Jump to content

AndiusTheGreat

Members
  • Posts

    194
  • Joined

Reputation

10 Good

Personal Information

  • Location
    Alaska
  1. Wow. What an amazing video. I retract all comments. Please allow Illum to stay that way forever, and ever...
  2. The Problem: As anyone who has read my other topic on the subject has read, the problem is Illum is entirely one sided. There is not enough incentive to do anything but hold the center if you are on the side with the greater numbers, and the side with the lower numbers basically can just take the other bases and sit there twiddling their thumbs because the massive zerg rarely budges from the center. This topic is some relatively simple solutions that would help with the problem. I don't hold these solutions up as the ideal for what Illum should be forever, but I do think they would be quick to implement and make Illum 320% more fun right now. And guess what! It doesn't even require PVE in a PVP zone. Part A: The Supply Chain- In the real world a military force that digs into the center of the battlefield and ignores all other positions is what one would refer to as, surrounded and cut off. In Illum its what we would refer to as the only people making progress on their dailies/weeklies. This is a pretty simple solution IMO. We set up something called the supply chain. Say you are Republic. What good is retrieving armaments if you don't control your base, and the territory you have to move these armaments through to get to your base (Southern Assault) is controlled by your enemy. So in order to collect armaments at central assault you need to control both Southern Assault, and the Republic Base. The point is in order to reap rewards you have to keep watch over your own territory. You can't just blob up in the center and expect the enemy to come to you. Part B: Pushing the front Line- While its really great that you can capture armaments as you control the center of the battlefield, wouldn't there be more rewards if you pushed farther deeper into enemy territory? If you control Republic Base, Southern Assault, and Central Assault pushing into Northern Assault and Imperial base should yield even greater rewards. Either an increased number of armaments or some new spawn. This would incentivize map control because lets face it... nobody is worrying about it much right now even with the Valor rewards. Part C: Imperial and Republic Armaments- They need to be separated as if they aren't one side will wait for the other to push to their base, intentionally not flip it, and then collect armaments. Imperials can only take Republic Armaments and the Republic can only take Imperial Armaments. Part D: Increased Defense Value for Your Side of the Map- This doesn't need to be NPC guards nessicarily. You could make it so accessing your side of the map requires going through a choke point where the defender has high ground advantage as well as turrets. At Republic base it would be a heavy advantage for the Republic. At Southern Assault it would be a light advantage. And visa versa of course. Part E: Respawn changes- You should be able to speeder in and respawn anywhere on the map regardless of who is in control. If your enemy controls the whole map you can only respawn/speeder in to your base. If you control southern assault you can respawn at your southern respawn. If you control northern assualt you can respawn at your northern respawn. Otherwise it would just be too damn hard to maintain a supply route. If you like the ideas, show your support! Respond saying which parts you like and why! Respond saying which parts you don't like (And more importantly why.) I of course like parts A-E for the reasons I already stated.
  3. Summary of Yesterday's Events: Well yesterday I spent around two hours leading our forces in Illum. We were highly outnumbered, and attempting to take the center prooved to be suicidal, so we went and gained complete map control of everywhere but center. Other than a couple lone imperials this did not draw their forces out of the center. Several people mentioned going and doing something else as a raid as we tried to pick up more numbers. They specifically asked if there was any PVE content we could do, to which the answer was obviously no. There was some discussion of doing EV at that point, but in general the raid just started losing members. I lead them around a bit more re-capping bases the solo imperials took before we regained members, and the imperial forces had finally bled out a bit from boredom I think. We then made 3 pushes in which were still outnumbered, and still lost, but at least traded a decent amount of kills. After the 3rd push the raid collapsed and went down to 5 to 6 members. We went in a couple times, picked off lone armament hunters, then immediately retreated. After that they started catching on and moving as a group. At this point we started making suicidal pushes at them. Their forces had apparently depleted as well at this point, and let me put in there that the group which included Faate, Rhilia, Omega-X, and some other brave souls who's names I can't recall were straight up pro. Though they still heavily outnumbered us we were somehow managing to get in more kills than we had members of our group before we went down. We did this a few times until people finished their weeklies/dailies and then the ops fell apart. My Point 1. Obviously people asking if we could do things as a group. Directly relates to this topic. Had we been completely unable to take ANY keep in the moors I still could have said. "Yeah, lets go hit goldy." Or "Sure lets go kills some drakes." or "lets farm trees." or even "Lets go poison/cleanse the Hoardale." While this obviously isn't what we would want to do all night, it would give us something to do, to keep us occupied as we waited on more members. 2. People NEVER sit there at TA and watch all the other keeps fall like they sit there at center on Illum. The fact we were forced to hit center, or not have anyone to fight is ridiculous. Good open world PVP encourages map control not holding one point while the entire map falls as the stronger faction. A losing faction might hold out at a single point so as to sell their lives dearly, but the stronger faction never would. If Illum worked like the Moors I could have sent a scoundrel/shadow to keep tabs on their main forces while the rest of our group ninjaed a keep. And they would have actually given a damn. We would likely play a game of cat and mouse for awhile that would have ended in us holding at a more poorly guarded point we could take quickly (Like Isendeep or LC) and they would assault us there, or we would have ended up hiding out in something akin to elf camp if they had complete map control while they surrounded it and we traded fire. Anyway I think my point is clear. Even in real warfare the smaller force when put up against the larger force would try to cut off supplies to the larger force and generally harass them, or take up a defensive position and wait for the larger force to come to them. Not continually throw themselves against the place where the larger force has dug in. Its ridiculous, and its a horrible model for open world PVP. TL : DR I had fun last night, but not as much as I could have. These ideas would still greatly improve Illum.
  4. I won't deny Cobra actually is good. He is a big name on my server in Illum, and he was in a huttball match that me and a few my guild-mates were in that closed due to our side not having enough people... as we were stomping the other side. Of course some of those guild mates are also big name PVPers on our server. Where I will disagree with him is that investing massive amounts of time into specific content gives you a right to speak on them where others who have invested less time have no right to talk. Illum is a valor farm and I hate it. Of course my valor rank isn't near as high as someone who really enjoys said content. If the only people who have the right to talk about things are the people who put huge amounts of time into them, then I bet post NGE-SWG was even better than pre-NGE, and Archlord is a great game! There is a reason every time I show up in Illum I can't wait to finish my daily so I can leave. And it isn't because it is such thrilling content. It is because I am so bored the only thing keeping me sane is talking to my guildmates on mumbe. Having good content in other areas is no reason to not improve horrible content like Illum. I think this game as a whole is great, don't get me wrong. This isn't a comparison of TOR vs. LOTRO, or a comparison of TOR PVP vs. LOTRO PVP. Its purely a comparison of Illum vs. Ettenmoors. I think public opinion is very heavily on my side that the Ettenmoors is better than Illum here, especially when you take out factors we aren't even discussing like class balance. The point is I think in addressing where they went wrong, Bioware needs to look to the parts people enjoyed about the Ettenmoors and copy some of them. If they copy some of the upsides and leave out the downsides I think they can easily turn Illum into something that blows both Illums current form, and the Ettenmoors out of the water. I've suggested what I think the two most critical factors that make Ettenmoors more enjoyable are.
  5. Adding PVE content to a zone really helps with this a lot. When I log on to the Ettenmoors, and my faction controls the map, I go out and quest. When I log on to the Ettenmoors and the other faction controls the map... I go out and quest, or harass the enemy as they quest. I also have had a lot of fun solo harassing enemies as they try to take keeps. In one case I prevented an entire team from taking a keep because of cleverly timed hit and run tactics on my warg. Their entire team wiped because I kept silencing their healer. When I log onto the Ettenmoors, and we have a raid going, and they have a raid going, I ask for an invite and have some fun. When I log onto Illum and either side controls the map/has an overwhelming zerg... I leave. Thus why I almost am never in Illum.
  6. Why is it so hard to understand that class imbalance is a non-issue in this topic? We are talking about what could be copied from the Ettenmoors to Illum in order to improve it. Those are: 1. NPC guards for control points. 2. PVE side-content. 3. Meaningful Rewards. Those are not: 1. Creep vs. Freep imbalances 2. Slow Combat 3. Personal grudges against devs and their girlfriends Lets try to keep things focused on the actual talking points shall we? PS. I mainly played creep, and ONLY played creep after Moria.
  7. I'm sorry. Apparently dozens or hundreds of hours of playing fairly simple Open World PVP zones don't qualify me to speak on them. I'll be sure not to talk on this subject again until I have played 10 thousand hours of both Illum and the Ettenmoors and sacrificed my first born on the altar or Open World PVP Zones for Themeparks.
  8. As someone who played before Mines of Moria, I would like to point out that Trolls didn't exist when the moors first came out. And I'm fairly sure they had a limit of 1 troll at a time when they did. I do remember the expansion well. It's what caused me to stop playing the Ettenmoors for a long time. We would have 5 of us for every freep and when the freeps did show up some idiot would pull a troll. That and I never hit level cap on my freep ever again after the first level increase. The PVE was just too unbearable. BTW Landroval was my server as well. Andius was my main but he was only in the moors pre-Moria. And I had one creep of every class but I enjoyed my warg Argmoor the most. I have no doubts Bioware can do better than the Ettenmoors with a half decent try, but as you said they have things they can learn from them. NPC guards for keeps, and PVE content to keep people occupied with the fighting is no good, are two things I think they should consider.
  9. Concerns for game improvements are never pre-mature. As someone who has been here well before release I can say a lot of what was suggested on these forums, has ended up in this game. Thank people voicing concerns prematurely for the fact our lightsaber models aren't 3 times larger.
  10. I think that would help the issue, but I have the feeling it would take it from waste of time... to semi-bearable. So I would support your idea, but I think further measures need to be taken, and I think the measures I've suggested are fine. PVE in a Warfront quickly turns in to PVP. The difference is you aren't just standing around waiting for a fight.
  11. That is entirely irrelevant to the points discussed in this topic, except to say that Ettenmoors style PVP in TOR would be 1000x better as class-imbalance would be a non-issue. Nobody here is suggesting changes to classes to be more like LOTRO Player vs. Monster Players. The Ettenmoors shares it's basic concept with Illum, but... gives more incentive for map control as you can only turn in quests from specific control points, if you still control them. It also gives a huge reward for flipping bases. Something you couldn't do here because.... It is true. One time I popped out of a warzone, took the center map in around a minute BY MYSELF, and as the imps showed up the next warzone let me in. It was hilarious, but entirely broken.
  12. I really don't think the design of the actual zone was bad it all. The biggest problem out there was balance issues. Balance issues are prettymuch a given when one side can be played from level 10+ and one side requires you to be max level or at least close to it, to be at all effective. TOR has perfectly balanced sides because aside from animations and armor appearance they are identical. The point of having PVE in a PVP zone is because open world PVP is about random encounters. You don't run in to random encounters all that frequently while out questing on the general map (At least I didn't.) but you do run into them frequently in PVP designated areas with decent rewards. Also if people are out there doing that PVE content and the action gets hot it will be easy to get them in the big raid. Right now if the action heats up in Illum I likely won't even hear about it because I could care less who's winning the zerg. Especially if I've finished my daily. If all we are looking for is mass scale battles we might as well just make 50 vs. 50 WZ PS. This game isn't supposed to be about PVP but PVP is almost a requirement for any MMO which involves combat. People spend a long time building up their character's and they like to see how they measure up against players. Its not like we are playing Harvest Moon Online. This game is filled with guns, lightsabers, and people who like to use them. As such it is prettymuch an expectation that they have PVP, and that the PVP not be lame. Whether they set up that expectation or not.
  13. And if people enjoyed Illum you might see more people out there on one of the most populated servers in this entire game. There are currently 7 level 50's on in my guild. One of them is on Illum. Thats me. I'm doing PVE dailies. If you want big epic battles all the time give people a reason to come there. I would be in the Illum PVP zone right now if I could run quests for daily commendations out there. I know whenever I was out questing in the moors and someone called "FREEPS ARE PUSHING TR" "CREEPS ARE PUSHING LUGS" I would ask for a raid invite. Why is it that I don't even give a damn what is happening in Illum?
  14. This is a topic that is meant to directly address the problems with Illum. The fact I draw my reference from another game does not mean that this topic isn't directly related to SWTOR. Also to all of you talking about class imbalance in the Ettenmoors. Yes it was a problem, but it won't be an issue here as this game uses mirrored classes. I'm not suggesting they take all the moster classes from LOTRO and pit them up against Republic forces, I'm suggesting they add side content to the Illum PVP area and give control points NPC guards. I generally PVP more than I PVE. I mean I played Darkfall for crying out loud. Open world PVP is actually about my favorite form of content in any game IF DONE WELL. But yes this is the only game I find PVE to be highly enjoyable in. I'm playing this as opposed to a pure PVP game because I like a variety of enjoyable content. PVP in this game isn't that great and I think most honest people can admit that if they are at all honest with themselves. We can only assume that as time goes on they will add more warzones, hopefully for dear god's sake improve Illum, and possibly add some other forms of PVP like pod racing or maybe even open space combat. (They did say they are working on a special project they won't give details on yet for space.) If there were no promise of PVP improvements I would drop my sub right now. By the way. 39 valor may not be 72, but you still don't get it without hours and hours of PVP. Its not like I don't take advantage of the meager PVP opportunities we already have at all.
  15. I didn't ask them to bring in OP CC, or class imbalance. But the Ettenmoors got a lot of stuff right. One of the great things about MMOs is you can copy the parts of features other games got right, and ditch the crap. Just because another game did it doesn't mean you can't. Even the most original games rip off some features other games got right.
×
×
  • Create New...