This letter was written right after the 1.0 patch was installed but because of the guild's red tape i publish it only now

First of all we would like to make a clause that we are not going to criticize the administration of the project or BioWare at large. The purpose of this letter from the in game community Ultima Guild is to try to help to improve the PvP location Ilum. Now situation on Ilum looks far not as normal PvP but like a daily and weekly quest farming and a new patch didn’t improve the situation at all. Obviously nothing has changed. Before the patch people were just standing on base receiving quest objectives there were no need in pvp at all. Then the new patch came and everybody were anticipating its installation as soon as possible. Finally it was installed, but what has improved? Nothing at all in fact and some things became even worse. Now to complete daily quest people just have to do some simple actions (throwing aoe ability in crowd) in tremendous fps decline and all the time appearing login screen.

Maybe BioWare has chosen the way of WarHammer Online in which after every patch hotfixes were installed. The funniest fix you’ve made after this patch is artificial reduction of population on Ilum. Now Ilum is divided into mirrors while on each mirror there are about 50 impereal players and 10-25 republican. Where is balance at all? There should be some queue on Ilum, like those which is for war zones, so that the balance between fractions could be kept. This queues could solve two problems: 1) make pvp on Ilum balanced and not looking like domination of one bigger fraction (imperials) all the time 2) balance fractions on all servers cause some imperials wouldn’t want so wait those queues all the time and will switch to the republic side.

So that was our view on current situation on Ilum PvP zone. Here are our suggestions on how to improve it:

1) Make Ilum sphere of interest for all players including pve players. In other way there still will be to little people. Bring in some new daily quest for pve players with an useful reward for example some items for tionese gear. People doing this quest could kill some NPC which would be guarding those points where republican and imperial military equipment is located (this NPC could be imperial and republican solders). And to complete quest they will have to kill for example 25 NPC on each 3 points. Also you may allow doing this quest starting from level 48 (and boost them to 50 like on warzones) to increase population of Ilum. Why tionese gear? Because it is not the best gear in this game but it would be enough to awake pve players interest in Ilum. Furthermore it will allow players to gear up somehow when they will reach level 50. And there should be some loot from NPC so that they could be farmed (credits, schematics, recourses). Each NPC could grant 5-20 valor points so it will make sense for level 50 players to kill them to.

So now we have enough players on Ilum with different interests in it. What about pvp and pvp players? Actualy in this situation quite everything is already done. Just only:

2) Don’t grant the valor and count the kill by quest on the territory of republican/imperial base. So here it comes. Everybody want to complete daily pvp quest so they will have to go in field, on those points with military equipment, and just spread all over the Ilum and not just stand at one’s base. Meanwhile in the field, and at those points we already have lots of players: those who are doing quest and killing npc and those who are doing pvp daily quest and killing enemy faction.

 

And what to do after reaching lvl 50? Everybody geared up in rakata or batllemaster so that doing those operations and warzone makes no sense. There are some planets on galactic map which are considered to be disputed. Why not allow a single guild not republic or empire but guild to take control over it? It could be some kind of a siege on this planet. The guild controlling the planet could receive some kind of a tax from it, some other exclusive rewards. On those credits guild could buy guild vessels, guild skills, some goods from guild vendors. There is no actual guild system in the game right now and that is a big shame.

 

PS: All the written above should not be considered as an attempt to insult the BioWare or the current game. Ultima Guild exists for about 6 years and it has participated in lots of different projects, European and Asian, it has seen its benefits and cons as players. That is why Ultima Guild is suggesting to use its in game experience to make SWTOR better so that it could exist for many years and it would be interesting to play it all the time.