PvP?

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Taris Arena in KoTOR

  1. Yes. Mainly because I enjoy it. I like Open World PvP, but if you need a quick PvP fix then arena style is good, quick and enjoyable- it’s also great in a team.

    Jono

  2. I’m somewhere in between, instinctively I choose no ( but not because it’d feel to much like an ‘esport’), probably because of WoW’s arena. However, in the context (Bioware, Star Wars) I still do think it has the potential to work

    Hard call.

  3. I voted no, but only because in other games pvp is balanced around the arena and not bigger scale PVP. You want a quick fix pvp, queue up for warfronts. But other than that open world lakes, or zones for me.

  4. what about yes, it would feel like an esport? lmao
    BGs don’t feel as competitive as Arena.

  5. I think yes, as long as they don’t try to turn it into a competitive sport beyond the competition the game itself provides. It should also be able to be same faction vs. same faction as well.

  6. Cormeister says:

    I voted yes, but my vote is conditional on one thing. Only if Bioware can figure out a way to balance APvP so that those changes don’t interfere with PvE or Warzone PvP. I felt that Blizzard tried to balance the game around the three types of gameplay that I mentioned, which of course meant that all types of gameplay suffered. PvE Rais especially, lost some really cool, unique abilities all in the name of PvP ‘balance’. The concept of APvP is a really good one and can be quite fun (MMO Deathmatch!) but implementing it at the cost of other parts of the game is not desirable.

  7. LazyBuddha says:

    I voted yes. There is so much they could do with it. Hold tournaments with a prize at the end maybe even put in a gladiator type thing where you can fight a person or NPC foes. Anyways you get the idea. I do think you should be able to place bets on who you think will win.

  8. I voted no but if they can have an arena that is better than WOW and not balance PVP for only arena then I would be for it. However a rated Battleground system would be fun.

  9. Voted No. To much of class balance is effected by other areas of play. To many variables for tuning.

  10. Arena PVP doesn’t have to be with launch. It would be cool to add it a little later on.

  11. DozingDawg says:

    Arenas are part of Star Wars and there for should be part of the game. They should not be a stand alone but part of the story as the have been in the movies and KotOR.

  12. ScreamAndRoar says:

    Arena only becomes a problem when you attach too much importance to it e.g. when it’s the sole source of the best PvP gear.

    Doesn’t sound like that’s going to be the case and Mythic have no history of focusing on Arena that I know about, they’re famous as WPvP guys.

    I would keep it as an underworld thing for credits and maybe some cosmetic stuff although strictly speaking a Jedi would not engage in combat purely for sport.

  13. I voted no. I don’t particularly dislike the concept of arenas, but I think there are some prerequisites and consequences I, personally, wouldn’t like to see in the Old Republic.

    Arenas in WoW have been implemented and very welcome because Blizzard as a company has an enormous rep in e-sports from their starcraft and warcraft strategy titles. It was almost expected of them to provide an e-sport solution within WoW. Bioware as such does not have this prerequisite. None really expect to see SWTOR become a discipline in e-sports.

    Arenas tend to create a certain subgroup of players, which than demand a certain amount of attention from the developers. It becomes a constant struggle to balance classes just so that arenas are fair enough fights and than rest of the game has to live with these changes that are produced by a very small portion of the game. This is basically minority running the experience of majority players.

    I don’t care about seeing either of these two scenarios in TOR.

  14. Sverrir says:

    I voted yes, but i also want to add that this type of combat is already in SWTOR, it shows in the gameplay feature trailer that was released at E3. you can see a sith warrior vs Sith inquisitor on dromund kaas dueling, not accsacly an arena but there were audiences.

  15. No do not put in arena or the pvp will become extremely unbalanced or the classes will not have any unique differences in the long run and then we will have another WoW PvP system and were some players will have to change there class or the spec they love because its under-powered and you wont get anywhere in arena
    we can all agree that star wars is much too amazing to let arena destroy everything that it is about. there are plenty other ways to to get your PvP fix and though arena is fun when playing an overpowered frost dk it will never be that word that blizzard will never understand ; Balanced

  16. Kryssprols says:

    There are 2 problems in PvP in WoW : the consequences of PvP or PvE-focused adjustments for the other aspect of the game and class balancing.

    I think of two possible answers in SWTOR : akin to the companionship system, we could imagine a team of player characters. One would conduct missions in the wild (PvE) while the other one would only do Arena PvP. Or maybe 1 character would share both aspects of the game through flashbacks : in his youth, the player character would have had to fight his way through arenas. The consequences would be that PvP equipment or PvP oriented trees would be useable only in arenas since it pertains to events which happened before the character begins his PvE journey…
    Better arena equipement would be a logical reward but other rewards, would allow the character to gain in status (opportunities of vehicle/spaceship/armor customizations ; account-based objects, titles, vehicles, money) in a sort of retroactive way. (ex : a player gained the right to use a distinctive painting for his character armor in arenas. In the present it appears because a companion found a picture of the characater in his youth wearing this paintings and decided to reproduce them on the character actual armor.

    For the other aspect, since TOR has no heal-only classes, we can easily imagine 1vs1 arenas (same class) to avoid class imbalance in PvP.

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