As of late the big talk in SWTOR has been Hutt-Ball. It has been literally shoved down our throats whenever we want to participate in PvP. The unique design of the warzone makes it the optimal event on any server which carries an imbalance between the Imperial Republic. The unfortunate part of this is that majority of servers do. The thing that makes Hutt-Ball little bit irritating is that because of the class imbalances on every server it is the primary war zone that is selected for any PVP encounter. Hutt-Ball is the only PVP encounter were both Republic and Imperial side can either fight against one another or against other people from the same faction. It sounds really nice, but in reality it’s actually the downfall of PVP in Star Wars the Old Republic. This happens because Hutt-Ball is going to be selected 90% of the time due to its design.
Hutt-Ball wouldn’t be half as bad if there was more communication in the game itself. A large part of moving the ball across the map revolves around passing from player to player. It’s pretty uncommon that one person can pick up the Hutt-Ball moved from the middle only to the other side of the map and score all by themselves. Communication is always key in this. The thing is; however, most people opt to not communicate well playing couple. Is always obvious with teams that worked out a game plan prior to the start or obviously communicating through Ventrilo or some other VOIP service. It’s obvious that during the design phase is Star Wars the Old Republic Hutt-Ball was one of the mainstays of the game that they really wanted to show off as a major PVP feature the game. Hutt-Ball isn’t a bad event by any means, but the sheer overexposure of it due to the design is really hurting Hutt-Ball as well. I have a lot of faith in Bioware to provide any fix that is needed to make Hutt-Ball more enjoyable for everybody. It sounds a little odd, but the thing that would make Hutt-Ball more enjoyable to everyone is actually for us to play it less. Seems odd isn’t it? That’s the honest truth. The good thing is that the patch is possibly just a few weeks away.
The more time goes on it seems like the patch that is due out in March is shaping up to be more of a miracle patch than any of the previous updates to the game thus far. They haven’t released it out right but they’ve said that the new patch is going to have a new war zone along with a plethora of other changes to the game that should vastly improve the experience for every player. Now whether or not this fixes any of the PVP imbalances that are in the game remains to be seen. From a strictly PVP standpoint they’re going to have to do something with the setup of war zones that will get people in other maps than Hutt-Ball or I personally believe that a lot of people who play the game specifically for the PVP may move on to other games. As far as I know right now there’s only going to be one new war zone match, but Bioware have been very impressive with the content thus far and I wouldn’t be surprised if they snuck in a second one as well. It may be more or less wishful thinking but it’s certainly possible with the track record of Bioware and including content and patches.
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