Let's talk about Arena tonight!

got tired of reading when i kept seeing blizzard in every other post.
but im not sure how anyone could be against arena's

its premaid vs premaid
there will be certain groups that have the advantage. but remember your skilled and everyone else is so bad
i personally would not be happy to run into a group that instantly had an advantage over me then get totally destroyed by them. but its not like the same exact thing doesnt happen in warzones...

the number 1 thing is in the arena i pick my team. there is no random luck of the draw.
in a warzone i can pick up to half the group then the rest could be anything from geared out war hero's to everyone asking how they get expertise.

in what way is luck better than choice? will more people choose to be the "op" people? sure. but atleast you get to choose how you fight it.

i played WoW enough to know its not my thing. never did arena's but the fact that it (apparently) failed so bad is a good thing. why you ask? some people learn from other peoples mistakes and then find a way to make it work.

this is NOT WoW. quit assuming just because you did it once it will be the same again.. thats called being narrow minded and in my opinion seems pretty ignorant. its not bringing over WoW's arena, its adding an arena to SWTOR.

No, in BC was golden age of pvp. And 2v2 was the main bracket. And it was dumbiest thing to do. They do it only coz fail hard with shield block value and stupid hero class.

I loved Arena in WoW but i actually hoped that this Game wont need it. However, Bioware failed so hard with Open PvP that i want Arena.

i'd love to hear what arena comp a sniper/gunslinger would fit in. i can't think of a more useless arena class ever created.

also, it's funny that people say "don't look at wow arena" when everyone knows Blizzard invests a TON of resources in trying to balance for it yet it still fails in every way.

The only thing that I can't agree with is having the highest rated players get the highest rated gear. Sure, it sounds great, but it's creating a continuously steeper climb to improve your rating.

Let's say someone reaches top tier before you, but you're equal skill. Maybe they just had more time or whatever. You work your way up to his bracket, but to what avail?

You're of equal skill, but you can't beat the other guy simply because his gear is better than yours. And the only reason he has that gear and you don't, is because nobody was there to stop him from getting a higher rating.

Now, you (a player of equal skill), can't beat him simply because he got his hands on the gear first. Doesn't seem all that competitive to me. In that case, there is no "Oh, just be better than him". If the system is supposedly only based on skill, then you can't play better than a top ranked person.

When they invested time and effort into balancing, arena was a wonder. Then they left WoW in a hands of incompetent freaks with a Ghostcrawler as a leader, made "EVERYONE MUST BE VIABLE IN PVE" as their moto, and ruined pvp in WoW for good.

In WoW in took 1800 rating to get most of your PvP set, which is easy as pie. After that, even you face fully geared team, you too are missing just 1-2 pieces of gear, which is not that much a difference.

Also even if you just started to arena but you've made your homework and get all the gear you can get from the regular WZ, you're not that far behind it terms of a gear. Take a look on Champion and Battlemaster gear - difference is marginal.

Ah okay, I didn't realize we were only talking about a 1 or 2 piece reward here per tier. I didn't dabble into the arena aspect of WoW.

I'd be fine with that difference.

I would love arena in SWTOR. It's something else to do and it just means more subs.

Honestly, could care less if people got the best gear from regular WZ's. I don't feel the need to have better gear to win. We don't need that seperation.

For several reasons - but the most important one is that - PvP has been suprisingly popular on this game. Much much more so than on other MMO's percentage wise. That means it appeals to casuals as well as more competetive sorts. When you grasp the ramifications of this, I'll later in this post link it back to something else I said.

And I think reinforcing the gap between bad and competetive - with gear, is a woeful idea. If you're good enough to get recognised on your server as a decent player, getting gear that makes you even stronger just seems to be an unfair advantage, because at the end of the day, what you're asking for is competition - why do you need "rated onry" gear to be able to compete?

Having listened to Gabe speaking in an interview with TotalBiscuit, I believe he was saying how they didn't like making abilities work one way in PvP, and another in PvE, and that they were trying to avoid that wherever possible. Now - if that inference was correct, what you've said above, isn't going to happen. So introducing Arena's which are basically a copy of WoW's system, will have all the same inherent problems that WoW had, only with the inexperience of Bioware's PvP team's added funzies (and I think they've made some excellent things in this game, but - there are also some glaring things which most sensible people will acknowledge were out of whack). See - Ilum for reference.

Arena, comes with a slew of problems of it's own, when you take the WoW model.

1: PvE's are forced to grind Arena for things. In this game, be that mods or weapons or what not. If Arena was purely for Vanity gear, like really nicely designed gear that didn't make me look like a Jedi Hobo. Sure. A super Speeder that was shiny, Also - fine. However - I hated having to grind for PvP gear, so supplement PvE gear on WoW (you remember how Arena weapons were superiors to 25man, but were not equal to 25man HM - so in a progression guild you HAD to grind Arena to get them). Despised it. Which - would be a consequence of implementing the "best" weapons in PvP, because base damage still matters. Sadly.

2: Segregates the population. By this, I mean - it becomes a case of have and have nots. What we have right now - is a system that while the first few days, white - there's frequently a massive gear disparity between the majority of freshly dinged 50's, and people running around in Champ gear, that gap can be closed relatively quickly. And then everyone is on a fairly level playing field, where skill is the only true division between players. You don't need gear progression to compete.

3: Lastly, from my perspective at least, is seeing the inevitable fallout from PvE players, because they feel like they're being balanced due to PvP (because balancing around Arena is a pain in the arse to do). Again, this has been spoken in depth by the WoW team, and others. It's adding in, more recipe for hard work, and people screaming. Your "arena" can't be balanced easily around small groups.

I'm not against a form of Arena being added. I'm against the WoW model being used here. Because I think it will do more harm than good. There's a HUGE difference, and people saying I'm just parroting, are tools. Because they just want their shiny gear, without grasping the consequences. If you want WoW's Arena, play WoW. I do want something here to differentiate between casual, and competetive, but not in terms of power levels. Because - it's own problems, and increasing power creep is one of the glut of them.

Sunshine, there are some comps out there that when the right mods from PvE have been put into the right gear from PvP, utterly destroy other setups. Now, I think I'm about average skill, and have trounced some of what are regarded as the best on my server from the other side, with those setups in small skirmish fights. Like 3v8. Just because we had the "best" setup.

Sure, most players will never reach that skillcap. I know I won't either. But - already, I'm seeing setups that will break pretty much anything other than their exact mirror, at lower skill levels. And there are a few comps out there, that are low skill required to trounce. It will become comp fest all over again. And that - I didn't like in WoW either.

And no - I've read what was written fully on the interview by the WoW team, and had my own interpretations of the consequences, and see many of the same problems they had there, coming here, if the model is followed. I'd be delighted to have "High Competetion Gear" that made me look better than everyone else, even if it had the same stats. Bling, in effect. The idea of getting that extra power level, to compound a difference in skill, seems pointless, short of trouncing even weaker people. Bullying if you will. I like my fights to be, remotely, on the same playing field - even when my opposing number calls me names when we battle on the field.

Going back to power creeping, which I touched on earlier, the more you can stave off power creeping, you can increase the longevity of a game. This has been a problem that has affected most MMO style games, going back to MUD's. The more you can keep the content from growing in sheer power, but relying on diversity and vanity to keep players coming back, the more people are interested in joining in. Which, introducing the best gear only for a certain cadre, goes totally against.

I probably won't ever do it, and with the only major upsets is Arena messing up PvE aspects every now and then (And it will, no matter how fast BW can balance things) and the occasional "Get pooped on by Arena players with their BiS gear in Pug WZ because their partners aren't on yet" horror, I think Arena won't be THAT much of a bother. But the final decision lies with BW, and...well, they have been a bit better but they have a long way to go. I think if they ever decide on something like Arenas, they need to see how rated WZ's turn out first.

Just my opinion.