Fellow TORWarriors and PvPers, thanks for viewing yet another edition of SWTOR PvP. Today’s topic is a review piece on the new two week recurring open-world Player vs. Player (OPvP) world event on Illum.
During the ice filled planet Illum’s early days in Star Wars: The Old Republic, players were offed two quests for killing players in OPvP. This model ultimately failed miserably because players were swapping kills to complete their quest, latency (lag) would make even the best machines crash, and some factions couldn’t leave their spawn because of camping. The developers removed these quests from Illum, thus eliminating nearly all incentive for OPvP. For nearly a year, SWTOR fans have been craving some form of OPvP, and now we have it.
The Good
Incentivized OPvP – Illum offers two quests that give you 100 Warzone commendations. The first quest, [PvP] Data Retrieval/Data Recollection, is a simple kill/collect quest that can be done entirely avoiding other players. The second quest, [PvP] Charging the Pylon, brings nearly certain confrontation among other players.
“Ho hum. Just gonna wait here for a bit….”
Charging the Pylon requires a group of up to four to collect pylons scattered throughout the map, then return them into a center area. Only one person can turn this pylon into the central node with a one minute cool-down. Inevitability what happens are a bunch of people sitting around this deposit area waiting for the time they can deposit the pylon. Once the deposit area becomes active, an all-out brawl at the node ensues.
Personally, I enjoy this quest because of the Darwinian survival of the fittest model, though it is not perfect. It breeds competition, guild cohesiveness, and gives another reason to spend countless hours earning the top end PvP gear. However, I can see why this would be a nightmare for other players that do not share my same opinion (more on that later).
Rewards –The reward system is great because players can only receive 200 Warzone commendations, per player, per daily while this event is active. That’s roughly two to three Warzones or 30 to 45 minutes. The Illum quest rewards are decent enough to make players participate, but not overpowered making it impossible to gear your character without completing them. Giving players an alternative method of play is always a positive in my book.
Environment – The developer reconstructed Illum in the same manner as Terror from Beyond. The same dramatic sound constantly humming, the Trion lighting casting eerie shadows, or the vibrant colors, players can enjoy spending hours questing and roaming the fridge world of Illum. I stand around gawking and marveling at the level of detail put into this planet. From huge destroyed ships, to the overhead space ship that can be seen from far away, I feel like this is the type of quality I’ve come to expect from BioWare.
I can’t stop looking at the world….it’s so pre….gah! I’m being attacked!
No Lag – The biggest surprise I had when I returned to Illum was the quality of the latency. The first day, my server had seven instances of Illum capping at around 50 players. This significantly lowered the lag and eliminating computer crashes that all players hate. My game has yet to crash or freeze while on Illum, great job developers.
The Bad
Same Faction PvP – Probably the worst part about Illum’s PvP area is that everyone but your four member parties are enemies. Republic, Imperial, it doesn’t matter. Instead of bringing each faction together to kill a common threat, this event is making sparking conflict among the same faction. I believe this was a major mistake because it separates the community and does nothing to bring them together.
Broken Travel System – I cannot use my quick travel or emergency fleet pass to return to an area. The game seems to use the ability and leave me in the same spot. Whether designed or not, this has been extraordinarily painful. I even let an enemy kill me so I can use the medical center resurrection. Apparently repair cost has changed as well considering my repair bill was 12k credits. This could be improved upon.
Good People Are Punished –Today, during my initial set of dailies, more than three groups of players were working together, waiting in line at the pylon point, courtesies allowing each other to turn in the pylons. Eventually other players wouldn’t follow this same ideology and jump in front of the line and causing chaos. I can see why this would be unimaginably frustrating to players and wish there was some alternate to completing the quest without controlled mayhem (even though I enjoy it).
Conclusion
SWTOR feels transformed. Instead of players sitting in fleet waiting for Warzones or Flashpoint queues to pop, people are engaged. Players are taking advantage of new content and swarming the different planets to enjoy all the new things that it has to offer. I can see why some people might dislike this event, but more content means more things to do. BioWare isn’t forcing players to participate, but giving them an option. This update has giving me exactly what I wanted and have been salivating for nearly a year, a reason to enjoy open world PvP.
How do you readers feel about all of it? Have you gotten a chance to get in the game and try it out? Is this great for the game or just another mistake? Let me know your thoughts and opinions in the comments section below. In the meantime, thank you for reading and please enjoy!
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I love it. I especially love the charging the pylon part. I love the competition to get to the pylon in time. I’ve been killed countless times and been right pissed off, but then I get back up, and kill someone else and I’m all happy again.
The waiting in line thing is good, to a point. I’ve had one time, the line was long enough that anyone at the end of it would run out of time before they could get to the pylon to charge it. We noticed this when we were far enough up the line. We then handed in our orb and then proceeded to “shorten” the line for our next set of orbs. The best part about shortening the line, if you kill someone with an orb, they explode dealing damage to those around them. If you use mass AoE’s on the line, everyone gets hurt, someone dies, and causes a chain reaction of the entire line dieing. Had it happen to us once, and we’ve also caused this one.
The idea behind the mission is make people pvp to complete it. But this system isnt good for it, mostly of the case, as you said, Darwinian survival, people notice that the best chance of success is make a line and avoid unecessary battle. So what should be a pvp mission turn into a wait in the line mission. So at the end it’s a completly fail. Why’s that?
my opinion is: Same as old ilum, what kills a world pvp and open world pvp is the lack of points of interest. This mission concentrate the objective in one area (that’s good to force people do the pvp in theory) but everybody attacking everybody, let’s say, 20 players at same spot. Its chaos. So peopel realize the easiest solution, make a line. A pvp quests the objective should be the pvp it self, kill a number of players or take bases. Perhaps something like halaa, wintergrasp and tol barad. Or the Guild wars’ WvWvW.
My opinion if they made something like free for all, no law like outlaw den, is a entire map/planet that there’s no law (supposed to be tatooine) where should have multiple bases that a guild can take like line age 2. And maps and planets where the battle rep vs Imp happens, and you need to take the sections to move foward.
i’ve made myself a lot of suggestions on SWtor forum you can check on threads “My Ilum map – How I think it should be.”, “Denova (Rep vs. Imp PvP planet)”, “World Pvp”, “patch 1.x Guilds”, “guild HQ’s” and “Guild’s Quests/Story”
All posted by me “Benets”
the most interesting thing about the design of this area is how we still dont have 3 things satisfied
1- player combat should be meaningful anywhere. we don’t need a warzone in one static location in the world. that’s lame
2- player choice of who is your enemy should be meaningful. are you chaotic or for order? are you good, grey, or evil? this is the experience that long term players of this game are after.
3- there should be individual competition via ranking, and specific experience, currency, and overall impact to all these elements for rewards and benefits that you can choose that provide an incentive to stay engaged in it.
Basically we don’t have pvp. we have Gvp… griefer vs player.
Until the above 3 are addressed, that’s all we will have beyond the structured game
I hear you but the problem is TOR is not a game built around pvp if it was then you would have a case. But because PvE is clearly the area that it is centered around. It is harder to create those incentives if most people of the game do pve.
Also I believe in terms of open world pvp it should just be that player verses player. Needed rewards or currency to go pvp in the open world is a cop out to me. You should fight in the open world mainly to fight. I don’t play Halo alot but when I do I don’t do it for the rewards. I do it just to go around and kill people.
Warzones makes sense because its a control environment. But when you have an uncontrollable environment like OWPvP all your incentives that you point out are mearly tools that people will use to cut corners and then you will have the same mess you had the first time around.
Me personally if you are not doing open world pvp simply to kill people, then why are you doing OWPvP?
I would assume they are doing it to advance their character’s identity in the game. that’s why we play the RPGs. Legacy has an untapped potential for how pvp would or could shape a character identity, from bounties to all kinds of other approaches
I am friggin luving it , though not the intentional griefing ( waiting mid till someone is channeling the orbs then killing them) Open World PVP is back, Ilum is back people are actually doing the Illum quests and getting some decent rewards, is it perfect hellz no but I am having fun again on friggin Ilum……is this bizzaro world? Well done bioware learn from the mistakes here and give us better and better content can’t wait to see what Makeb has to offer now.
I hate pvp and since i only play on a RP server it bothers me a little that i have to go to a pvp heavy area i would otherwise stay out of because i want some gear i really like that is not available in any other way.
Also i dislike the forced pvp aspect, i stay clear of the marked pvp area but when i’m unfortunate enough to be in a group with someone flagged for pvp i risk getting flagged myself, so i resigned myself to only doing the soloable quests which means i’ll have the gear i want this time next year and that’s with some luck.
I just don’t understand why there is the need to make some items nearly inaccessible to some people, i don’t understand what is gained by keeping less skilled players from enjoying the game fully.
I guess it depends on your server, but so far in the Shadowlands I have yet to see anyone attack another player outside of the contested zone even when they otherwise could have. And the only thing the PvP missions contribute to getting the gear is ~800 rep/day that you can easily make up for by having a few alts.
So last night I was killing some droids for Data Retrieval and see a group coming my way. I renew my Static Barrier just in case, and lo and behold, just before the last droid falls their Guardian’s lightsaber comes flying at me. They found out too late that I wasn’t alone, I had just ran ahead of the three guildies I was teamed with, including a tank and healer… About 20 seconds into the fight the now-enemy Scoundrel stealthed and left the other three to die.
A few days before, mine and a few other groups got into a fight over the pylon… A passive-aggressive fight. The light would come down, 3+ orb carriers would start their captures, and then everyone would drop AoE’s to interrupt each others’ carriers before patiently waiting to do the whole thing again. After the first couple tries we started throwing in CC on each other to stop the AoE’s but still not escalating into full-on fighting. This went on for at least the 10-15 minutes or so it took for my group to get our four captures through.
It’s the moments like that that have been the highlight of the event for me, so I’d say that the PvP implementation is so far a success.
“Darwinian survival of the fittest model”
should read. “Folk Darwinism.”
I rather enjoy the new open world PVP on Illum. The main thing being, I’m not forced to join in unless I wish to. The balance they struck with it has gone beyond anything I was expecting! I must admit, they finally made Illum worth going to.
Thought I did not realize that the contested area, makes it so that you will attack even people on your own faction. I can see it making some sense though not rather enjoyable sense.
To the ppl complaining, i clearly says its a PVP Quest ther is NO need at all for PVEer to go there, if you want more reputation you can kill the 2 respawning worldbosses all day, some ppl did like 15 in a row.
I disagree with the writer on the issue of “free for all” the way it is it prevents the 70% Imperial bashing the Republic Player Situation we had in the old Illum days very often.
Im playing both sides and it is still the same since beta, the Republic side has less ppl interested in PVP, as the Imperial side at least on German speaking Servers.
Also the blocking of Operations and limiting the groups to 4(ppl of same guild excluded), leads to a more balanced situation the one side totally outnumbering the others.
So my Opinion for the event this was very well made and can stay like it is.
BUT for Illum PVP i want something different, more; bigger; better!
If the manage to get me something like the vanilla Alterac Valley id be happy.
Best would be something like ffa 10 to 20 man Groups fighting for points on a large map, but im not sure if the could do this without scrapping their current game engine.