Now that BioWare has instituted fixes limiting the number of Republic and Imperial players taking part in each instance of player-versus-player planet Ilum an uneasy truce has been formed. Now both sides can take turns killing each other for credit!
Patch 1.1 for BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic patched the game so players could farm valour — in-game currency used to purchase high-end PVP gear — by killing one another. Initially this caused serious problems, but as you can see in this video sent in by reader Chris, the two factions have put their differences behind them.
On one hand I am impressed by the ingenuity of the players in this vid. Why bother with battle when large-scale mutual execution will suffice?
On the other hand, this is not how the game should work. BioWare needs to take steps to curb this as soon as possible in order to keep the situation from spiraling even more out of control than it already has.
SW:TOR – Ilum – Trading Deaths – The new “legit” way to farm Valor [YouTube]
Doug Sherry
Friday, January 20, 2012 at 11:53 AMWow, that looks sooo boring.
NotAbbott
Friday, January 20, 2012 at 11:57 AMWhat? You’re telling me this isn’t the highest echelon of sub-based gaming?
/glib
Sam
Friday, January 20, 2012 at 12:13 PMI hate this, I know it’s never coming back but god i miss early wow when people played for fun, when it wasn’t just about grinding as fast as possible to the best gear in the game. These days if you stumbled around aimlessly in wow exploring the world and dying lots while not really doing any quests people would think you’re foolish regardless of whether you enjoy it or not, and it’s all the more saddending because mmo worlds (imo) leave that prospect open better than any other., in virtue of them being truly alive with other real people.
Red-Giant
Friday, January 20, 2012 at 12:24 PMThe problem (IMHO) is the reliance on gear. You need a much more stat based game, akin to UO. Gear could be crafted only, some drops were magical stuff, but that was very rare and could not be recharged or repaired (most were items to make killing a specific type of mob easier, not a player). This wow style reliance on gear causes this continuous ‘min-maxing’ grind rather than play for enjoyment. Again all my opinion only of course.
Mr Waffle
Friday, January 20, 2012 at 12:39 PMIt’s made worse in TOR by the fact that crafted gear can’t compare to the stuff you get from raids and commendations. lvl 1-49 you can dress however you want (pick a piece of ‘custom’ gear and then just upgrade it as you need to) but then when you hit lvl 50 everyone is after the same few sets of best-stat gear…
NotAbbott
Friday, January 20, 2012 at 12:51 PMThis is an interesting point, and one I agree with and would love to see explored by an MMO (Guild Wars 2 is currently talking the talk, but we’ll see) – a game where builds are the foundation for a solid character, rather than having the purple epic sword of some thing or other.
I guess that is the harder of the two to do, which is why it hasn’t been successfully tackled so far. Making it balanced, so that the game doesn’t simply revolve around cookie cutter builds. Which in turn requires a fundamental shift from the way MMO’s currently work in PvE and PvP with regards to skills, skill/global cooldowns and the like, which is little more than a shiny rock-scissors-paper game, to a more diverse set of interactions.
In the end I guess it is easier to just tweak weapons and armour properties instead of character skill trees.
mchaza
Friday, January 20, 2012 at 12:18 PMsame exploits can be done on so many multiplayer games for example Call of duty Domination exp farming, nuke boosting with tactical insertion etc. The thing that was done to fix those was basically nothing at all but a community effort in curbing the problem by seeking out and grieving those who try and do it.
Adam Ruch
Friday, January 20, 2012 at 12:43 PMI love the psychology that comes out in MMO games. The problem here is pretty obvious: there’s no penalty for dying.
Its so funny how the most dedicated players of games do their absolute best to NOT play the game.
McGarnical
Friday, January 20, 2012 at 1:19 PMVery much agree. I play for the game, not the grinding metagame.
Daniel
Friday, January 20, 2012 at 2:08 PMTime for Bioware to patch humanity.
doubleDizz
Friday, January 20, 2012 at 2:44 PMomg boosting. These guiz are geneyuses…
Raf
Friday, January 20, 2012 at 5:29 PMBack in my WoW days, Blizzard would have solved this by using the banhammer with extreme prejudice. Is Bioware just soft or something?
Zeruel
Friday, January 20, 2012 at 6:37 PMI’m getting the impression that lessons learnt by watching blizzard over the last 6+ years haven’t been heeded.
Asp
Friday, January 20, 2012 at 9:30 PMYou know what this is? It’s not surprise that the general nature of humanity is NOTHING LIKE the heroic, self-sacrificing features you find on heroes in movies. This is just the same as governments and corporations (2 different factions) scratching each other’s backs (to the detriment of many people).
Snacuum
Saturday, January 21, 2012 at 1:54 AMLook out guys! You’ll get banned for using the game mechanics in their present state in not the manner the developers wanted!