Saturday, January 21, 2012

Was Ilum and SWTOR's Endgame PvP Content Rushed?





Since launch, the planet Ilum has caused much concern for BioWare and the players of Star Wars the Old Republic. From overall performance issues, loopholes in the daily PvP quests, to "bots" farming high end loot chests while away from keyboard, Ilum has raised alot of issues with the player base.

With yesterday's 1.1 patch, players are no longer able to "trade off" with the other faction in order to complete their PvP daily quests. They now HAVE to PvP to complete the PvP daily.

As a result, players from the Sith Empire have now found another loophole. It became apparent that they were farming Valor (PvP Rank) by simply completing quests while inside the actual Republic Base. Some players made it all the way to rank 60 in just one day by taking advantage of a mechanic that was not intended to exist. Sith players going inside of the Republic Base were to be killed almost instantly, but this was not the case, and the damage has been done. In turn, there was nothing similar for the Republic players to take advantage of.

Many Republic players are claiming that the gap has already been breached, and many of the Imperial players have literally cheated their way to the top by taking advantage of this exploit. They are now able to use alot of the top end gear, leaving the Republic players months behind.
Players have threatened to cancel their accounts, and some are demanding a roll-back to make the stage even once again.

Today, in response, BioWare is implementing an emergency patch which will eliminate Imperial players from being able to go inside of the Republic Base without immediate death. Whether they take action or not on those players who took advantage of this exploit remains to be seen. It is uncertain at this time if they will roll back Valor ranks on these players as well.

Has the damage been done? Will the players involved see their Valor ranks rolled back? Is it fair to leave it as is?

With any MMO it will always be a work in progress. Some are calling yesterday's 1.1 patch the worst patch in MMO history. While myself being a former Star Wars Galaxies player, I can definitely beg to differ. However, there are many players who are dedicated to PvP and are quite upset over what took place yesterday. Hopefully BioWare will take some sort of action to even out the scales and make the players happy.

With this being said, do you feel SWTOR's end game PvP content or even the planet Ilum as a whole were rushed to live? Would more beta time have revealed some of these problems before the player base got involved? Should the PvP on Ilum have been instanced like the warzones?

More to come as we see what BioWare has in store with the emergency patch going in right now at the time of this post.

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