Mar 5, 2012

Posted by in News | 3 Comments

PVP Panel Discussion and Q&A!

Lady R has again come through with some extensive notes for the PVP-minded out there.

Warzones
  • Warzones are extremely popular. More than 50%of players play warzones daily.
  • Concerns about faction imbalance on servers
  • No ability to queue for specific warzones
  • Players going afk and leaving
  • New warzone in 1.2, Novare Coast, going to involve same faction vs same faction gameplay. Majority control-type objective. Need 2/3 shield control to be able to damage the objective. It’s been tested really well, we look forward to getting player feedback on it as well.
  • Ranked PvP – will be added in 1.2. We do know this is something people have wanted. Players will be able to queue up solo or as part of a group up to 8. Wins and losses will adjust their ranking.
  • 1.2 wil also introduce new warzone dailies. Daily missions will require winning a certain number of medals rather than wins. Winning and losing both award medals. Removes incentives to quit early. Going to be introducing a lot more medals – scoring in Huttball, catching the ball, being the first to do things.
  • 18 new medals – including objective based. We don’t want people to be farming medals. More medals for completing a warzone faster. Medal rewards will be capped to prevent farming. You will get cumulative medals – so for instance if there is a medal for completing a warzone in 10 minutes and 5 minutes and you complete in 5 minutes, you will earn both medals. Goal is to encourage people to win matches quickly rather than dragging them out.
  • Vote to Kick – players can vote inactive players out of a warzone. (Much applause.) We are working on ways to watch whether people are truly AFK and not being voted out based on levels, etc – measures to prevent abuse.
  • 1.2 – New tier of PVP gear, War Hero. Greater set difference from PvE gear, we want to reduce the amount of cross-over between PvP and PvE gear. More leaning on expertise, more stats that are PvP focused.
  • New lightsaber colors with new gear. Also new PvP crafting, including expertise crystals. Also going to add entry-level PvP gear available for purchase with credits, to help players bridge the gap entering PvP. Gap is currently wider than intended.
  • Existing Warzones will allow same faction vs same faction matches, to create “training mode” scenarios.
  • New map changes and voiceover to introduce these training mode scenarios, will help reduce repeated Huttball on some servers.
  • Cross-zone Warzone queuing – will lead to more level bracketing, future possibility of bracketed tournament. Will include ability to choose a specific warzone.
  • 8 person team queuing will also be released sometime between 1.2 and 1.3.
Open World PvP
  • Current state of open world PvP – we know that this is significantly less popular than warzones. Level 50 characters play warzones 3 times more than Ilum PvP.
  • Ilum has some problems.
  • Outlaw’s Den seeing some great gaming.
  • 1.2 – We’re going back to the drawing board with Ilum. (Applause) We were a bit too ambitious, ran into vartious technical difficulties, trying to pull it out for now and trying to de-incentivize it a bit to try and get back to where we wanted to with Ilum, want it to be more engaging and fun. We want balancing measures between fighting factions, certain incentives for key targets, and that isn’t in there and we’re fully aware of it.
  • Removing Ilum PvP quest.
  • Rewards are being moved to warzones, adding new War Hero tier gear to warzones, less randomness from rewards for PvP progression.
  • More details on the Ilum redesign will be provided later in the year, but please continue posting your feedback in the forums – devs still tracking and listening to that closely.
  • Minor changes to Outlaw’s Den, working on the ability to travel there quickly. Leaving it as a PvP sandbox (pun intended)

Additional PvP concerns

  • Mirror class imbalances, speed hacking and exploiting – customer service takes appropriate action on all confirmed cases. Multiple teams working on detection and prevention.
Discussion topics

What do you think about warzone rankings?
What are your thoughts on Novare Coast
What design coniderations should be made for the Ilum redesign?

Question and Answer

Are there going to be any warzones where it will be PuG only and not pre-made teams?

As it exists right now, it does make an effort to match group vs group. When we get cross-over queuing, that will make it more prevalent that it group vs group and solo vs solo. What it tries to do now is one group on each side and then fill the rest with solo, but it depends on who all queues.


With the changes to PVP gear coming, will you also be changing the DR on expertise?

All the stat caps have been rebalanced following the introduction of the tier, so yes.


What is causing the response time issues?

Few causes. We’ve done internal testing, and some of the issues don’t show until you’re live with the Hero engine. Some of the things we have found is optimization with the ambiance in the area, including walkers, turrets, etc.


Will there be a return to battling over objectives in PvP?

Had to step back from initial plans with Ilum where objectives temporarily locked as in beta, they became permanently locked. Instead, in live trading was happening and we weren’t able to react in time to that – however we still haven’t been able to solve the locking issue. So that’s still the goal, but had to do death-based objectives until we can get that resolved.

Goal is to have it ultimately be objective focused.


Allies and Adversaries – Do you see any functionality being added where we can use this more in game? Also, will there ever be a bounty system in game?

Bounties – the PVP team would love to have a bounty-type system. We can’t give a definitive timeline on it, but it’s something we want to see in the game as well.

Adversary – it’s on the Wall of Crazy. There is a roadmap there, but not there yet – some time in the future.

Warzone challenges – ability to directly challenge another 8m team in a warzone, we want to add it but not in for 1.2.


How will you address commendation issue where Battlemasters have to complete daily quests for gear?

With 1.2, ranked warzones will reward commendations directly, rating will allow you to get different colored gear – direct purchase.


How will I manage a large PVP guild when there is only 8m content?

It’s not that we want to only do 8m content, we want to do large warzones, but right now 8m is what we have.


Is the current valor system going away with the new system? What will we be doing in terms of guild vs guild PVP?

Grouping up for ranked warzones up to 8m currently, we do want to do larger groups in the future.


Targeting in PvP, can’t tab-target, no name plates, will there be any updates for that?

Tab targeting improvements are in the words, smarter tab targeting, etc, clickable nameplates is something we want to do but don’t have in yet. We do want to work on these things though to improve ease of combat in PvP.

In PvP, we’re continuing to do animation updates, polish, enhancements, and you will see these things continue to get better and improve. Autofacing in PvP, not likely. The problem is, if you add in autofacing, then it’s just a competition of who has a better rotation.


How will you earn best in slot gear in PvP? Crafting, earning?

Best in slot will be from ranked warzones. Zoeller qualifies – since you are now able to retract every mod from your item and crafters can crit orange gear with an additional augment slot. There will be an upgrade option to RE and upgrade orange items so you don’t have to step away from having that awesome new tier of gear and not the look you want. There is a second option of getting gear which is buying it from a crafter.


Defense and shield is strong in PvE content, but nearly useless in PvP. Will those stats be improved in PvP gear, or will they be removed?

Interesting perception is that if you give up defense for damage, this is really good. This is not entirely true though – as a tank, you are vulnerable against certain attacks and if you give up all your defense gear, you’re making yourself vulnerable to the highest damage classes in the game like Sentinel and Sniper. So you’ll be vulnerable to multiple classes. When we get into ranked PvP and players play more aggressively, you won’t be able to get away with getting rid of defense.


Are there plans to add more PvP daily quests?

1.2, your end-game PvP gear is not limited by the daily, so you can continue to earn warzone commendations. Focus on dailies is going away.


Dynamic Events – are they going to focus on PvP or PvE? We’d like to see some more open world and spontaneous PvP rather than just running around on Ilum.

The thing with dynamic events, we don’t really want to give away what we’re doing yet but we’ve got a lot of people working on it and it’s going to be a surprise. We don’t want things to become business as usual, we want it to feel really dynamic.

We will be doing something eventually where you get rewards for randomly killing people in the world in PvP.

  1. • less randomness from rewards for PvP progression.
    (APPLAUSE)

  2. hooray they finaly noticed they failed big time with ilum

    for the rest there is going to be some awsome pvp changes with 1.2

    might even rethink sub’ing again
    in short its a major step forwards when this will hit the live servers

  3. Cross-zone Warzone queuing, is that cross-server pvp?

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