Is SWTOR PVP Broken?

Recently there have been a lot of complaints about PVP in SWTOR and not all of them are just from hardcore PvPers who don’t like the way things are set up in SWTOR. In fact, there are many bugs and legitimate complaints that lead a gamer to ask, “Is PvP in SWTOR broken?”

MMO Crunch has a piece that asks “Where’s the PvP?” and brings up a pretty good question about the lacking world PvP in SWTOR. I have to agree with the author since I play on a PvP server and have yet to run into a PvP encounter in the open world once so far and I’ve been playing since pre-launch.

MMO Crunch says:

“The problem with the open PvP zones is there is absolutely no incentive for players, which is why they’re empty. Why bother in a open zone when you can queue up for a warzone and get all the rewards? While hardcore PvPers will say the reward is in the kill itself, that’s not enough incentive to get most players to participate, so there has to be some reward be it XP, Valor or something else.”

Again, good points. Even if you enjoy PvP just for the sake of killing other players, there should always be some type of reward, even if it is nothing more than a kill counter for the player. What’s the point if there is no way to track it, benefit from it or brag about it?

But that’s not the only problem with PvP in SWTOR. There are also loads of bugs and open room for exploitation- something that been talked about a lot the past week or so. One example of such exploitation that caused a stir recently is base trading. I’ve seen it happen in other games as well.

Basically, in certain PvP zones (like Ilum), there is more benefit to capping the bases and taking the zone rather than actual PvPing. So some gamers decide to take advantage of the situation to get more credits and benefit by using alts to trade the bases back and forth.

This is just the beginning of ways that PvP is “broken” in SWTOR and ways that gamers can exploit the system to their own gain. What bugs or exploits have you encountered?

Lisa Clark

Lisa has been an avid gamer since she was old enough to hold her first controller and a game writer for more than a decade. A child of the Nintendo generation, she believes they just don’t make games like they used to but sometimes, they make them even better! While consoles will always be her first love, Lisa spends most of her gaming time on the PC these days- on MMOs and first-person shooters in particular.