If you spend any time on the official Star Wars: The Old Republic forums, you are sure to have seen his passion and prose regarding all things Star Wars. You know him as Professor Walsh. Each week (or thereabouts,) Professor Walsh enlighten us all with opinions on lore, design and more in this sometimes highly-opinionated piece.
Greetings my Padawan learners! The Professor is here once again, and this time with a topic that I am empassioned about. But first, I have two disclaimers:
Disclaimer #1
What you are about to read is an opinion piece. It might even be considered controversial. It might even make some readers mad. The point is, I’m a critic. I do what I do and say what I say because criticism, in my eyes, is a better form of feedback than flattery.
I get a lot of flak from some viewers for always “attacking” BioWare. The truth is that there are plenty of things I wholly agree with BioWare on regarding The Old Republic. I, intentionally, focus on controversial hot topics and heated opinions because I feel the dissenting voice is an important thing.
Am I always correct? No. Do people disagree? Yes.
This is what I do though. I’ll never say, “This sucks because I say so.” I’ll always explain why I don’t like something. That, to me, is the essence of what being a critic is all about.
Disclaimer #2
This article is based on a series of forum posts that were made on SWTOR.com in a thread started by Aneu.
I have checked the information as well as I could, and have found it to be accurate. If this information is incorrect, I can only apologize. This article is, however, based on the numbers generated by parsing the Guild Headquarters information.
Moving On…
About two years ago, before I joined Ask A Jedi, I wrote a series of articles on the SWTOR.com forums regarding some predictions. At the time, I declared that there was a flaw in the marketing strategy and insinuated that I felt BioWare was intentionally hyping up the Sith Empire.
From all of the information I was able to gather since then, it seems a fact that a slant indeed existed. My evidence however suggests that this was entirely coincidental and was in no way intentional on behalf of BioWare. I want to make that clear.
At the time, some people – many of whom have become regular sparring partners with me on the forums – argued with me and attempted to disprove the slant. Inevitably it was revealed to be true but unintentional and all opposition to the existence of the slant faded away as is usually the case in these situations. It became an accepted thing and everyone let it slide.
I, however, was not content to let this sit. I fought tooth and nail to put my theory out there that the marketing bias appearing to exist for the Sith Empire would inevitably create a PvP faction imbalance.
So I compared the possible faction imbalance to the same kind of imbalance that was present in Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning which was produced by Mythic Entertainment. Once more I was countered. There were many people who claimed that such a thing was only my paranoia. Eventually the forum posts fell into obscurity and onto deaf ears. Though, BioWare did seem to change their presentation format regarding the hype differential of the Sith and the Republic and did indeed statistically begin to balance the two out.
Enter Huttball
My fears recently resurfaced as I was pondering Huttball. The reason Huttball was created was because BioWare wanted a PvP match that could be started more easily in the event of a faction imbalance. BioWare in fact appeared to be preparing for a PvP faction imbalance, which sent a tingle of fear down the Prof’s spine.
There now are recent reports coming in that used the Guild Headquaters system as a data mine that are showing in numerical form how these imbalances might be taking shape:
That is a higher than 2:1 ratio of Empire:Republic PvP guilds. If these numbers are accurate, then this is a sample size of nearly 150,000 players. This is a small number compared to the total number of players The Old Republic will have but this is absolutely a large enough sample to be considered statistically sound.
This is exactly what happened in Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.
This may seem like a small issue to people who don’t intend to PvP and indeed it will be. If you don’t PvP then this imbalance won’t really alter your play experience at all. If you only intend to participate in Warzones like Huttball then this will not really alter your play experience either. If, however, you plan on doing any of the objective based PvP in the game, or the over world PvP, then this could be bad.
I’m a veteran of games like Dark Age of Camelot and Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. I also love open-world objective based PvP. It is probably the most fun and enjoyable part of MMORPGs to me outside of roleplaying. Heck I roleplay while I PvP.
As a side note, the old Professor is not a newbie at this kind of thing either. No, I was pretty hard core in my day. In DAoC I spent a good bit of time on the Blademaster leader boards. In WAR I have screen shots of myself topping damage charts by extreme margins while playing a Swordmaster. I know, and love, my objective based PvP.
What’s The Problem?
The problem when playing on a server where the enemy faction outnumbers your faction by a huge margin it becomes nearly impossible to succeed in objective based world PvP. This is because they can’t actually bring those numbers to bear, something that they can do in Warzones or other instanced PvP. When a group of 30 people take the enemy fort and the enemy can show up with 60, 90, or 120 people they take it back fast.
It becomes frustrating and overall not fun for anyone involved. It is too easy for the enemy and too hard for you. Eventually objective based PvP goes the way of the dodo.
This could be even worse in The Old Republic because it has been stated that PvP gear can be gained from objective based world PvP. This means any faction imbalance will cause the higher population faction to have better gear on top of numerical superiority. All in all, yes – PvP faction imbalances are a big deal.
A Little Bit Of Theory
Generally speaking PvP players are attracted to being the aggressor and they are attracted to being the winner. In pretty much all of the main pre-launch hype, the Republic and Jedi have been depicted as the losers, the defeated, and the major underdog. While there is a minority of players who like being the underdog, most PvP players, the causal mindset, do not.
The underdog is the guy who comes out of nowhere to challenge the establishment. Usually this is a quirky bunch of individuals who come together with the common goal of upsetting the status quo. They usually have a higher degree of skill than the status quo team does but lack the equipment and the facilities to utilize it to its maximum potential.
Unfortunately in The Old Republic, from the perspective of the casual player, the Sith are the underdog not the Republic. While the Sith may be the ones who won the pre-release story and thus the Republic being defeated would make them the underdog, that isn’t how it actually works out. BioWare, I feel, sent the wrong message.
The Republic had everything: money, planets, and more. BioWare, in the Great Hyperspace War timeline, painted the Sith as the victims, as the people the Republic bullied and tried to annihilate. The Empire wins the Great War by way of a “last ditch desperation move” which is usually how the underdog team wins. When the Hope trailer was shown, it depicted the only Republic victory, which, unfortunately, set a bad example because the lone Sith Warrior star was ganged up two to one and defeated that way.
Individually we are lead to believe Darth Malgus could have beaten both the unnamed Trooper and Satele Shan… implying the Republic only won because they ganged up on him. This is exactly the kind of behavior that the “villain” team does in underdog movies.
Show Don’t Tell
When I had a chance to speak to BioWare Senior Writer Drew Karpyshyn at Star Wars Celebration V, one of the things he (and other developers at the con) made clear was that they wanted to set up the Republic as an underdog. Their plan to do this was to show the Republic being beaten down pretty severely. Unfortunately, that isn’t the proper way to show an underdog story.
Ler’s take a look at a few examples.
The first is the remake of the movie: The Karate Kid
We are introduced to our protagonist. Young Dre, who is moving to China. He is shown to be entering into a situation that is out of his element. Next we are introduced to the antagonists as Dre is bullied, less than halfway through the trailer however, the tide changes. Mr. Han shows up and stops the bullies flat.
We see Mr. Han outclassing the bullies in a brief montage then he assures young Dre that he will teach him real Kung Fu. The rest of the trailer is a training montage that culminates in showing young Dre becoming a better fighter and most importantly it shows him defeating the bullies. People are cheering him on. The bullies are clearly meeting their match. The trailer ends with Mr. Han sharing some words of wisdom and hope.
Those are key elements to create an underdog feeling. Those are what resonate with people and especially casual players. Those are the things we have been ingrained to look for our whole lives when trying to pick out the underdog.
Think this is cherry picking? Here’s another. This is for Kickboxer. Notice some similarities?
As usual we see the main protagonist in a bad situation. Eventually he meets a teacher who will teach him. He trains up, becoming better than his enemy, and eventually is shown fighting the enemy and apparently winning.
This is the part that, in my opinion, BioWare missed. They only did half of the underdog story. Because we only see Sith winning “fairly” and regularly. Because we see the Republic with its idyllic worlds and the Sith in their dark and desolate places. We associate the Republic with the status quo as the Sith as the underdog.
My Suggestion
If this imbalance does exist, BioWare still has time to correct it. It won’t be easy though, and it won’t be cheap.
BioWare needs to show the Sith getting their you-know-what handed to them. We need to see the Sith suffer a loss on par with the Jedi Temple. We need to see Sith Lords bite the dust in one-on-one encounters against the Republic. We need to see the Sith ganging up on the Jedi two-to-one and actually losing. We need inspirational dialogue and we need the Republic talking about how the war isn’t over.
BioWare wanted the Sith to seem like a credible threat. I feel they took it too far and made the Republic look like a joke. There is still time to correct these things, however there isn’t much. I fear, if those numbers are correct, that it could potentially harm the long term health of the game itself.
Until next time, may the Force be with you.
