PvP in 7.2 - Missing My MVPs

When Bioware announced that 7.2 was going to include the removal of ranked PvP, my initial reaction was to have sympathy for those who enjoyed that game mode, and when I sought out other people's opinions on the matter I was surprised by how many comments I saw that basically came down to "good riddance, it was nothing but a toxic cesspit anyway".

I then had a look at the official forums to see the reactions of actual ranked players and was amazed by just how much denial and deflection was going on there: Ranked wasn't toxic, but if it was, it was justified because of bad players daring to invade their space, and now all those totally not toxic ranked players are going to invade unranked and make people's lives hell there, but also unranked was already the most toxic game mode anyway and the game's going to die because the subscriptions of ranked players were all that was keeping it alive. Or something.

It's still a bit of a shame because I remember when the Bad Feeling Podcast (rest in peace) went through a phase of really wanting to make ranked a thing, and their angle was basically that ranked should be for everyone - after all, the point of the ranking system is that people of all skill levels will be sorted into the correct "bracket", and if only enough people queued then everyone should be able to take part and have fun being matched up against other players of similar skill level. Sadly it seems that this never came to pass and instead ranked turned into the home of a small elite that cannibalised itself until it was too late. Oh well.

So 7.2 brought us a brave new world where there is no more split between ranked and unranked, but separate queues for 8v8 warzones and 4v4 arenas, and we get to fill out a PvP reward track similar to Galactic Seasons.

The PvP season track is pretty bare-bones compared to the regular season, with only 25 levels, no separate subscriber vs. non-subscriber tracks, and no daily objectives. Instead there are six weeklies that are the same every week, and beyond those you can earn a small trickle of points by earning medals until you reach the weekly point cap of 1000. (Completing the track in its entirety requires 7000 points.)

The weekly objectives are split into three for warzones and three for arenas, which ironically meant that after thinking that the new queue split would mean no more arenas for me, I actually ended up queueing for more arenas than ever before, just to complete the weekly objectives during the first two weeks. While I've never really minded the occasional arena sprinkled into my random queue, I've got to admit that this particular experience has actually been kind of tiresome as the objectives require you to play twice as many arenas as warzones to get the same amount of credit.

Also, while it's not made very clear in the UI, the PvP season seems to have similar limitations on the weekly objectives as the regular season, meaning you can only get credit for four out of six each week. After spending several hours being a punching bag in arenas just to complete objectives that ultimately didn't award me any points (even though they weren't greyed out), I think I'll stick to the 8v8 objectives for the rest of the season... though I might still find myself playing arenas if I decide to go for the achievements tied to the season as well, as they require you to complete 25 warzone and 25 arena weeklies. Considering the season is only 12 weeks long, that's a lot though and I'm not sure I'll bother.

Another change that wasn't really advertised much has been a revamp of the scoreboard that you see at the end of the match, and to be honest... I'm not a fan. The primary tab now just shows a picture of your character and your personal stats - which are pretty meaningless without those of the rest of the team to put things in context. About the only thing I like here is that medals earned are listed in full instead of requiring you to hover over them to read what you got them for.

On the team score tabs, kills have been removed from the main view and are now only visible on hover - not sure if this is supposed to make people feel better about dying a lot? I used to find it helpful to be able to see them more easily in order to gauge everyone's ratio of kills vs. deaths at a glance.

However, the thing that irks me the most - and I was somewhat surprised by this myself - is the removal of MVP votes. When I first heard that this was also going to happen with 7.2, my reaction was something along the lines of "eh". I liked MVP votes, but I couldn't deny that they were an old system that didn't really seem to serve any purpose anymore, and in most PvP matches I played, most people didn't seem to bother casting votes anymore anyway.

However, what their removal made me realise was that MVP votes made me care about the rest of my team - not because I coveted their votes, but because the act of casting my own MVP vote made me pay attention to how much everyone else was contributing to the match. In this blog's first year I wrote a post called MVP Votes And You, in which I talked about the many ways in which someone could earn my MVP vote, and there were a lot of them! With their removal, I just don't feel like there's any point in paying much attention to the other players' performance unless I'm planning to PvP all evening and want to get a bit of an idea of who's a strong opponent that day and who isn't. If I notice anyone having played particularly well, there's no real way of showing appreciation for it, except for maybe typing it in chat, but they probably will have quit the match before I've finished typing anyway. Not to mention that it's much more effort than pressing a button.

Considering that Bioware said that an important reason for them making all these changes was to make PvP interactions more positive, it kind of galls me that they also removed something that was created specifically to be a positive interaction. I can only hope that they'll consider bringing the system back in some form eventually.

In the meantime, the jury's out on how well this new PvP season system is going to work, for me at least. For now it's got me doing more PvP than usual, but I also worry that with arenas being so heavily incentivised, I'll end up burning myself out on those. (Which - again - is incredibly ironic considering that we're able to completely banish arenas from our queue for the first time since their introduction.)