BioWare has ‘big plans’ for Star Wars: The Old Republic PvP

In a fan Q&A session, BioWare said they have "big plans" for PvP in Star Wars: The Old Republic. If you've been keeping up with our updates you probably already know that BioWare has struggled with PvP in their first MMORPG.  Between PvP glitches, Ilum exploits, unbalanced factions, and ridiculous gear grinding, PvP for SWTOR has seemed like a chore and less of a game.

So naturally, fans want to know what will happen in the future for PvP regarding Ilum and Warzones.

"We’ve been pleasantly surprised at how popular PvP is in The Old Republic and we’ve been doubling down on our efforts to bring exciting new content and systems to the PvP community," said BioWare's writing director Daniel Erickson.

Erickson revealed plans for a new "same faction vs same faction" warzone, meaning less Huttball (finally!) as well as a new Warzone ranking system.  He talked a little about it, but details are still vague.

"We can say it’s enabled for same faction vs. same faction play, so if you’ve been playing a lot of Huttball, expect some variety soon! Also coming in 1.2 is the pre-season of our Warzone ranking system, bringing better matchmaking which means better PvP. In the future expect a ton more PvP news as we expand and polish what has proven to be one of the most popular aspects of The Old Republic. We’ve got big plans."

Of course, when it comes to world PvP, a lot relies on faction balance – something you'd notice the game is missing if you read the Ilum reports.  Erickson commented a little on that, saying the Legacy System will hopefully change.

"Faction balance is always a concern and something we watch carefully across all servers. It’s also something you can never fully account for programmatically as it is different on each server. We have many servers where the differences are small enough to be negligible and then others where either the Empire or the Republic has a huge numbers advantage."

"The Legacy System will take some first steps towards incentivizing players to look at what the other side has to offer and we will continue watching the most extreme servers to see if additional steps are needed."

We don't actually know what the Legacy System will do exactly, but we've heard a ton of vague details that make a lot of promises.