THE PROBLEM:

I think we can almost all agree that Ilum right now isn't very fun for either side, and sure as hell isn't balanced.

I think the main reason for this is the massive faction imbalance, and I can't really think of any way you can have fun, balanced faction vs faction pvp when one faction immensely outnumbers the other, WoW has tried, but it's never turned out that well.

One solution is to simply put a cap on the number of players that can enter Ilum on either side. Say 20 republics are in ilum, then only 20 imperials could get in at any time. While this would fix the problem you would end up with massive queues for one side, on many servers you simply wouldn't be able to do ilum on most days. While i'm sure there are many republic players that would answer "Just deal with it" I can almost gaurentee that with a system like that people would become incredibly frustrated and you would lose subscribers.

So that leaves us with a problem - how do we have fun pvp without massive queue times when one side outnumbers the other 10:1?

Oh wait, Bioware has already solved this problem, they made it so pvp isn't necessarily faction based. Huttball, while annoying to get 20 times in a row, is far better than simply not being able to pvp.

MY PROPOSAL:

So I've been toying around with this idea for a couple of days now and I think I've come up with a solution.

While a little bit complicated to explain, this is the basic idea.

Instead of a massive faction vs faction war, we would divide the teams up into squads of 4. These would be the teams, we would have multiple four man squads, in my opinion between 8-16 squads in ilum at a time (32-64 players) and it would essentially be a free for all. You could attack anyone in another squad, regardless of their faction.

Each one of these four man squads would be given a mission, to go into the zone (Ilum), and retrieve an objective, essentially a huttball (But you can call it whatever you want for story reasons, an artifact, a datacron, I really don't care) and then take that objective somewhere else in Ilum to score.

BUT AIDAN WAIT! That doesn't sound very fun, won't people just camp the zones where the objectives spawn?

Here's where It gets a little bit creative. Every squad would have their OWN object in a randomly generated location to retrieve.

This is important, every squad would have their own objective that no other squad would be able to take initially, so we would never have a problem with people camping objective spawns.

BUT AIDAN WAIT! Where does the pvp come into play? Won't people just grab their objective, and ignore everyone else in the zone like they did with Ilum 1.0?

Here's the cool part of it, you would be able to take down other squads and steal their objective as they try to score it. As a team that has gotten their objective and is walking it to their drop-off point, you can kill the objective carrier and score their objective yourself.

Essentially, the challenge would be defending your objective carrier as he attempts to score, while taking other people's objectives and scoring them yourself.

I assume we could put the re-spawn time on objectives some 5-10 minutes per squad. If someone takes and scores your objective you would need to wait 5-10 minutes for the objective to re-spawn, or you would have to try and take someone else's objective.

The holder would have a light beam shooting out of their head, to make them a visible target from a ways away.

BUT AIDAN WAIT! Won't people just camp spawn points or scoring points?

To solve this problem I would take a hint from popular FPS games... Random spawns, especially in Free for all games, are a great solution. Squads would only re-spawn when their teammates are also dead, and then the entire four man squad would spawn in the same location as if they had just gotten a medical probe (10 second invis to buff up, etc.)

The same could be done with the scoring locations, have them randomly generated as well.

BUT AIDAN WAIT! I don't want to have to find 4 people every time I pvp, nobody likes me.

I figure that a random queue system would work fine for this as well, get paired with 3 other random people from your server.

It's true that pugs would be at a general disadvantage, but this is true for wzs as well. It's just one of those things that you need to deal with.

This would give us the massive 30 player fights we wanted from ilum, the only difference would be that it's squads of 4 fighting over objectives instead of 28 imperials ganking 2 republic players.

To me at least, It seems like the most balanced, fun, and hassle-free way to do Ilum.

If you have any comments, questions, criticism, or if you just want to show some support please let me know, but please, none of those "This will never happen" comments, I realize Bioware will probably never implement anything they find on the forums but pessimistic people make me angry, and when i'm angry I write in Comic Sans