The Fanatical Swordsman

Season Two is starting to wind down, rewards have been announced, and everyone is a bit…meh about them. It isn’t that the rewards are bad…actually, never mind, the rewards are bad. But let’s look at the season as a whole, compare it to Season One, and then see how they improved upon the things I talked about in my last article.

Last time I wrote an article about Ranked PvP in SWTOR, I summarized five ways SWTOR did things right and five ways they could improve. Let’s look at those:

S1: Things Bioware Did Right

1. The Rewards (I mean, rancor)
   
2. Season length seemed right
3. Introducing the new game-mode before the season started
4. “Highest Rating Earned” is used instead of “Current Rating”
5. Top tier contains only around 5% of the population

S1: Things Bioware Could Improve

1. Exclusive rewards to PvP (our rancor is not special)
   
2. Dual-queue (queue with regs and ranked)
   
3. Announce rewards waaaaay sooner
4. Group the rating cutoffs by class
5. Have additional rewards per server and in each class

Now let’s see where there were improvements and where there weren’t.

S2: Things Bioware Did Right

1. Exclusive rewards to PvP
   This is thankfully the case for the time being. Rewards should be exclusive if they are cosmetic. Since we don’t gain a stat advantage, there should be no other way to get our cosmetic rewards, because they are just that: cosmetic. Cosmetic rewards make you feel unique, and that is something that disappears if the uniqueness (and thus the reward) is destroyed by other people getting similar rewards from other places.
2. Have additional rewards in each class
   Class all-stars are getting individual, special rewards, as well they should.
3. Season length seemed right
   This time-frame was even better, with a short 3-month-ish window.
4. “Highest Rating Earned” is used instead of “Current Rating”
   Same as last time.
5. Top tier probably contains only around 5% of the population
   Same as last time, though it will probably be slightly more than 5%, since it was slightly more than 5% last time as well since people played more ranked to get the rancor).

S2: Things Bioware Could Improve

1. Dual-queue (queue with regs and ranked)
   Still not fixed. How is this still not in? At least they added the ability to queue for Starfighter while in queue. Seriously though, how is this not in?!? They already had it in 8v8.
2. Announce rewards waaaaay sooner
   Still not fixed. They did not learn from last time’s population issues that you need to promote the heck out of your rewards!
3. Group the rating cutoffs by class
   Still not fixed. The class percentages should all be the same, in other words, the top 5% of each class should get tier 1 rewards. Why is this not done, two seasons in a row?!? The balance is slightly better this time, but there is still a large percentage of Guardians/Juggernauts vs. everything else now, so more of them will get tier 1 rewards than of other classes.
4. Have additional rewards for each server
   Still not fixed. I lumped this in with additional rewards for the best in each class, but there are servers that have players that cannot get a pop. They are compared in rating to players that get pops daily. This is not fair, because there aren’t cross-server queues.
5. Introduce something new
   This is a new complaint, because last time there was a new game type. This time, nothing has been changed or improved. Oh, wait, they did add a new gear grind *cough* I mean “set.” It wasn’t even a reskin of the last set of gear. It was literally the same cosmetic as the last set. How lazy do you have to be in designing that…
6. Give good rewards
   Okay, the rewards this time? Crap. All of it. Crap. You know why it was crap? Because no one likes Baron Deathmark, yet they give us the ability to dress like him. PvPers are not known for their propensity to do fluff stuff, but they give us trophies for housing (which better at least look significant).

These are just a few of the things I think Bioware did right and could change to do better! What do you think? Give me your suggestions for ranked season three below!