At the London MCM Expo held on May 26th, there was a SWTOR panel with Emmanuel Lusinchi that focused on some highlights of Game Update 1.3. Some interesting points were revealed. The entire panel can be seen on Gamespot’s Twitch TV. A very awesome transcribe of the panel can also be found over at Dulfy’s site.
One of the most interesting bits, I found, was regarding the future implementation of ranked warzones. Click “continue reading” to find out what went on.
Here’s the question and its paired response:
Q: What is happening with ranked warzones? They were suppose to be in 1.3, but they are not?
A: Oh no, it’s a warzone question! Ranked warzones, we added them in 1.2 to the PTS. You can have a very good design on paper and it is a very good design when you prototype it, and when you put it with the rest of the game you realize that it is not that good. The problem with ranked warzones we found just before we released 1.2 was that we let people just queue by themselves for ranked warzones. When you have ranked warzones, the important thing is your rank goes up and down based on your wins/loss. Something that is very personal, your rank, was in the hands of something so complete strangers that you have no control over. You could be starting a warzone and then you notice that guy on your team who is just terrible and just abort the warzone when the team loses. It is one thing to be upset at end of the match with your teammates whom you communicate in vent etc but it is a different thing to be upset at strangers. Rather than releasing it, we decided to disable it.
We went back to the drawing board to create a good experience where you queue up for the ranked warzones as a complete team (not a group of 4 but a group of 8). We also had to make sure that once the warzone is over, your group is not dissolved. When we made this decision, we realized that we have to fix a lot of things to give you a good experience.
It is going to be on for 1.3 but whether it is enabled or disabled it is going to dependent on all the testing we done internally and on the PTS. It is going to be very disappointing personally and for you guys if it is not on but then again we reserve the right to postpone it if it is not to the quality we want.
Couple of interesting points here. First of all, it seems that when we do see ranked warzones, the system won’t allow players to single-queue for it. This has created a rather wide range of community response and quite a bit of players seem to be responding negatively. Here is one of the community threads regarding the entire panel.
Many games with competitive PvP scenes require groups to be organized beforehand, but most of those groups tend to be within the range of 2-5 players. 8-man groups won’t always be simple to put together. And then there are games like League of Legends, which offer players a choice of participating in ranked matches through organized groups or by queuing solo. Of course, there’s a reason LoL players have nicknamed queuing solo “ELO hell.” Solo queuing in competitive play can be extremely brutal, random, and frustrating. Still, it seems many SWTOR players would rather have the option than not.
On the other side of the coin, SWTOR is an MMO that boosts a pretty solid guild system. Add to that the addition of server transfers, and hopefully players hoping to get involved in ranked warzones don’t have to be left out in the cold– they can simply transfer servers if necessary, and look for a guild.
Oh, yeah, and what else do we find out in the quote above? That’s right– there’s no guarantee we’ll see ranked warzones in 1.3. For players itching to test out the feature and help the BioWare team make ranked warzones a reality, there is currently a news article on the main site asking for players to sign up to help test 1.3 on the PTS.