Would it everyone have 1 life?

Would there be multiple lives?

Unlimited lives but most kills at the end of the timed match wins? (I hate that)

Would a team share a life 'pool' where a death of a member of the team would take away from the pool and the team loses when their shared life pool is drained?

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdFzHIdsHx4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD6AIC7O4oc

Edited June 20, 2013 by IAmViiOLENT

Thanks for helping clarify.

 

Are these "arenas" actual places players can travel to, or only accessible via group finder? Hoping for the former...

Edited June 20, 2013 by Machine-Elf

I haven't played Wow but since I heared about arenas possibly coming I did some research. They sound fun, but from everything I read, balancing classes turned into a big problem and jacked up how PVE'ers roll. An idea that I think would help elleviate this problem, and should have been done before with class balancing (RIP Vanguard DPS) is that certain abilities and talents work one way in WZ's/Arenas/PVP designated areas and another way outside those areas. I know it sounds like it potentially could get confusing but it will help keep balancing fair on both sides of play styles. I love to PVP and PVE. Or even like most of us do now, each class has a PVP spec and a PVE spec.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdFzHIdsHx4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZD6AIC7O4oc

 

Yay Sensus! I 've modeled my Rogue after his toon for a long time.

Please stay tuned to have your hopes and dreams crushed.

 

I give BW credit for actually trying something new - it indicates they recognize that the current pvp situation is not working. I am alarmed that the "something new" they are aiming to try requires good class balance when historically they have done a very poor job at understanding and modifying class balance.

Please stay tuned to have your hopes and dreams crushed.

 

nailed it

No way. NOT arenas.

 

I can already see the typical composition. Sentinel/maras and scoundrel/operative heals shadows/assassins for guard (maybe). I mean would you even need a guard if you have the dps? Worst idea ever and that is why it will never happen.

Edited June 20, 2013 by Givemedanger

No way. NOT arenas.

 

I can already see the typical composition. Sentinel/maras and scoundrel/operative heals shadows/assassins for guard (maybe). I mean would you even need a guard if you have the dps? Worst idea ever and that is why it will never happen.

 

Unless you have a crystal ball I suggest you wait and see exactly what information we will get on arenas. Hopefully its good so I can come back in October.

Good luck killing a tank/healer pair in 4v4 they are hard enough to take down in 8v8. I can see now all teams will be 1 tank 1 healer 1 off healer and 1 pure DPS and turn into stalemates

What a bold move by Bioware.

 

I know this game is relatively small, but I hope the dev's understand there is a whole population of competitive gamers that are looking for a good MMO-style PvP game that isn't a MOBA. Forge fell flat. GW2 fell flat. WoW had it once but is determined to shrink it's PvP population. Tera has promise but En Masse isn't really a good development team and Blue Hole seems to be slacking. Rift PvP is laughable at best. EVE just takes too long to get started in anything meaningful. SWTOR is primed to fill that niche in the market if it desires to. Almost everything is here, just missing the incentivized arena rule-set.

 

Let's all hope the dev's here have the clarity and vision to deliver what could be something special...

 

 

 

 

if indeed arena's are on the horizon.

 

This !! if they do it right there are tonns of pvp players that would come back as there

are no 1 awesome pvp game now.Playerbase is spread out in all games in a limbo stasis

dreaming of competetive joy.

Good luck killing a tank/healer pair in 4v4 they are hard enough to take down in 8v8. I can see now all teams will be 1 tank 1 healer 1 off healer and 1 pure DPS and turn into stalemates

 

Good... those are some of the funnest battles in PVP. When they finally end I get such a rush.

 

Also, creating a good team composition resulting in being a difficult team to beat sounds like working as intended.

I've hated deathmatches in everything that isnt OHK shooters, they deserve a purpose there, so I'm going to hate this. Add that it's most likely going to be a 4 vs 4 and I play a class that currently wouldnt have stod a chance in such a setting and I might aswell unsub. Now you might say, why unsub when there will be normal warzones too? For one, how do we know that they won't be mixed and how great is it going to be to play healer/tank pairs in every game, including, normal warzones too? It's just going to make the premade problem ten times worse. And two, even if they're seperated it's going to cut the population in half and make the queues even longer at the hours I play.

Small scale (4 v 4 or less) arenas are a horrible horrible idea that highlight every flaw in PvP and class balance. Even Blizzard admits that.

 

IF we must have arenas, I hope they keep the 8v8 format, or better yet, 16v16.

 

I agree with this. I'd love to see a 16v16 battle "arena".

Small scale (4 v 4 or less) arenas are a horrible horrible idea that highlight every flaw in PvP and class balance. Even Blizzard admits that.

 

IF we must have arenas, I hope they keep the 8v8 format, or better yet, 16v16.

 

 

Ummm...they have that now...it's called Ranked WZ.....Arenas would by far be the best thing to happen to this PVP community and I guarantee the population would sky rocket back up.

If you think class balance is a problem now, then it will be a disaster if arenas come with 2.4. ESPECIALLY if they follow WoW with 2v2 and 3v3, but even 4v4 I could still see it becoming a major issue. Even Blizzard admits they regret implementing arenas because of this...

You all realize that 2.4 WILL be postponed by at least 3 weeks when it's there right?

 

And three weeks later they'll say they won;t implement it because it wasn't the way they wanted it to be.

There are some pitfalls to avoid however. As you scale the PvP down to, what I assume will be 4v4 or lower, it brings into focus glaring class balance issues and most developers tend to let the pendulum of balance swing too far when adjusting. WoW has been experiencing this since Ghostcrawler took over and the PvP population has been dwindling ever since. Every expansion they try to re-invent the wheel and spend the rest of the time scrambling to put a Band-Aide on all of the oversights. The other pitfall is when developer's give too much credence to the QQ on the forums. I know the game needs to be fun for as many people as possible but simply put, some people aren't playing their class correctly and don't understand PvP as a whole. I know I know, everyone is an expert. It's the internet. But, tackling the problem with the merry-go-round approach to class balance will kill competitive MMO gaming faster than Ghostcrawler joining your dev team.

 

class balance is important, but I would rather the devs work on adding solid maps and clean up the gameplay more than worrying about class balance at first, if deathmatch happens

 

I would love to see them add limited in game macros like /focus /focus arena 1-4 /tar arena 1-4 /tar party 1-4 /cast @playername /cast @arena 1-4 /cast @party1-4 /cast @focus and /stopcasting

 

arena enemy frames would be nice to have also (like in WoW) possibly with enemy break cooldowns

If you think class balance is a problem now, then it will be a disaster if arenas come with 2.4. ESPECIALLY if they follow WoW with 2v2 and 3v3, but even 4v4 I could still see it becoming a major issue. Even Blizzard admits they regret implementing arenas because of this...

 

I bet the Devs don't regret their paychecks from all the popularity they have gotten from implementing the Arena right? I mean the world wide coverage of Arena tournaments that have been held because of it right? While pve is popular you do not see world wide tournaments with thousands of dollars being given away for beating a boss in pve, but you do for PVP for WOW BECAUSE of Arenas.

 

Fact is Arenas will bring lots of pvpers back to the game and that means more revenue. More revenue means alot more content for both pve AND pvp.

yes, there is. there are SO many players out there that are competitive enough to play ranked, but cant because they cant find a team of 8. 8 is too much to organize, but 4, 4 will create a ton of new teams and a lot more activity in the high end pvp scene.

 

Utter nonsense. They can't find a team of 8 because not enough people want to do ranked, simple as that. All these 4 player teams don't want to join up to do ranked. They want to do easymode warzones.

 

Suggesting that 8 is too much to organize is ridiculous. There are tons of 8 and even 16 player teams being organized successfully everyday doing Ops.

Edited June 21, 2013 by MotorCityMan

Arena is a great idea

it wont be 100% balanced but it will be fun . and after all its a game if you dont like arena dont play it

Arena is a terrible idea, it's a very risky move. I suppose it depends on how they implement it though. If it remains 8v8 and shares a queue with Warzones or Ranked Warzones it should be fine.

 

If it doesn't share a queue with Warzones it will be directly competing with it, spreading the already small pvp community even thinner (we aren't getting cross server queues remember). Since arenas require less players, if you queue for both then arena will pop first and players only wanting to do warzones will only very rarely get queue pops because their teammates are constantly being poached by the Arena system. If you can't queue for both at the same time then both queues will struggle.

 

As an Australian I play in offpeak times, so it can take a while for my Warzone queue to pop, and after server transfers its probably going to get worse (I'm on a PVE server). If you introduce Arenas on a separate queue it will probably cripple Warzone queues even further.

 

If it's not 8v8, it will probably introduce a lot of the issues that plague WoW unless they directly address those issues in the design stages. I wrote about a couple of them at the bottom of this page if anyone feels like reading a wall of text about it: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=651406&page=7

 

In short, I hope they are very careful about how they implement arena.

"Arena" is just code for the new Huttball facility being paid for by the GTN credit tax.

A few responses to some posts.

 

1) Rob Pardo said arena was a mistake: yes, he did. But why? He also states in that article that it was a mistake because it was "a huge headache for Blizzard." Of course it was been a huge headache for them. Their strategy to tackle imbalances in WoW is horribly cumbersome and ineffective. It doesn't have to be that way nor should it. Balance in that game isn't rocket science. They have taken the absolute wrong approach since the ending of WoTLK in regards to class balance and we, the customer have had to pay for it.

 

2) That interview was from 2009. They have since started shifting toward a RBG focus and I think that policy is the death knell for WoW PvP. Numbers don't lie in this case. Less people are doing arena and even less are actually participating in RBG's. RBG's has turned into free points for gear progression with very little actual competition to be had. Not a single high-end player regards them as at all competitive.

 

3) Arena population wasn't the minority. It has become the minority due to the poor implementation of the rule-set by Blizzard. They are unwilling to have spells/abilities to different things in PvP as if it's some sacred cow. I also would contest that PvP, in all it's forms are on the decline so of course arena participation is down. Just because Blizzard's design isn't responsive to the demands of their customers, doesn't mean Bioware has to follow their lead. SWTOR already has much more going for it, from a design point of view, than WoW. No spammable CC for starters. How about, resolve as opposed to diminishing returns for different kinds of CC so you don't have endless CC chains (hello rdruid/lock/mage teams). SWTOR isn't a cool-down zerg where people are dying in a blanket silence from 100-0 through defensives. The fate of WoW, doesn't have to be the fate of SWTOR arena.

 

4) The "whole population of competitive gamers" have been waiting for something worthy to actually invest their time in. Most people mess around in LoL, Dota2, Starcraft, CS:GO but there are some that want a MMO-style PvP game worth getting in to. Seasons 1 to even season 8 in WoW arena had good participation across the board. What killed it was the policy of Blizzard to shove RBG's down everyone's throat. No one likes that kind of heavy-handed behavior. To say arena is a "dead end street" is short sighted and just plain wrong.

 

5) "Arena pvp is a dead end street. Once the pecking order has been established, game over. Arena will wither on the vine just as ranked did. There is no magic in 4. The player response will be the same." - Let's just look at this statement.

 

-- a) First of all, there is a real problem with most ladder construction. Without rating decay there is a possibility for stagnation. If you don't play to maintain your rank you lose your rank. It should be that simple.

 

-- b) Second, what kind of defeatist attitude is that? So I suppose that people won't do auto-cross racing because Sebastian Vettel has established himself to be a superior race-car driver. Just nonsense. People will do arena because they enjoy the rule-set. If you don't like it, don't do it. It seems the real issue you might have is you are afraid other's might like it and somehow take away from what you consider to be fun. Your logic is tragically flaw though. We live in a capitalist society and if rated WZ's are really what people want, then it will have a much higher participation rate than arena. The point here is choice. Furthermore, In the same post you say RWZ's are dead and yet you say you want Bioware to sink more resources into them? I applaud Bioware for trying something new.

 

-- c) Finally, yes, Blizzard has failed with their implimentation of arena. They threw tons of resources at the problem and have came up with more problems. This has more to do with the overall vision they seem to have for PvP. If you are going to have a rule-set in your game, you need to support it equally. You cannot try to heard people into what you, the developer, wants after the cat's been let out of the bag. That said, I never said Bioware had to follow suite and make all the same mistakes. If they are wise and learn from the mistakes of others who have tried, then I think we will be just fine. As I have stated already, this game's PvP feels really good. There are a few things that need tuning but that can be easily fixed.

 

I know change is scary, especially in a MMO. We've been let down far too often. I know arena isn't going to be everyone's thing but why would anyone want to limit the possible ways anyone could have fun in SWTOR? I hope you all at least give it chance before condemning it.

Edited June 21, 2013 by Selout

I know change is scary, especially in a MMO. We've been let down far too often. I know arena isn't going to be everyone's thing but why would anyone want to limit the possible ways anyone could have in SWTOR? I hope you all at least give it chance before condemning it.

 

Because Arena can kill Warzones and cause severe impacts to PVE as well?

If Arena is on a separate queue to Warzones it will poach players from the already slow-to-pop offpeak queues. Without cross-server queuing, PVE servers in particular will suffer.

 

If they try to correct Arena imbalances they can cripple the Flashpoint queues as well if they nerf a tank or healing spec so badly it is no longer viable for PVE, causing people to no longer queue for FPs on those characters. What will happen to guilds that rely on certain classes for their Ops groups, if those players can longer pull their weight because of nerfs? It happened in WoW, and it will happen here if that's the path they go down.

 

Yes this is all doom and gloom stuff. It could turn out great, in which case I will happily queue up and enjoy it, or ignore it and go back to questing and Warzones if it isn't for me.

 

But it could also break all of PVP and a heck of a lot of PVE. People are worried. And so they should be. We need more information about what this arena is and how it will work to reassure us that they aren't going to screw it up, because if they do screw it up it is going to impact a lot of the content we already have and enjoy.

 

I think all we can do for now though is wait until they release more details and hope for the best.

I agree, it can be bad. We've all seen it in WoW. I don't know why we automatically have to assume it IS going to be bad. We shouldn't dump all over it before it's out of the gates.

 

I made my post as encouragement for the dev's so they don't lose their nerve... if they even read these forums. I see a CM response so that's a positive sign. Far too many people are silent when people try to shout down progress. I choose not to be silent.