Lead PvP, Operations & Flashpoints Designer Gabe Amatangelo posted on update concerning Ilum issues and the resolution. An emergency patch will be pushed to servers tomorrow, January 19, at 5AM CST. The patch will prevent players from entering the opposite faction's base and prevent them from leaving. Population caps on Ilum will also be descresed to help improve client performance. You can read the update in full below.
Hello everyone; I wanted to update you on the issues we’ve been seeing today on the live servers, specifically within the Open World PvP area on Ilum. We’re aware that on some servers, either Republic or Empire groups have been capturing the Ilum control points, entering the enemy’s base and ‘camping’ the medcenters, preventing the opposite faction from leaving their base to recapture control points. This is not a fair or balanced gameplay experience and can also severely affect client performance, so we’re taking steps to address this.
Our intended design for Ilum Open World PvP is that players are instantly killed when entering the enemy’s base safe area, just like in Warzones, and that the defending faction can take taxis to other points within the zone. As of Game Update 1.1, this is not working as intended. We have found the issue preventing this from happening under server load and will be publishing an Emergency Patch to address the issue. We’re aiming to have this patch published early tomorrow morning (January 19th, 5 AM US CST).
In addition to these changes, we’ll be reducing the population cap on Ilum. This should help increase performance by requiring your client to render fewer characters on-screen at once.
Regarding Valor gains, with the 1.1 update, players now receive a base reward of 20 Valor per unique enemy player defeated in a short time, and this base reward is modified by the number of objectives that the player’s faction owns. The gains are rate limited per player killed, encouraging players to attack unique players, not to pursue vendettas. The Valor gains players can see over time will vary greatly depending on the activity level in the zone. This is expected.
To dispel a couple of rumors that have been seen today – there is no Valor gain from destroying turrets within enemy bases, and none from killing NPCs.
We encourage players to avoid Ilum until our patch is deployed. As a temporary measure we will be disabling taxi services which would normally take players into the Open World PvP area. However, players will still be able to taxi out of the area.
We will continue to monitor Ilum across all servers and will make further changes to gameplay if required. We welcome your feedback here on the Forums, but please ensure your feedback is constructive and specific. Feedback based on rumor does not help us isolate potential issues.
UPDATE: Associate Online Community Manager Joveth Gonzalez added to the thread noting they will be evaluating and tracking individuals taking advantage of the Ilum situation.
Hi everyone,
I just wanted to be clear and let you all know that we’re definitely aware of individuals who took extreme advantage of this situation and we will be carefully evaluating and taking action as necessary.
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Posted 1/19/2012 11:21:38 AMI'm glad I decided to focus on Op runs and HM runs instead of going straight to Ilum now.
After seeing that spawn camping video, I know without a doubt I made the right choice waiting for Bioware to shore that up first. Sorry to those who have to experience that on the receiving end.
I'll definitely be giving Ilum a try once they get this new patch implemented.
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Posted 1/19/2012 9:27:29 AMI had an issue happen to me while leveling up and knew something was broken before the Ilum disaster. I was in a small camp with a med center, got jumped, killed the guy and he pops right beside me (med center). He kills me, i pop right beside him. More people show up, this goes on and on. No one can leave, whoever has more people just keep farming the other side. There was no way to end the cycle other than log off and go play a different toon. You need to be able to respawn at a different Med center, AoC had this option, it worked.
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Posted 1/19/2012 8:29:29 AMOne broken PvP zone (which is being immediately fixed) and you already start the doomsaying? A pity. They can go ahead and delete Ilum altogether, it will not harm that massive game.
What do people who complain about faction imbalance propose? Go play Republic and that will fix it. You don't want?
Would you like it if BioWare introduced special advantages to playing Republic, which the Empire doesn't have in order to pull more people there? No, you'd be crying right here about it.
So what could be done - implement population caps for Ilum. Guess what? BioWare is doing it.
The only way of stopping the people of playing the badass faction is by making them ugly and undesirable (like Horde). That, however, is not possible in Star Wars. Here the Empire has the immaculate clean and disciplined theme, while the Republic is a congregation of races and whatever scrubs from the galaxy. If BioWare did something to change this, the same people who cry now would be crying about how not true to Star Wars lore it is.
Conclusion: some people will always whine. Ignore them and enjoy an absolutely amazing game.
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Posted 1/19/2012 9:55:39 AMIt's not just a broken zone. It's the only zone and it's broken. You could also say there's the Outlaw's Den, but it's not quite the same and I don't think the Tatooine questers would like an influx of 50's cruising around. It doesn't ruin the game for everyone, but it does put a serious damper on things for those of us who were looking forward to world pvp as their end game.
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Posted 1/20/2012 3:07:33 PMAnd it's not necessarily the fact that it's broken. It's the fact that it's so horribly badly designed, and yet it was still enabled anyway. The fact that there are multiple MMOs out there with open world pvp areas 'lake style' that have done this RIGHT. If Bioware had done their homework, as I assumed they had-and that assumption is shaken now-they would have accurately plotted the issues, the balance, what kind of things need to happen in the zone, what kind of things need to be avoided, how they want the zone to play out, how can they make that happen. Instead, what we got was a very simple king of the hill style capture the points. I read a dev post, where he basically said that ilum was not supposed to be up 24/7 and that they knew what players would do in it. And yet, they LEFT IT IN. They still enabled this horribly broken piece of crap. The most nonsensical thing ever.
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Posted 1/19/2012 7:46:42 AMOh, good. They'll be taking action against the players; kind of like they take action against people named Burnallnegros and Furry-vag who've been running around for 3 weeks? Right.
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Posted 1/19/2012 6:50:21 PMDid you report them? No? There you go.
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Posted 1/19/2012 4:45:00 AMJust my tuppence on the whole roll back wailing and gnashing of teeth.
They mended the Kira companion story so I made a fresh Gaurdian that I took up to lvl11.
If that was rolled back because of a bug that was exploited then I would be proper peeved.
Just slap the tempory ban hammer around. Most of the over reactors had no intention of resubbing anyway.
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Posted 1/19/2012 5:18:01 AMyou have nothing to worry about ^^
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Posted 1/19/2012 4:43:09 AMI played in Ilum for 8 hours and got from 44 to 54.
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Posted 1/19/2012 5:20:50 AMIf your playing on the side that was camped, i feel for you.
if not.. collecting armaments in the middle combined with PK's in that area should finnish your daily within an hour.
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Posted 1/19/2012 2:16:32 AMWhy are people complaining that they cant get their weekly quest done? its a weekly, you do it once pr week. The daily is 30.. the weekly is 150. How many days is a week?
Sure some ppl cant play 5 days a week thats fine. But whining when u cant get it done in the same time it took when swapping cannons is just retarded.
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Posted 1/19/2012 12:50:57 AMTwo ideas for Ilum:
1) Close it. Work on it and re-release it in the march update with balancing mechanics so it's not so one-sided.
2) Change it to a FFA zone. Faction balance problem gone! Just have random spawn placement in Ilum and have all players go at it. If you place fast spawning armament chests at all points then low pop servers can still complete the daily/weekly in a reasonable time period and you have places to focus fighting.
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Posted 1/19/2012 12:48:14 AMHow to balance faction? Buffing would be one way though you had like thousand of imp player crying because they got one-shotted from a buffed rep but honestly this would be the only solution I see. There just shouldn't be any possibility to abuse this buff for PVE content.
The crying will never stop, ever.
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Posted 1/19/2012 12:32:53 AMPepole are so quick at crying it's unbelivable.
Zomg pepole getting battlemaster in matter of a day. I've been in illum from 3 pm to 1 am non stop and passed from 50 to 56. Yes it's is still alot... but in no way you can get from 0 to battlemaster in a day. They going to patch it tomorrow and there should be a rollback so no big deal in that part.
On that patch they didn't adress the faction unbalance... what you guys want them to do ? Give buff to the inferior faction so that any smuggler/imperial agent can sneek up on you and 1 shot you ?. They said they will reduce the number of pepole per instance in illum. That will fix it imo, the last instance will be imbalanced for sure.. but it's a start. They can't find a quick solution to very thing...