Ever since the topic of self-rez was introduced for SWTOR, there has been debate over how it will impact the game.
Georg Zoeller popped into several posts on the official forums to talk about the concept, answer questions and clear up confusions. He says:
“Let’s give you some details, since it’s E3 and we’re being generous
The reason we added this system is that the worlds in The Old Republic are huge and a travel death penalty turned out to be much more punishing than initially planned. Our testers were quite vocal about that.
Our testers also commented that they liked the more challenging content compared to other MMOs (no, Daniel’s demo wasn’t showing that, since running harder content and talking and answering interview questions is a bit much to ask of a writer).”
He goes on to describe that the system was added to help fix the death issue and avoid the problem of the travel death penalty. He describes how it works in testing. The first time you die, you can summon the probe almost immediately or return to a medical center. Upon your 2nd death within 30 minutes, the timer for the probe is set to 20 seconds. From there on, with each subsequent death, the probe timer gets longer.
Details are still being worked out about the conditions under which the droids can be summoned and there is still a chance they could be removed completely but for now, they are in the testing phase.
They have also considered all sides to the self rez debate, such as how it can be abused in PvP. Most likely, it will be disabled completely in PvP scenarios.
There was also worry that players would use this feature to “cheat” in PvE content. Georg’s response was right on the money:
“… we’re also not terribly concerned with people being creative about some of the heroic content. We’re pretty pragmatic about it – if people have fun doing a one off heroic quest in a very creative way (like, let’s say luring a bunch of enemies to a cliff and then pushing them over with a force push) and they’re having fun, that’s something we’re potentially fine with. In fact, we find that a lot of the ‘creative’ ways people find around more challenging content seems to take more time than doing it the planned way anyway.
As long as there’s a reasonable effort vs. reward ratio here, who am I to say that you and your friend can’t have fun figuring out a way to get past that 4 man heroic?”
For clarification, he adds:
“This obviously doesn’t apply to Operations or Flashpoints (Did I mention that you can’t order a probe in instanced content like a Flashpoint or Warzone?), but for world heroics, we’re definitely taking a relaxed view on these things.”
It’s a pretty detailed discussion but those are the highlights of it. You are welcome to pop in the thread yourself and see all points of it. What do you think- will self-rez in SWTOR be a good thing or will it be exploited?