I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I dialled back my ambitions for PvP Season 2. I expect to complete the reward track next week, and then I'll be done with PvP for a little while I think. I don't really have anything to add about the PvP season system in general that I didn't already say last season, but I do have some observations about the way warzones have changed that I wanted to jot down.
Premades
According to the forums, these are currently THE big issue in PvP, and I've read some accounts of people coming up against full eight-man premades in warzones that sounded like they made for a pretty awful experience. However, in all my PvPing since the start of Season 1, I don't think I've encountered a single eight-man premade myself, which makes me wonder just how prevalent this really is.
What I have seen on the other hand is people complaining about premades when there was no evidence of any going on. I mean, it's not like I can tell with 100% certainty how the enemy team is set up, but if their performance is effectively indistinguishable from a pug, who cares? The most bizarre encounter of this kind I had was a Queshball match which was actually pretty balanced and ended 2-3, during which someone was incessantly complaining about how we were up against a premade and clearly never stood a chance. Just, what?
Anyway, the main reason I bring this up is that it's very weird to me that there's this much complaining going on about something that I've never seen, while at the same time hardly anyone seems to talk about...
AFKers
Now these have become the real scourge of warzones since the removal of ranked in my experience. I'm not going to claim that they're everywhere - I've seen maybe half a dozen since Bioware changed the system, but that's still huge compared to basically never having to deal with them before. I wrote a post back in 2017 about encountering an AFKer in Alderaan Civil War and how toothless the PvP vote-kicking system was, but the point is that this was a highly unusual occurrence back then.
It hasn't been highly publicised, but when Bioware removed ranked arenas, they also removed the vote-to-kick system from PvP matches (weak as it was), meaning that people are now completely powerless against saboteurs on their own team and this is definitely getting abused. I'm usually pretty chill about things like losing, people playing badly, or general complaining in warzone chat, but I've got to admit AFKers make me see red. I rarely add people to my ignore list, but people who openly AFK in PvP get an insta-block from me. I know it won't prevent me from getting grouped up with them again, but at least I'll never have to listen to their smugness ever again or accidentally help them out in PvE.
Because to be clear, these are not people giving up in the last minute of a match, or players who just want the rewards from the season track but hate participating in PvP. These are people who are invested in PvP, who get very mad when things aren't going their way and then decide to "punish" the rest of the team by AFKing out, and without any reporting or kicking tools there's nothing the other players can do about it.
I've tried to force AFKers back into action by pulling them towards combat (when on a Sage or Sorc) or running on top of them with an enemy on me, to get them caught in AoE and/or perhaps killed if they don't do anything, but unfortunately that rarely works because it's pretty obvious to the enemy team when someone's just standing there doing nothing and since it benefits them, they have no incentive to waste time on attacking/killing that player either.
I really hope Bioware does something about this. I'm not saying I necessarily want the vote-kick option back (though I'd definitely take it), just... something, anything.
Ancient Hypergates meta
On a totally unrelated subject, has it seemed to anyone else like the meta in Ancient Hypergates is changing? Hypergates has always been one of the more complex warzones due to its scoring system, and I'm not saying there was ever a fixed meta in unranked anyway, but my general experience was that you'd either win by dominating in mid and running orbs or by stealth-capping the enemy pylon at the right time. People rarely tried to brute-force the enemy pylon because if your team wasn't massively more powerful than the enemy, it was never going to work anyway.
However, for a few months now, it seems to me like all the fighting is around the pylons. I used to spend a lot of time fighting for the orbs in mid, but increasingly I see both teams just splitting between the two pylons and fighting there, leading to more volatile games with pylons swapping ownership more often. I'm reminded of how way back in the day when ranked warzones were a thing, people would just fight at the pylons all the time and it wasn't unusual to go several rounds without any pylon cap at all. I haven't yet seen that in regs fortunately, but it does feel like there's more of a push towards that pylon domination kind of gameplay. Is it just in my head?
I just started back doing PvP (the grind to Valor 100 is a slow, procrastinous one for me ^_^). While it is too early to make many observations yet, I did see that strategy play out -- both pylons capped -- on Ancient Hypergates several times. That said, it does seem to be a thing that depends on the time of day, at least on Star Forge.
ReplyDeleteI also saw a number of people drop warzones when they were on the losing side, but it was often in the last 30 seconds or so. That's puzzling to me as why not wait instead of taking a no-queue debuff for a longer timeframe? I can see dropping right at the start if it a warzone you just don't like or one you get backfilled into, but right at the end? Weird. Have you seen anything like that?
I can't say I've noticed that, no. I know that in the lower and midbie bracket, there used to be a time when people would intentionally quit matches near the end since the characters were twinks and they didn't want to gain XP to outlevel the bracket, but I don't know whether that's still a thing or would've even been relevant in your case.
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