The Old Republic at E3 2012!

Proper diminishing returns would have made it pointless, with it kill trading in WAR only worked if you did 100% of the damage, were a lot lower in rank AND had a large pool of people to line up to die (which made it effectively pointless, over actually fighting, for everyone but gold farmers).

But again the utterly horrible design of the zone was also largely to blame, there wasn't enough reward for winning or losing or indeed a clear way to win or lose really.

I could have seen it from a dev team that had never been anywhere near an RvR game, but just playing an RvR game would have allowed most people to design a better systems, never mind that many of the people working on SWTOR had worked on WAR (and that Biware was running WAR).

Bioware run war but mythic created it, like i said there was little to no need to trade kills in war, most the time if you were doing it you would get your head kicked in by someone else walking passed making trading kills pointless exercise, the main objective in war were to attack the main citys by fort and land control on a direct path to citys. Added to that if you tried to gank in war pvp areas you got turned into a chicken and kicked up the butt.

The ranks here were to prestiges to ignore for any pvper worth there salt due to the box's and gear, and thats where like i said it fell down, there was no end objective, holding the zone itself had no objective really. you wernt hindered by not controlling it to a great degree, there was no objective beyond it and gear was tied to much rank for valor to be the only objective of it.

Bioware expected people to want to rvr simply because of the films, i doubt they ever expected this http://youtu.be/vaLcHRApMyM

Mythic devs worked on SWTOR, transfering over during the Mythic EA > Bioware-Mythic EA > Bioware EA phase.

Kill trading was largely pointless because of dimishing returns leading to 0 renown per kill, if you wanted to do it I suppose you could just find an out of the way non-RvR basin place and do it (which is what gold farmers did do), but it was largely pointless because you made MORE renown playing NOT by farming( unless you had a 24/7 botting system in place like gold/renown farmers did). Some did kill trade for drops (not renown), however a lot of people got banned for that, and in the end they largely changed the system to change that too.

There was no point ganking for renown (even without the chicken debuff) because again you got no realistic renown for it anyway.

If they'd had WARs system there'd have been much less reward for kill trading, and if they'd had an RvR structure that was fit for purpose, then there'd have been even less so.

Renown Rank was the most important thing in WAR btw, without it you couldn't wear a lot of gear (you could PvE for some equiverlent), and later on Renown Rank even gave you an effective "level", so there was all the reward in the world for getting higher Renown Rank, just not much reward for trying to do it by kill trading.


Which again is why I'm baffled as to why SWTORs PvP and RvR seemed to taken nothing at all from WAR (or indeed any prior MMORPG). WARs CC system worked much better than the overly complex and generally not fit for purpose resolve system in SWTOR.

Gabe being here and all of mythic that created warhammer being here are totally different things, get over the warhammer link because as far as i know only gabe is from there, the warhammer system wouldnt work here, maps are setup wrong and to impliment that would require a whole reworking of maps and thats worse as both sides maps through leveling are not shared. Best game to take the ideas from is wow as wierd as it sounds.

Ganking has never been done for anything apart from harrasment, trading kills happened and there is no getting away with it, illum imploded faster then a rabit eating a hand grenade because there was nothing else todo but gain ranks. The den is still fine btw.

I'm not saying they should have designed the whole of SWTOR like WAR.

I'm saying that I can't understand how (given they ran WAR, had devs that built WAR and surely at some time must have had some devs that had played WAR) that the could build an RvR basin that included not one thing learnt from WAR or deemed to be successful in WAR.

But yes, they seemed to ignore other games too, such as DAoC or WoW (even the orginal Alterac Valley is decades ahead of what went Live on Ilum ), even LOTRO has a better RvR basin than Ilum was, and again not by a small margin.

Here is the thing, illum is exactly the same as a war basin, exactly, the difference is it leads to nothing.

Most successful RvR basins have a variaty of terrain and a lattice of points to capture and/or hold leading to further major points and usually a final large capture.

Often this can lead to another zone (WAR or PS), but equally it can just lead to a reset or period of being locked before a reset.

But almost always there is a goal and a way to win, no matter how temporary.


If they ever bring ground based RvR back to SWTOR, hopefully it will be along those lines.

There is no world PvP because the community does not seek it out. If you want to spark some world PvP, start camping in an enemy heroic area or make an ops group to go raid an enemy base.