We have the questions, we have the participants, we have the date.

For those who are unfamiliar my name is Snave and I've previously hosted an interview with Eric Musco about the state of PvP which can be found here -

This will be a continuation of that interview focusing around certain key areas. Namely Class Balance, Match Making, "Better Than Cross Server" and the PvP community.

I made a previous thread asking for suggestions and letting people know it was happening. Happily (for me) the VAST majority of topics were already covered in the questions I'd sent over to be answered. To set expectations realistically AND PLEASE READ THIS BECAUSE I KNOW YOU ALL HAVE A HISTORY OF NOT READING STUFF, there will be no specific questions like why are mercs bad or why is tank tunnel / hard swap the only valid tactics in TR. These will be broad strokes. There will also be no announcements during the interview or commitments, so no "X is happening on Y date" and no "X is something we will be implementing soonTM".

Do I think this will yield all the answers the PvP community has wanted? No. But it's going to be direct communication, it's going to be points the majority have wanted raised and it's going to hopefully effectively communicate a lot of frustrations we all have.

The interview will be live streamed on my channel - http://www.hitbox.tv/Snave - and I hope to see you all there.

Any suggestions or queries can be emailed to me snave@torcommunity.com

Snave, will you have this recorded somewhere to watch later?

Yeah it'll be on my VODs and I'll slap it on youtube

Snave please ask Musco if he is up for the challenge to play sentinel/maruder in pvp. I would like to know how he thinks balance melee vs range is.

You know Eric doesn't design the game right?

I don't think anyone is designing this game anymore, the PVP = Stun > burst > death.

It is more like Stun Wars since 2011 that PVP.

Most of the time in PVP you are stunlocked to death and then waiting for spawn. No actual gameplay.

I don't think anyone is designing this game anymore, the PVP = Stun > burst > death.

It is more like Stun Wars since 2011 that PVP.

 

Most of the time in PVP you are stunlocked to death and then waiting for spawn. No actual gameplay.

I wish that was the biggest problem with PvP. Thing is, it isn't really. Not with the healer/tank meta thats been common the past year or 2. A well timed stun may be your only hope TBH.

Some info on why they just let Galactic Starfighter die would be nice.

They answered this in the marathon they had. They want more people to play it before they give it attention... Which is like asking people to give you money before showing them a product.

This will apparently get fixed tomorrow but FYI the interview IS ON THE 15TH. IT'S A WEDNESDAY.

Hi Snave, I know the questions, etc, have been negotiated already, but this issue didn't start to be a major problem till a few weeks ago and is even worse this week.

Can you please ask Eric about the mass exodus of pvpers in the last few months and what they might be doing to stem the flow or bring them back. (I'm on Harbinger, supposedly the most populated server in the NA)

I know there are those who say it's not so bad, but in the last 3 weeks I have seen pop times in my time zones, prime time, drop fron 1-5 mins, to 30mins - 3hours. Of course this isn't American prime time, it's APAC and I realise that our prime time is rather late for a lot of NA players.

Except that I belong to a NA guild, 3 months ago the PVP in my time zone was nearly instant pops. Most of the players were NA people too. I played with multiple people from heaps of guilds. All these people have stopped playing.

Even at the crosser over Timezone border at what could still be called a reasonable hour in NA, there is a huge drop in actual player numbers. This is on a weekend as well, not even during the week, which is even worse.

Pops might still be ok in NA prime time, I play then too, but that's because there is small dedicated group playing at that time. What happens when they start to leave too?

Last night I waited 3 hours for mid lvl PVP to pop, when it did there was 4 on our team and 6 on the other. All of us had been waiting 3 hours, why didn't the queue start putting us into arena till more people were available for 8s.

Even when I swapped to 65s after that match, I got 2 pops in 30 mins, then nothing till I eventually logged off 2 hours later.

I know Subscriptions are at there highest in years, but these are story people, what about the PVP subscribers that are leaving the game? Why not keep all subscribers and have even more people?

Also, anyone who frequents the PVP forum will have noticed the huge reduction in activity. It's nearly as much of a ghost town here.

Most of my guild have stopped playing because of the decline, I'm sure other people are leaving for the same reason, it's now become a snow ball effect.

I keep getting asked by my friends and guildies to come to WoW and Overwatch to play PVP. I am reluctant to go back to WoW as it seems child like in comparison. But I've reactivated my Blizzard account and downloaded it. I haven't restarted my subscription, but I'm close to it. If I do I will be cancelling 3 swtor subscription from my house hold.

Anyway, can you see if you can squeeze this question in, I'm sure you can see how this is now an urgent matter.

Good interview Snave. 😊💋

Is there a possibility you might be able to list the key question points and what Eric's answers were?

Good interview Snave. 😊💋

 

Is there a possibility you might be able to list the key question points and what Eric's answers were?

Too bad Snave's interviews aren't big enough to get picked up by Dulfy's radar. Dulfy's post stream summaries are top notch.

I keep getting asked by my friends and guildies to come to WoW and Overwatch to play PVP. I am reluctant to go back to WoW as it seems child like in comparison. But I've reactivated my Blizzard account and downloaded it. I haven't restarted my subscription, but I'm close to it. If I do I will be cancelling 3 swtor subscription from my house hold.

I only logged in twice during May to send mail to a former guild leader. He moved to Harbinger but still checks his mail on POT5.

Please ask why they have nerfed force leap in the endzone for Juggs in Quesh Huttball. It was not needed and has broken the map for this class

I find it interesting that Eric quickly responded to Svave's question on this topic by saying that it definitely is a bug, but still hasn't posted a response in the forum thread that was created to discuss this topic.

I understand that he may not know when the bug will be fixed, but it would be nice if he at least stopped sipping his water long enough to post an official reply confirming BioWare's knowledge of the bug, and letting people know that they will work to fix it.

Here's a summary of the interview that was written up by u/bstr413 over on the swtor sub reddit:

Couple of points from the stream:

They receive some conflicting info on class balance even though the public generally thinks a class is OP or underperforming. In these cases, they wait a while to see what happens. His example are snipers: a couple of snipers were top of the Ranked leaderboard, but many were very low. Their other metrics suggested that snipers should be higher due to the balance at that time. They waited and over the ranked season they saw the other snipers increase in rank.

They also wait for some time to see if a balance problem is as bad as it seems at first glance. They find that a lot of small balance issues tend to fix themselves. (Larger ones need a patch typically.)

They are looking to announce class balancing way a head of time and give reasonings like they did with the last patch. Hopefully that will allow people to see their reasoning even if they don't like the changes.

Putting stuff on the PTS is not as easy as players like to think. (Mostly seems to be the fact that you would then have to make the deadline for having a patch done to a month or so ahead of release.) They also see very low actual playing participation on PTS most of the time. EDIT: And typically these are only the hardcore players when they want to balance for both casual and hardcore.

They don't like to make class balance right before an expansion / major overhaul of the class balance scene.

No plans to separate PvP and PvE class balance.

Some classes are on the top of the leaderboard, but have bad win/loss balance overall. They tend look at the overall average of classes to balance. Their fictitious example: Sorcs topping the leaderboard, but have a slightly below average win/loss balance overall. EDIT: It was a fictitious example: I missed that part when I was listening.

Skanktanking and offhealing is a problem they are currently discussing. They are looking at solving the whole problem and not just "band-aiding" it.

New abilities in 4.0 were an exception, not the new norm. They wanted all classes (except Gunslinger / Snipers) to have more mobility, not just some of them. New abilities will be more unique.

If they determine that they need a balance change, they do them "when they can" and preferably between Ranked seasons. They try to make many small change patches instead of general sweeping changes. (3.0 was an exception of course.)

Rewards for PTS have just encouraged most people to do the bare minimum to get the reward and not actually "test" the content. It does reward those that always do PTS though.

All intentional changes that aren't fixing exploits should be in the Patch Notes. Anything that isn't in the Patch Notes is a bug "99%" of the time if it doesn't fix an exploit.

Example: Not being able to leap to anyone on the Huttball goal line is a recent bug. Fixing the Sorc Barrier bug was very likely intentional and was fixing an exploit.

They know of the issue of premades in PvP. Any solution they came up with so far slows down queue pops. A fast queue pop is the biggest goal of the devs; the biggest complaint of players is a slow queue pop. The second biggest complaint for regular PvP is premades though.

No Ranked 8v8 PvP in the near future due to the above issue. EDIT: But Eric wished that it would come back.

They are working on adding cross-faction to more Warzones. Huttball is their first target since it is the easiest to do (no changes to VOs.)

Eric: "I had to throw in a Starfighter reference." Snave: laughs "Shout out to the 1 player playing Starfighter."

Still working on the "better than cross-server."

They had hoped that more people would move into PvP instances than what they are seeing.

Players killed the PvP servers: they decided to move off the servers.

4.X has more new content than other post-expansion periods. However, some players don't like the kind of content they added (i.e. almost all single-player.)

Eric doesn't communicate as much as he could because he doesn't like to give "not answers" or communications that don't really give any information. Example: he doesn't answer threads about new ops since he has no news about new ops yet.

They cannot officially promote community content with curse words in it due to the game having a "Teen" rating and ESRB regulations. That is why they don't promote many of the fan sites and streamers out there. (EDIT: They also cannot promote events and streams that give out prizes without a bunch of US regulations.)

No plans on bringing back the PvP reps. Instead, they will bring in knowledgeable players to test big changes instead.

Players will question truthful official news from BioWare and not question false information from players.

Example: Many people that complained that they didn't have early access to KotFE were actually playing KotFE during early access at that time. Also, people stated that BioWare were banning people for using the free transfers when they were not.

This season in Ranked has had the highest number of hackers in it so far. Since the post last month asking for reports on these hackers, many people have reported these hackers and many of them have been punished.

At the same time, this season has seen a very low number of win-traders, partly due to the harsh punishments they received for the last few seasons.

Eric isn't even sitting in his desk in the EA Play picture. It is not their entire office. They just gathered some people in part of their office to get a group shot.

Too bad Snave's interviews aren't big enough to get picked up by Dulfy's radar. Dulfy's post stream summaries are top notch.

 

I played the Overwatch beta instead of the May 4th double exp event.

I only logged in twice during May to send mail to a former guild leader. He moved to Harbinger but still checks his mail on POT5.

I resubbed to wow again, but after trying to find addons to setup my GUI, spending 2 hours doing it and not being happy with the result I went back to play some swtor.

Why the hell can blizzard make a customisable GUI like swtor. It's the one thing the Devs have done better in this game. Finding third party addons is a pain and has put me right off it again

I find it interesting that Eric quickly responded to Svave's question on this topic by saying that it definitely is a bug, but still hasn't posted a response in the forum thread that was created to discuss this topic.

 

I understand that he may not know when the bug will be fixed, but it would be nice if he at least stopped sipping his water long enough to post an official reply confirming BioWare's knowledge of the bug, and letting people know that they will work to fix it.

Yeah it would be good. Not everyone watched Snaves interview

Oh man! I thought I was the only one. I absolutely despise Mag Shot.

 

Rail shot animation/sound..... /shudder, so nice!

Especially if you you get the killing blow with it.

I know man. The feelings about MS are nothing but pure hate.

Here's a summary of the interview that was written up by u/bstr413 over on the swtor sub reddit:

 

All intentional changes that aren't fixing exploits should be in the Patch Notes. Anything that isn't in the Patch Notes is a bug "99%" of the time if it doesn't fix an exploit.

 

Example: Not being able to leap to anyone on the Huttball goal line is a recent bug. Fixing the Sorc Barrier bug was very likely intentional and was fixing an exploit.

 

Hi Snave,

Not sure if you're reading this thread anymore but I wanted to ask if you have heard anything from Eric about the Huttball leap issue. It still isn't fixed and people are saying that Eric was mistaken, it's not a bug and is now working as intended.

Also PVP in the US is dying fast. Prime still seems ok, but out side of it the pops have died in just the last 3 months and are getting extremely long. I play in the APAC region. 3 months ago in our prime time we had 2-5 min pops. Now they are between 20 mins to 1+ hours. A lot of the people I played with too were US players, so it's not the time of day issue.

My whole PVP guild has quite the game in the last 3 months for multiple reasons. But one is the slow pop. Even though US prime time pops still seem OK. I think they may just be masking the underlying problem that our PVP population is dying at an alarming rate.

I know you mentioned to Eric about Cross faction PVP and he gave a soft response. Is there anyway you can bring this up with him again. While it won't be a golden bullet to fix the drop in players, it can be a part of the solution. With possible server merges to harbinger or free transfers to harbinger only so pvpers can move to the most populated server in the US. I say Harbinger because the west coast is the only viable location for APAC players to play and not get an extra 100+ ms increase over our already 180-300ms connections.

Anyway, I hope this gets to you and I hope you're well.

Cheers

Trixxie 😘