Another PvP Season Under My Belt

PvP Season Seven has a few weeks left to run, but I completed my last achievement last week, so things are going to be kind of quiet for me in game for the next few weeks. At least we can expect to get some information about the next patch in the livestream next week.

The pacing change that came with the additional levels introduced last season still felt odd, as I once again finished all the bonus achievements before actually completing the seasonal reward track. If anything, it was even more pronounced this season, as I didn't make an effort to make the maximum progress of one thousand points a week this time around, which meant that I needed an extra week to complete the track. The track being the last thing to get finished remains slightly strange to me.

My most stand-out experiences this season were all in arenas, interestingly enough. The best match I had was without a doubt when the plasmatech Vanguard that I'm levelling dinged upwards into the midbie bracket. I actually don't like doing PvP at the lower end of a bracket, because you usually feel very obviously underpowered compared to the characters at the upper end, and sometimes people even get shirty about having low-level team mates. As it was though, I still had a PvP weekly I wanted to complete, and in this arena, fortunately nobody complained. And we ended up having an insanely good match, which we won 2-1, with me actually doing crazy amounts of damage with my DoTs despite my low level. The last round also came down to a 1v1 between me and an enemy, which I won. That felt pretty great.

My worst arena experience of the season were several days when the midbie queue was made unbearable by a premade, which was kind of ironic as people complained about premades a lot in past seasons and many seemed to think that discontinuing 8-person queues for warzones would solve that problem. Yet I rarely had problems with premades in previous seasons, while they were a really noticeable nuisance this time around.

Even so, I'd still argue that the real problem isn't the existence of premades in itself - I see nothing wrong with friends or guildies wanting to queue together. The problem is population (yes, I'm beating that drum again). When you only have about ten people or so queueing for midbie arenas on a given evening, and four of them are in a group together, it's obvious that everyone else is doomed to have a bad time. I very rarely quit matches, but when I got put up against the same premade for the third time in a row, I apologised to the one person on my team who had already loaded in, explained that I was getting tired of getting stomped by these guys over and over and left, followed by me logging off and doing something else for an hour or two. When I logged back in I thought I'd give queueing another try - and was immediately put up against the same premade yet again. It was absolutely infuriating.

The generally most interesting arena experience I had, with a mix of good and bad, was when I was doing a midbie arena on my Juggernaut, and the second person to load in on my team immediately said something like "oops, I meant to queue for warzones". Sensing that he was about to quit, I quickly teased "you've got to stay for this match though", which at least worked to engage the guy in conversation. He groused that he wasn't that good etc. and I simply said I'd still rather have him here than go up against the three people on the enemy team by myself, which oddly seemed to convince him.

I can't actually remember whether we ended up with properly balanced teams in the end, but I do recall that there were only three people on our team and that both I and my reluctant arena buddy actually put up a pretty good fight. The third person however was a Scoundrel that did nothing but use their basic attack and throw grenades every now and then. Didn't even use stealth from what I remember. There was one particularly odd moment when I and the warzone guy had both died, and the only two players remaining were our Scoundrel and a Powertech on the enemy team. And the Scoundrel just stood there, plinking away at the PT with their basic attack so uselessly, that the Powertech actually stopped fighting for a bit and just watched in confusion. Was that Scoundrel really not even going to try anything else? Eventually the PT got bored though and killed them (easily, of course).

This caused warzone guy to get mad and start insulting the Scoundrel, which in turn resulted in me trying to calm him down. He said things like "don't queue for PvP if you're not even going to try" and I tried to argue that the Scoundrel may well be a newer player and just not know how to play very well. Sure, they were above level fifty, but I'm pretty sure you can make it to that level by using nothing but two buttons nowadays if you want.

The whole thing just made me feel very conflicted because I've been converted to the benefits of accessibility and agree that the story doesn't need to be hard to be enjoyable, but at the same time putting obstacles in the player's way that force them to learn to press more than two buttons is one of the main ways in which you can teach someone to play better. I guess in an ideal world there'd be enough people queueing that two-button-pressers could go up against other two-button-pressers, but unfortunately that's not the world we live in and as it stands, encountering someone in PvP who is still on such a basic level of gameplay when they are more than halfway towards the level cap is definitely a shock to the system.