PvP Season 10 Ponderings

I haven't talked about PvP seasons in a while, mostly because the devs haven't changed anything about them since stretching out the reward track back in season six and the objectives are always the same, so there isn't really much to talk about from my point of view.

I also still have the same concerns about the state of PvP that I elaborated on in this post from two years ago, primarily as far as the state of queues is concerned. I guess things have at least remained stable, as it's been two years and I'm still managing to get both my warzone and my arena weeklies done, though the lowbie queues still feel like they take forever. It's particularly bad when I'm approaching the top end of the lowbie bracket and have to make sure to not accidentally out-level it before I'm ready, meaning I have to twiddle my thumbs while waiting for matches to pop instead of at least doing some quests in the meantime.

It makes me wonder whether I wouldn't enjoy the PvP season more if I just stopped trying to go for the arena achievement, like I did in a few of the early PvP seasons... but I do kind of like the gameplay (in the lowbie brackets at least) and the extra rewards for completing the meta achievement are so massive it really feels like leaving money on the table to skip just this one part of it.

In general, PvP is just suffering from feeling a bit stale at this point in my opinion. Did you know that it's been close to eight years since we last got a new warzone map? The last time we got a new PvP gameplay mode was with the Proving Grounds over ten years ago. Even the introduction of PvP seasons happened three and a half years ago at this point - and yes, I still miss my MVP votes. I get that the SWTOR team is small and that they have a lot on their plate as it is, but still... I also have a lot of things to spend my time on as a player, and PvP with nothing new happening is definitely getting a bit boring. I wonder if 8.0 will include anything interesting for PvPers?

Anyway, so as not to sound all doom and gloom, jumping into PvP again for the start of the season has also been a reminder of what I do still love about it. Like pugging, it's a bit of a window into the server community, showing you which guilds are very active, who's that one guy that seems to play absolutely every single day, and so on and so forth. (Back in the day, PvP was how I found the guild that Mr Commando and I now lead together, so don't underestimate the ways in which it can bring people together.)

I particularly love seeing all the "meme" characters with ridiculous names or looks - I'm not always a fan of that kind of thing, but in the context of PvP I do tend to find it funny. Try telling anyone to focus fire the guy with the below name for example:

I was also amused to see "Agent Mako" looking exactly like the bounty hunter companion, and chuckled at "Caterina de'medic" the Commando healer. Only today I faced off against Spiderman in Huttball. Sometimes that kind of thing manages to take the sting out of even a bad loss.

And of course, there are the matches that are just super memorable. Like the one I dubbed "closest Novare Coast win ever", which we won with only 2% integrity left on our own bunker, and when the enemy's bunker hit zero they had just killed off our last defender and were already three quarters of the way into flipping one of our turrets. They were just seconds too slow!

Or the Voidstar I played on my Merc healer alt where in a highly unusual turn of events, the enemy left me almost completely alone for most of the match. That practically never happens, and I remember thinking "I wonder what kinds of healing numbers I'll end up doing when left to my own devices like this" and the answer was over fifteen million. I was pretty chuffed! (And we won.)