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Premades are hurting pvp participation


ralphieceaser

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By making the weekly require wins only to count, we have seen an increased amount of premades farming quick wins since premades are always more organized and focused, often times literally steamrolling the enemy team to the point everyone realizes it is pointless and afk.

 

Worse though is the fact that when people keep seeing the same names in the enemy team steamrolling them they are starting to stop quing because it is never fun to have a pug vs premade and there is no point getting destroyed.

 

The premades are causing such a big problem that people stop queing to avoid them

 

And we go from 8v8 warzones to suddenly non stop arena matches on high activity times, either let losses count or ban premades from queing together.

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Tired of these posts.

 

Here are the facts:

You can make your own pre-made in about 2 matches. If your good at pvp and invite people that performed well after the match you can make a premade almost instantly. I have never had a problem getting a group together when I want.

 

Most of the time premades are just friends messing around not really taking things seriously or a group of players that do well in pvp and want to increase the chances of not playing with useless teammates. Quite frankly if your good at pvp finding a group is stupid easy.

 

Queuing Solo is really your choice. Lots of times I que solo because of laziness and still have a positive winrate.

 

99.9% of the time this is a learn to play issue. Quite frankly most people can't pvp that well. You have no ideal how much trolling I do in a warzone. Where I let people get me to 1/4th health before I attack or just stand there and let them wail on me, because they are clicking, backpedaling, or have no concept of how their class works. The average knowledge and application of the SWTOR player base is low.

 

Might sound harsh but its the truth.

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Most of the time premades are just friends messing around not really taking things seriously or a group of players that do well in pvp and want to increase the chances of not playing with useless teammates. Quite frankly if your good at pvp finding a group is stupid easy.

So how great do you imagine the pvp experience is when you have a group of 2-3 friends who know their classes and since they have 5 more players, they are completely able to steamroll the other team that doesnt have any premade or good players in it?

 

Your solution is as usual "just talk to general bro" not realizing the majority of players, do not enjoy interacting with other players for group hence why they prefer qued content and why that has always been more popular because people dont want to deal with the social barrier, which is your solution.

 

You might as well go and tell everyone to start doing OPs and then wonder why nobody follows your "great" solution.

 

 

People are choosing to stop queing while a premade is active than follow your "solution" and that should be a major hint for the problem.

The lack of people is the problem here because it goes from warzones to arenas because premades caused people to stop bothering.

Edited by ralphieceaser
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completely agree that match making is the problem.

 

Yep, if the matchmaking only put premades vs premades, this wouldn’t even be a discussion. Sadly it doesn’t. And while the matchmaking is the root of the problem, BioWare don’t seem to want to fix it. So then it becomes a premade problem.

The solution has always been to put premades in their own queue, like they have for ranked. But BioWare and certain players have always argued against it because they know the pop times would blow out as the dominant premades ended up ruling the queue (just like granked queue is nearly always dead).

And with so few players these days, a seperate queue wouldn’t work now anyway. The only solution if they can’t make the matchmaking work properly is to restrict premade sizes to 2 people or make it a solo only queue like solo ranked.

Edited by TrixxieTriss
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Tired of these posts.

 

Here are the facts:

You can make your own pre-made in about 2 matches. If your good at pvp and invite people that performed well after the match you can make a premade almost instantly. I have never had a problem getting a group together when I want.

 

Most of the time premades are just friends messing around not really taking things seriously or a group of players that do well in pvp and want to increase the chances of not playing with useless teammates. Quite frankly if your good at pvp finding a group is stupid easy.

 

Queuing Solo is really your choice. Lots of times I que solo because of laziness and still have a positive winrate.

 

99.9% of the time this is a learn to play issue. Quite frankly most people can't pvp that well. You have no ideal how much trolling I do in a warzone. Where I let people get me to 1/4th health before I attack or just stand there and let them wail on me, because they are clicking, backpedaling, or have no concept of how their class works. The average knowledge and application of the SWTOR player base is low.

 

Might sound harsh but its the truth.

 

Honestly, most of us are tired of these replies as well.

 

There is no learn to play issues when you have yourself or maybe on other person with you against a trinity premade on comms. Ability knowledge or skill has little to do with it to overcome that advantage. If you honestly think we could beat you, then its you who needs to learn to play. To beat a 4 man coordinated team you need your own 4 man coordinated team, or said team needs to be incredibly bad. Stop making poor excuses.

 

If the game did a better job of balancing such things, premade vs premade and whatnot this would not be an issue in any case, but it doesnt. I quit group queuing save for rare occasions for exactly this reason, its boring, its no contest, 9 out of 10 we win easily and generally win the 10tth as well you just have to actually think a little over watching TV on the side.

 

Play how you wish, but to ignore the obvious advantage is disingenuous. At least be honest about it. Pretending its every else thats bad is simply not factual, no one in this game is that good.

 

Now imagine youre the new player, and we have a lot of them right now, who dips his toe into that pool only to get rofl stomped by that premade, you think hes coming back? Or do you think it becomes a self fulfilling situation where you think pvp sucks or is dead, so you do silly things, and we fail to grow the community?

 

That, as you say, is the harsh truth.

Edited by Floplag
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So how great do you imagine the pvp experience is when you have a group of 2-3 friends who know their classes and since they have 5 more players, they are completely able to steamroll the other team that doesnt have any premade or good players in it?

 

Your solution is as usual "just talk to general bro" not realizing the majority of players, do not enjoy interacting with other players for group hence why they prefer qued content and why that has always been more popular because people dont want to deal with the social barrier, which is your solution.

 

You might as well go and tell everyone to start doing OPs and then wonder why nobody follows your "great" solution.

 

 

People are choosing to stop queing while a premade is active than follow your "solution" and that should be a major hint for the problem.

The lack of people is the problem here because it goes from warzones to arenas because premades caused people to stop bothering.

 

They know, they simply dont care. Its how PvP dies and why Bioware isnt worrying about it, the game isnt the problem, the community is.

Used to be youd see teams grab randoms to try to help them, make new friends, build the community.. anymore they dont give a rats. They have their little group, they only queue with that group, and they could care less about how that affects anyone else.

All these players who claim to be soooo good, and the rest of us need to l2p, but they only run regs in premades... yeah id be really good as basketball playing against 5 year olds too, lol

It isnt unique to swtor by any means, its gaming in general these days.

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Yep, if the matchmaking only put premades vs premades, this wouldn’t even be a discussion. Sadly it doesn’t. And while the matchmaking is the root of the problem, BioWare don’t seem to want to fix it. So then it becomes a premade problem.

The solution has always been to put premades in their own queue, like they have for ranked. But BioWare and certain players have always argued against it because they know the pop times would blow out as the dominant premades ended up ruling the queue (just like granked queue is nearly always dead).

And with so few players these days, a seperate queue wouldn’t work now anyway. The only solution if they can’t make the matchmaking work properly is to restrict premade sizes to 2 people or make it a solo only queue like solo ranked.

 

this so much , i can understand the frustration but we dont have nearly enough players to go about it this way , hence why they mixed jedi and sith to do wzs together because the game was so dead for jedi pvp ques . Also why they made mega servers once all the servers were dying . Sure premades are annoying but at least the match will be over fast .

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They know, they simply dont care. Its how PvP dies and why Bioware isnt worrying about it, the game isnt the problem, the community is.

Used to be youd see teams grab randoms to try to help them, make new friends, build the community.. anymore they dont give a rats. They have their little group, they only queue with that group, and they could care less about how that affects anyone else.

All these players who claim to be soooo good, and the rest of us need to l2p, but they only run regs in premades... yeah id be really good as basketball playing against 5 year olds too, lol

It isnt unique to swtor by any means, its gaming in general these days.

 

BioWare could easily fix this in one of three ways.

 

1. Make matchmaking work to only put premades vs premades (unlikely or they would have already done it)

 

2. Remove premades from the queue entirely and make it a solo queue like ranked (will piss off the premade ROFLSTOMP crowd)

 

3. Restrict premade sizes to 2 man and tweak matchmaking to make it better (This is a compromise so people can still play with a friend and it makes it easier for the matchmaking system to work better)

 

The solutions are not perfect for everyone (except maybe number 1). But we know BioWare can’t make the matchmaking work properly with such a reduced population.

So that leave 2 & 3 as the only real options if BioWare wants regs to continue to have a viable population.

Edited by TrixxieTriss
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BioWare could easily fix this in one of three ways.

 

1. Make matchmaking work to only put premades vs premades (unlikely or they would have already done it)

 

2. Remove premades from the queue entirely and make it a solo queue like ranked (will piss off the premade ROFLSTOMP crowd)

 

3. Restrict premade sizes to 2 man and tweak matchmaking to make it better (This is a compromise so people can still play with a friend and it makes it easier for the matchmaking system to work better)

 

The solutions are not perfect for everyone (except maybe number 1). But we know BioWare can’t make the matchmaking work properly with such a reduced population.

So that leave 2 & 3 as the only real options if BioWare wants regs to continue to have a viable population.

 

Sure, but then queue times go up and every complains about that. Its lose lose for them.

Besides people playing with friends, legitimately, isn't something that should be prevented or limited.

The only one that works if trying to match them against each other, but then you still get a group of people just playing together versus the "teams" scenario and then they dont want to play as the always get racked.

There is no definitive answer, its not that simple.

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Sure, but then queue times go up and every complains about that. Its lose lose for them.

Besides people playing with friends, legitimately, isn't something that should be prevented or limited.

The only one that works if trying to match them against each other, but then you still get a group of people just playing together versus the "teams" scenario and then they dont want to play as the always get racked.

There is no definitive answer, its not that simple.

 

The compromise is obviously still allowing premades, but limiting them to 2 man instead of 4 man. That also eases up pressure on the matchmaking system as well. I highly doubt that would increase queue times. If anything, it should reduce them.

 

There is no golden solution for this underlying issue that the matchmaking system doesn’t work well and has no chance of working properly if player numbers keep declining in the queue.

 

At this point, it’s a catch-22 situation.

They can leave it as is and all the issues that contribute to premades vs solos being unbalanced get worse and we have less and less players and even worse matchmaking. Which increases queue times.

Or they take steps to limit premades and piss off some people, but bring some more back to the queue. Which should decrease queue times.

 

And realistically, how many people who premade will stop playing if they can only group as 2 man? I’m guessing it would be far less than driving away newbie or solo players.

 

My solution is anything from perfect, it’s a compromised bandaid to let reg pvp hobble along a bit longer till it’s dead.

I can’t think of a simpler way to address the problem.

 

BioWares (ChrisS) solution (from Discord) is to increase player numbers. Which is obviously a pipe dream because that’s been their solution for years and we are still waiting.

 

It feels like wishful thinking on ChrisS’s part. Sure they may have things planned for 7.2. But does anyone really have any confidence they can attract “enough” old and new players back into pvp to make matchmaking work properly?

 

I’ve zero confidence they have half a clue how to do that. Look at the stupid changes they’ve made in the last few years to “improve” pvp. None of them have improved it. All the problems are the same or worse and we have far less people playing.

Edited by TrixxieTriss
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This problem has existed since day #1; BW is fine with unfair PVP. Just like they're also fine with having a very diminished subscriber base. It is very telling that even in ranked with the most hardcore players, many of whom have no problem with communication and cooperation to arrange win trading and similar tactics I'm not supposed to spell out on the forums, the queue that is by far the most active is the solo one. When Wow initially released their regular queue just for the grouped players it was dead on arrival. The "if you don't like fighting against premades get your own" argument is an accurate one, given BW's ambivalence, but it has nothing to do with a healthy pvp game in SWTOR. You could make the same argument about game balance, "if you don't like getting 'outplayed' by operatives and mercs just roll your own" - but that's just brushing the problem under the rug.

 

If we couldn't group to pvp in regs my educated guess is queue times would go down and participation would increase. I'm sure for some people it would be a deal breaker. I'm also sure that queues getting shut down by premades for a few hours has also been a dealbreaker for many players. I've heard far more complaints about premades than I have about "bloated ability lists".

Edited by Savej
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Ah, yes, the old "I want easy PvP wins even though I refuse to do any of the things that help my team win," argument.

 

It's a team game, if you show up to a team game with a random group of people that are not a team in any meaningful way you're obviously not truly serious about wanting to win.

 

It's not fundamentally a fairness or quality of play complaint, but a "loot requires effort," complaint.

 

The proper solution, or at least the only one with a shot at working, is bribery.

 

Bioware could implement a lobby where you get opt in rewards for communication and coordination related activities. Roles, groups, objective priorities, probably in a pre- baked UI sort of format. DOTA has this sort of thing for something like 30 seconds after a match is formed but before play starts. It was part of a suite of design elements that were put in to address the anti-social herding cats problems you typically see in computer game PvP.

 

It's possible to design for team building and collaboration, and to bribe players to then use those features, but it takes more than just weekly quest reward amounts being tweaked.

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class make up and balancing the roles in a game are just as important as the question on pre-mades.

 

Yesterday I had game in which my team had zero healers; the other team had 3. a sorc, a mando and a scoundrel. these were not the off heals from a DPS spec character as each used healing skills only available in the heal spec. My team couldnt hardly kill anything because of all the heals. since we had no healers, we lost via attrition. I have no evidence that this team with 3 healers and 5 dps had any groups or premades on it.

 

premades are in theory more coordinated and in theory are more likely to be a trinity group or at least a have a healer. but I see plenty of games go against pre-mades.

 

if the matchmaking could balance out the roles across the teams, but especially healers it goes a long way creating more even matches; pre-mades or not. and the match making system needs to be setup to do well given the realities we have on population, class imbalances and pre-mades

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...

It's not fundamentally a fairness or quality of play complaint, but a "loot requires effort," complaint.

...

 

Disagree. If the game wasn't meant to be played "fairly" while solo it shouldn't offer the "solo queue" option. There's no warnings on the label pointing out that queueing solo is for the "lazy weak-minded saps that should expect to lose". At least you are acknowledging that queueing as a group gives you an advantage vs solo pug teams. And again: the vast majority of players, even the most hardcore, don't like to spend time scheduling and forming groups so they can q for fair fights, they'd rather jump quickly into the action. Many if not most of those that go through the extra effort of grouping will even quit (or, lately, sabotage the game so it will end faster) if they accidentally run into a similar or better premade on the other side.

 

Just like in ranked - if you can effectively Q for solo ranked with a group you are cheating. Because doing that gives you an unfair advantage.

 

And, because this always comes up, just because an activity doesn't guarantee victory doesn't mean it is fair.

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Disagree. If the game wasn't meant to be played "fairly" while solo it shouldn't offer the "solo queue" option. There's no warnings on the label pointing out that queueing solo is for the "lazy weak-minded saps that should expect to lose". At least you are acknowledging that queueing as a group gives you an advantage vs solo pug teams. And again: the vast majority of players, even the most hardcore, don't like to spend time scheduling and forming groups so they can q for fair fights, they'd rather jump quickly into the action. Many if not most of those that go through the extra effort of grouping will even quit (or, lately, sabotage the game so it will end faster) if they accidentally run into a similar or better premade on the other side.

 

Just like in ranked - if you can effectively Q for solo ranked with a group you are cheating. Because doing that gives you an unfair advantage.

 

And, because this always comes up, just because an activity doesn't guarantee victory doesn't mean it is fair.

 

My observation of actual player behavior though, is that "fairness" is not what the complainers for the most part really want. They want to win, most of the time, to get rewards, without putting significant effort into the things that contribute to winning. Learning your class is one of those things, learning other classes is one of those things, and using teamwork is also one of those things.

 

Warzones are fundamentally a team activity. That's why they don't have 1v1 Warzones. You're still allowed to participate even if you do none of the things that help a team win. However, you shouldn't expect to win against people who are doing more things to win, doing them better than you, and doing them consistently.

 

Personally I'm not a super high effort person in Warzones. The thing is, if I'm on a team that gets rolled by a premade, I know that the reason we're getting rolled is because they're putting more effort into doing better at playing a Warzone than we are, and that if we want to win, the solution is to get off our lazy rear ends and counter with an even greater effort of our own. We almost never do, and consequently usually lose because that's the PUG way, but honestly, they're well deserved losses that we could have avoided if we had cared enough to make an effort.

 

If you don't care enough about winning do something about it then you don't care about it all that much. I certainly don't, but I'm at peace with that and if a premade beats a team I'm on, good for them for actually genuinely caring about PvP enough to get good at it. Even the icky social interaction and all the cooties or whatever that come with that. If they keep showing up in queue it's likely that the social interaction isn't fatal, or at least is very slow acting.

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My observation of actual player behavior though, is that "fairness" is not what the complainers for the most part really want. They want to win, most of the time, to get rewards, without putting significant effort into the things that contribute to winning. Learning your class is one of those things, learning other classes is one of those things, and using teamwork is also one of those things.

 

Warzones are fundamentally a team activity. That's why they don't have 1v1 Warzones. You're still allowed to participate even if you do none of the things that help a team win. However, you shouldn't expect to win against people who are doing more things to win, doing them better than you, and doing them consistently.

 

Personally I'm not a super high effort person in Warzones. The thing is, if I'm on a team that gets rolled by a premade, I know that the reason we're getting rolled is because they're putting more effort into doing better at playing a Warzone than we are, and that if we want to win, the solution is to get off our lazy rear ends and counter with an even greater effort of our own. We almost never do, and consequently usually lose because that's the PUG way, but honestly, they're well deserved losses that we could have avoided if we had cared enough to make an effort.

 

If you don't care enough about winning do something about it then you don't care about it all that much. I certainly don't, but I'm at peace with that and if a premade beats a team I'm on, good for them for actually genuinely caring about PvP enough to get good at it. Even the icky social interaction and all the cooties or whatever that come with that. If they keep showing up in queue it's likely that the social interaction isn't fatal, or at least is very slow acting.

 

But one person doesn’t make a team. You seem to think that some solo players are at fault because all or some of their team doesn’t try.

 

You could be the best player in the world and continuously be put with players who don’t learn or don’t try to win or worse, give up and sit in a corner. Why should you be continually punished because of other players attitudes?

 

Add to the fact that Bioware are now going to link your weekly mission (that will now reset every week if you haven’t finished it) to obtaining gear and this is a recipe for disaster for the whole of pvp.

 

Solo players will stop queuing if they can’t complete their weeklies and obtain gear. This will reduce more numbers in the queue, which makes matchmaking even worse.

 

The worst case scenario is you’ll have a couple of rank grade players trolling regs in premades. This will kill the queue really fast, especially when these guys get fully geared and go back to not trying to win.

 

The most popular Ranked queue is the solo queue. Have you ever wondered why it’s more popular than group?

 

And why even have two seperate ranked queues. Why not just put solos against premades in ranked? Because it’s not fair and there would be too much advantage to the premades.

 

So it really is time for BioWare to either remove premades from regs or as a compromise, reduce their size to 2.

Edited by TrixxieTriss
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The thing is, if I'm on a team that gets rolled by a premade, I know that the reason we're getting rolled is because they're putting more effort into doing better at playing a Warzone than we are, and that if we want to win, the solution is to get off our lazy rear ends and counter with an even greater effort of our own.

 

Like do you realize what you are saying? You are saying "yo why doesnt everyone suddenly get better and care to beat the premade", like you dont seem to understand how humans work here at all, might as well ask well tell people that "they can fix climate change if they all magically and instantly agreed to vote for greens in every single country"

 

That is not how humans or online games work.

If anything throughout the history of mmorpgs we know every time developers allowed premades to go into pugs, it hurt pvp participation because it is unfair.

 

People will ALWAYS prefer solo que over organized groups, many will just not bother with group content if a solo que isnt available because they dont want to deal with that social barrier. So you have a majority of players who just want to que and have fun, only for their fun to be destroyed by an organized premade who rolls over them.

 

What people said earlier about the skill level of people is true, there's a lot of bad players, but here's the thing, if a team has 3 less bad players because a 3 player premade joined, the other team is screwed because they are not guaranteed those 3 good players, it could be 6 bad players, 1 good player who just plays for fun and kills and 1 good player that cares about the objective, its a loss and anyone with a brain can see that from the beginning so they leave.

 

Hence why never in the history of mmorpgs has allowing premades to go against solo qued pugs been a good thing, the only people happy about that are premades because they are mostly guaranteed free easy wins, especially with certain classes like operatives in huttball games.

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Ralphie, the fundamental important item that you are completely failing to grasp is this:

 

They are not evil premades polluting your solo-queue, you are a solo player whining that playing as solo it's hard for you to succeed at their group content. The premades are the ones playing the content as intended. Everyone else, including me, is doing the equivalent of soloing MM PvE group content with a companion, because the game does allow it, even if it's not meant to be played that way.

 

This is one of the driving factors of SWTOR's PvP woes. The game design features are all based around the assumption that SWTOR will be like 1.0 to 2.0 era WoW, but with lots more players because wookies and lightsabers are sexier than orcs and swords. The assumption is that all players are hardcore (they'd have to be to put up with the grind), know class mechanics due to the difficulty of PvE leveling content (and of course from getting ganked hundreds of times as they leveled), and are in large vibrant guilds (because the bulk of endgame content is either intolerable or literally unplayable if not in a group of 8 to 40 people working together).

 

Warzones are designed to function under those assumptions. Ditto arenas. Solo queues were added as a sop to people who maybe logged on a bit earlier than the rest of their guild and didn't want to spam the toxicity of fleet chat to put together a group to get into a warzone. After all it should work anyway right? If you have one or two singletons on a team, they already know their classes, are correctly geared, are used to communication and teamwork, and know the map objective. It'll be a little rough, but they'll fill the gaps for groups that are a person or two short for some reason. It'll be fine.

 

SWTOR did not turn out like that from the start, and by design choices over the years the Devs pushed it farther and farther away from those assumptions. After the hardcore and the social players abandoned ship due to content droughts, Bioware pushed to cater to the casual solo player who's after a KOTOR III experience.

 

Despite this the content design has not changed and is still a group content design that no amount of queue tinkering will ever make truly suitable for solo play.

 

Can you have good well designed solo play PvP? Sure. Fortnite and PUBG style battle royale modes are a great example. In large part because they are designed for and marketed to solo PvP players. The design features work well with solo play, because the design intent facilitates that.

 

The problem here is that Bioware either needs to swap out its customer base and get a PvP population that's interested in the team PvP content it has, or they need to realize that over the course of 10 years they have been very successful at driving away the fairly small team play population that they initially had, and make new PvP content designed for solo play, and integrated into the game's reward structures (See duels and world PvP for what happens when the love of solo PvP has to compete against the love of loot).

 

That would be a logical plan for overhauling PvP in SWTOR with an eye toward success. Design for the players you actually have instead of the players you were dreaming about 12 years ago. The devs are even good enough at game design that I think that they'd have a good chance of producing decent content for solo PvP play. However, being logical and likely to work, it's extremely improbable that this would happen because it would also mean admitting that they've been failing on PvP design since the very start of SWTOR development. Or at least failing to design for SWTOR players. The team content is pretty decent for team players, there just aren't many of them playing this game.

 

Minor tweaks to team PvP content result in slightly different team PvP content. If you want solo PvP content, ask the devs to design some PvP content designed for solo players. It would be an excellent idea, and it's what, at least 6 years past due? Would it kill warzones and arenas? Probably, but it would kill them by being a much more popular success, which on the whole would be a good thing.

 

The TLDR I'm trying to get across as someone who has been both a team PvP player and a solo PvP player is this, If you want to play PvP that doesn't heavily advantage teams, you should be looking for content that is not deliberately designed by the game designers to heavily advantage strong teamwork.

 

If you want solo PvP in SWTOR you need to duel, do world PvP, or ask the devs to create the content that you want that currently does not exist in game.

 

The whole situation is messed up and frustrating, but it's not the premades that are messing it up. They're doing their hyper-niche team content the way it's quite literally designed to be done.

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Ralphie, the fundamental important item that you are completely failing to grasp is this:

 

They are not evil premades polluting your solo-queue, you are a solo player whining that playing as solo it's hard for you to succeed at their group content. The premades are the ones playing the content as intended. Everyone else, including me, is doing the equivalent of soloing MM PvE group content with a companion, because the game does allow it, even if it's not meant to be played that way.

 

This is one of the driving factors of SWTOR's PvP woes. The game design features are all based around the assumption that SWTOR will be like 1.0 to 2.0 era WoW, but with lots more players because wookies and lightsabers are sexier than orcs and swords. The assumption is that all players are hardcore (they'd have to be to put up with the grind), know class mechanics due to the difficulty of PvE leveling content (and of course from getting ganked hundreds of times as they leveled), and are in large vibrant guilds (because the bulk of endgame content is either intolerable or literally unplayable if not in a group of 8 to 40 people working together).

 

Warzones are designed to function under those assumptions. Ditto arenas. Solo queues were added as a sop to people who maybe logged on a bit earlier than the rest of their guild and didn't want to spam the toxicity of fleet chat to put together a group to get into a warzone. After all it should work anyway right? If you have one or two singletons on a team, they already know their classes, are correctly geared, are used to communication and teamwork, and know the map objective. It'll be a little rough, but they'll fill the gaps for groups that are a person or two short for some reason. It'll be fine.

 

SWTOR did not turn out like that from the start, and by design choices over the years the Devs pushed it farther and farther away from those assumptions. After the hardcore and the social players abandoned ship due to content droughts, Bioware pushed to cater to the casual solo player who's after a KOTOR III experience.

 

Despite this the content design has not changed and is still a group content design that no amount of queue tinkering will ever make truly suitable for solo play.

 

Can you have good well designed solo play PvP? Sure. Fortnite and PUBG style battle royale modes are a great example. In large part because they are designed for and marketed to solo PvP players. The design features work well with solo play, because the design intent facilitates that.

 

The problem here is that Bioware either needs to swap out its customer base and get a PvP population that's interested in the team PvP content it has, or they need to realize that over the course of 10 years they have been very successful at driving away the fairly small team play population that they initially had, and make new PvP content designed for solo play, and integrated into the game's reward structures (See duels and world PvP for what happens when the love of solo PvP has to compete against the love of loot).

 

That would be a logical plan for overhauling PvP in SWTOR with an eye toward success. Design for the players you actually have instead of the players you were dreaming about 12 years ago. The devs are even good enough at game design that I think that they'd have a good chance of producing decent content for solo PvP play. However, being logical and likely to work, it's extremely improbable that this would happen because it would also mean admitting that they've been failing on PvP design since the very start of SWTOR development. Or at least failing to design for SWTOR players. The team content is pretty decent for team players, there just aren't many of them playing this game.

 

Minor tweaks to team PvP content result in slightly different team PvP content. If you want solo PvP content, ask the devs to design some PvP content designed for solo players. It would be an excellent idea, and it's what, at least 6 years past due? Would it kill warzones and arenas? Probably, but it would kill them by being a much more popular success, which on the whole would be a good thing.

 

The TLDR I'm trying to get across as someone who has been both a team PvP player and a solo PvP player is this, If you want to play PvP that doesn't heavily advantage teams, you should be looking for content that is not deliberately designed by the game designers to heavily advantage strong teamwork.

 

If you want solo PvP in SWTOR you need to duel, do world PvP, or ask the devs to create the content that you want that currently does not exist in game.

 

The whole situation is messed up and frustrating, but it's not the premades that are messing it up. They're doing their hyper-niche team content the way it's quite literally designed to be done.

 

Sorry, but where did you get this misconception that playing solo is like playing pve with a comp and the only proper way to play 8man pvp is in 4man premades?

If the pvp game was meant to mainly accommodate premades, why don’t we have 8man premades instead of 4man premades? If we follow your rationale, then solo ranked should not have its own queue either. It should only be group and if people want to solo ranked they accept they will be pitted against premades.

 

This whole misconception that pvp in MMOs must have premades vs solo players is very outdated and it’s why “actual” pvp designed games have moved away from that model. Because it’s not a fair system, no matter what argument people make. Trying to argue otherwise is disingenuous.

 

BioWare should never have had a an all inclusive queue to start with. It should have been 1 queue for premades and one for Solo. And if queue times got too long for premades, it would have answered the question of what type is more popular and fair.

 

Sadly, BioWare didn’t do this. So we have people who say they need premades to play. My answer to that is, go play group ranked. Oh, but hang on, group ranked doesn’t pop because people don’t like having premades vs premade. They prefer premade vs solo so they have an unfair advantage.

 

It’s human nature to want an advantage over other competitors when they are t good enough. That’s why we have hackers and win traders and exploiters and cheats in every type of game or sport. Wether it’s drug cheats in sport or people hacking a computer game, people who can’t win legitimately look for a crutch to boost their performance or ego.

 

And while premades aren’t cheating, some purposely seek to have an unfair advantage in regs. And yes, we’ve all heard the social arguments of playing with friends. I acknowledge that is a real thing and I think any reasonable person understands that’s a legit request. But what we don’t accept is the baseless arguments that solo players are whining about it being unfair because the system can’t matchmake premades vs premades properly.

 

BioWare have had every opportunity in the last 9 years to fix this matchmaking and the queue system so that premades only play other premades 99% of the time. But they have failed to make this work.

 

In the mean time, as more and more people leave the game, the matchmaking gets worse. The discrepancy in matchmaking and the effects of premades are magnified. So much so that it now stops more people playing than if they removed the premade system. Which by the way I predicted would reach this point 5 years ago if BioWare didn’t do something about it.

 

You can try and justify why they should keep premades vs pugs all you want. But at the end of the day it will keep driving more and more people from pvp. Then it won’t pop at all.

I think more people would come back to reg pvp if BioWare removed premades than would leave. But I’m also fully aware that this is a social game and some allowances should be made to play with friends. BioWare can still address this by using a compromise and reduce premade sizes to 2 man.

Edited by TrixxieTriss
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"You can try and justify why they should keep premades vs pugs all you want. But at the end of the day it will keep driving more and more people from pvp. Then it won’t pop at all.

I think more people would come back to reg pvp if BioWare removed premades than would leave. But I’m also fully aware that this is a social game and some allowances should be made to play with friends. BioWare can still address this by using a compromise and reduce premade sizes to 2 man."

 

Trixie They should hire you.

 

Jumped back in yesterday after a year away and there were four people teamed up. You spawned you got jumped and killed by the same four over and over. Anyway going to unsub again till they fix this. No sense in arguing with people about this.. no one is ever going to give up their advantage. They will continue to destroy the game then blame BIO for never doing anything about it.

 

It's sad not only is pvp dead but the pvp forums are dead. People have given up on this.

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