a fair concern here, bioware: are you making the arena in such a way where...

Again, if they do not have death cause decay, and base ratings on performance instead of death balance will not be as much of an issue.

You would be ranked, under this suggestion, based on things like the following....


Hybrid Arena - Nar Shadaa

Both PVE and PVP players can compete. You can choose either to face real players or NPCs. NPC bouts lock out PVP flagged players from competing.

This is a small open battle arena. Players are ranked based on the following criteria...

Most healing done during the battle
Most damage dealt
Most damage received without dying
Most attacks avoided or parried
Most CC abilities used successfully (based on incapacitation time)

4 opponents, either 8 players or 4 players and 4 NPC bosses of increasing difficulty. Players get to choose which bosses to face, and leader boards keep track of which bosses or players you face and your results.

This option is balance locked to avoid Arena implementation pitfalls...any balance issues that exist are ignored. Players are required to learn how to adapt to imbalance on their own. There are no direct rewards for participation, other than perhaps reputation. Death causes no decay, nor do you "win" or "lose" the battle if you die or kill opponents.

My thread where I suggest ways to improve and spice up PVP

Hey bro didn't matches have a time limit of 25 minutes?

Sorry but with all due respect to Rob Pardo and Blizzard he is completely BS there.
if he regret so much for arenas why not just remove them from WoW all together? personally, arenas is the reason I played WoW for so long.
to be completely frank, the balancing team for WoW is just awful, Rob just looking where to point his finger.
they really should have taken some advices and tips from starcraft 1/2 and warcraft 3 balancing teams on "how to balance a game".
I still remember it like night and day, every time WoW started to look somewhat balanced after so many patchs, they introduce new expansion with crazy new abilities and total revamp to the talents and messed the whole balance again.
and the funny part is that every time you could see just from the info of the beta leaks how bad it will be, yet blizzard oblivious to it, until it finally comes out and they behold the horrific statistics

give me a break rob, pull that nonsense on someone that didn't play WoW as long as I did.

I never heard them confirm there would be arenas. When and where did they say that?

The only thing I heard about PvP was that "2.4 will have stuff that ranked players can definitely look forward to". And I was under the impression that meant Season 1 and maybe solo-queuing for ranked. Perhaps another warzone, if we're really lucky.

Can someone post a link where they said there would be arenas?

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=652060

Also this looks pretty interesting if it's true.

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=652610

Balance hell? We are ALREADY THERE

Operatives: best healers as long as I can remember, dps terribad since early nerfs, rolling broke as hell
Mercs: bad at everything since early nerfs, slightly improved in 2.0 but still not quite there from what I hear
Sins: subpar at everything but people are still somehow crying for sin nerfs in warzones
Smash: top possible dps in warzones since 1.4 (over a year now iirc)
Sniper: rolling completely broke this class into godlike status

and so on.

Arenas as they are in wow will kill SWTOR. There is too much QQ about PvP balance now.. you put a microscope on it and you can just shut down the game.

EA needs this game to make money... they are not going to do the same thing blizzard openly admitted was a mistake to do.

Nerf heals, nerf shadows dps, nerf marauder's defense, nerf all gunslingers tools, and add CD on scramper for ops. Don't touch anything else. Now you can release arenas.

Most of all nerf heals. Can't believe it didn't happen yet, it ruins pvp. I'm tired to see 4 heals (and 4 shadows) in each team in every WZ. Just reduce 10% heals via bolster and it's done, not that hard, is it?

hey bro. maybe now. but at the time they couldn't have. I checked the time..bro

Since ToR is consistently referred to as a WoW clone I think the knee jerk reaction is that BioWare would somehow follow a similar problematic path as Blizzard did with arenas which is presumptuous.

The argument "Blizzard said it was a mistake so why bother" is irrational.

I would applaud BioWare if they could find a solution to making arenas work without the class imbalance even if they only offered titles, gear and weapon skins.
The big problem with Blizzard was that they offered a whole separate tier of pvp rewards and by the time they realized they're mistake it was too late the genie was already out of the bottle.

If anyone has experienced warzones where people completely ignore the objective, because they are focused on death matching (and I know you have), you can see that this style of play is attractive to many people.

I say bring it on just learn from Blizzards mistakes.