Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Another Fucking Essay About Star Wars: The Old Republic!

I keep writing about Star Wars: The Old Republic, even when I’ve got other things going on. It’s just such a rich experience, with so many dimensions to explore. You can examine it from a sociological perspective, a thematic perspective, explore the story of the main class plots, the collective story that the factions develop across worlds, stories that collide and interlock between the Republic and the Empire. You can look at the way the free-to-play model is supposedly going to work, the way that vanity items factor into late-game play as an incentive, the way that content is being doled out through updates. You can discuss the way subscribers are being rewarded in nearly unprecedented ways for their loyalty while simultaneously scattering their voices in collective outcry at the raw bullshit they’ve been forced to put up with.

But lately what I’ve been doing, in the latest iteration on my Star Wars chores, has been player versus player combat, a distinct and profound SW:TOR experience all its own.

Ages ago, World of Warcraft introduced a new and exciting concept to the MMO universe: Battlegrounds. PvP was no longer a somewhat consensual contract players entered into in the game world at large with total strangers for petty cash and bragging rights. Instead, players could shimmy on into a particular section of map, wait in a very real line and then enter an arena with some of their friends (but far more likely a group of anonymous assholes) and earn brownie points towards buying PvP specific gear. There were some obvious problems here: the nature of Battlegrounds forced players into one area where they had to wait for extended periods of time, the rewards, especially at first, were a bit lackluster and progress was unbearably slow for casual players. Power creep from the rewards would eventually ruin any semblance of balance, and if it was ever restored it came far, far after my time, but the idea of instanced PvP zones that treated combat in MMOs as a sport was a brilliant idea, even if its implementation was problematic.

Fast-forward to Star Wars: The Old Republic and its Warzones, which are essentially the latest (and I’d say greatest) iteration on the concept behind Battlegrounds. Unlike Battlegrounds, which had shifting level caps, imbalances and power creep issues which kept the weak weak and allowed the strong to grow ever stronger, Warzones reward every player, even the losers, with delicious delicious commendations and valor (PvP specific experience points) that then let them buy into a system of player versus player gear specially designed for end-game PvP combat (and arguably not too useful outside of that). Warzones also temporarily shift player statistics to level 50 regardless of a player’s level at any given moment, so even a fresh level 12 character can still participate in epic e-sports combat with the big boys. It’s not perfect (it really shows when a new healer fails miserably mid-fight, or when an operative or a sorcerer doesn’t use an interrupting or stunning ability you’d expect them to have bound to their primary task-bar by late-game) but it’s better than new players simply being railroaded by veterans who have had a great deal more time to build their characters into fearsome engines of death and destruction. That still happens, a lot, but the law of averages means that your brand new smuggler who just selected his specialized class will still be able to do some hurt to his enemies, even if he’s less impressive than his capped out, tricked out vanguard ally.

But the real revolution heralded by Warzones is that they’re not tied to a specific geographic location. There are still specific areas reserved for PvP combat and PvP combat in faction shared areas for consenting adults, but for Warzone play players simply choose to enter a server-wide queue, regardless of where they are, and then get a chance to duke it out with one another once enough people have queued up. Clearing out trash mobs, running dailies for commendations and grinding cash is all very do-able while queued for PvP, so participating in PvP action doesn’t necessarily mean taking a break from your day-to-day activities. Paired with a series of daily and weekly quests with humbly generous rewards, especially when you consider the PvP systems of other games, SW:TOR takes PvP in an impressive new direction, attempting to trim out most of the dross that keeps even somewhat casual players out of it.

It’s telling, then, that PvP is still an all too often grueling experience, despite all these wondrous iterations.

See, the main problem with MMOs for me is people. People are fucking awful. Give them anonymity in a fantasy environment and they get much, much worse. MMOs are a case study plumbing the depths of this misery, a sounding test of just how shitty people can become. To be fair, SW:TOR is actually a great deal more moderate in its asshole content than most games, but PvP, by its very nature, seems to be a lightning rod to the various internet people who I normally go out of my way to avoid. When they aren’t just incompetent, they’re usually a balance of incompetent and antisocial, screaming epithets at strangers, excoriating their teammate’s performance without a single redemptive or edifying comment and generally just acting like douchebags. A friendly face is an unusual occurrence in a PvP match, and a competent randomly arranged team is so unusual that the weekly quest to acquire nine wins almost always takes me nearly a full week. It can take a even longer if I’m particularly unlucky.

Still, even if the increased dickhead quotient does make PvP an unpleasant endeavor, it’s telling that I’m still lining up to play matches night after night. Because, as awful as people are, PvP in SW:TOR is fucking amazing.

Alongside all of the incredible, devastating abilities you develop while you build your character to meticulously dismantle enemies, there are skills that seem almost totally useless. The Bounty Hunter’s stealth reveal, the Sith Warrior’s anti-healing debuff and movement slow, these are just the powers I’m familiar with from maxing out two characters, but they’re absolutely useless outside of PvP. Within PvP they’re absolutely critical. Good luck winning a ground of Huttball if your team doesn’t know how to slow properly, and good luck defending Civil War control points if you can’t detect the Sith Assassin creeping up right behind you. A specialized infrastructure, parallel and applicable to the one you develop for general combat, exists only seemingly only to serve PvP, and there’s at least one skill tree (the Sith Warrior’s shared Rage tree) seems specifically suited to PvP combat.

And then there’s the chaos and action at work in PvP. It’s a spectacle to behold. Even when it devolves into a fearsome, fucked up scrum for a Huttball or a disorganized clusterfuck surrounding a turret control point, there’s something magical about watching lightsabers swish, force powers glitter and blaster bolts fly. Even with the pervasive balance issues specific to PvP and the strange PvP ecology/economy at work thanks to the somewhat obtuse Expertise system (which seems to plateau rapidly, but still prove absolutely necessary to gear up if you want to participate in PvP combat), it’s still a great way to spend an hour or two blowing off steam.

And the progression is wonderfully paced. Warzone commendations stack up fast: I’ve been playing for less than a month, and I’m now missing only two pieces from my Battlemaster gear set, the standard late-game casual PvP equipment set. I expect to have those in hand within a week play. Then I’ll move on to the War Hero gear, which is a great deal more challenging to acquire (though it does rival Rakata gear in effectiveness).

So… I guess what I’m really saying is that I like SW:TOR’s PvP system. A lot. Enough that I plan to keep playing it for the foreseeable future, racking up as many ranked commendations as I can until I’ve got all the War Hero gear I want. Which, given the impressive cost of most of the choicest pieces, could take quite a while. Which is an endorsement, in a twisted way: SW:TOR has found a way to make me endure the worst part of an MMO (people) by making its most ephemeral element (PvP) a structurally significant part of the game which is both fun (even when I lose) and rewarding (even when I lose?!) to play. It’s kind of an incredible accomplishment, rooted in a game that is racing to adapt its business model to an uncertain future where MMOs shift from subscriber based models to free-to-play. But that’s a whole other story, though I will say that I see PvP as an integral factor in SW:TOR’s survival.