Lakes Confirmed Via Rockjaw

Last night there was a glimmer of hope from the twitter verse as Stephen Reid, community manager of SWTOR confirmed that more the information will be coming concerning the "pvp lakes" earlier discussed by Gabe Amatangelo, Lead PVP Design at Bioware.

While it is popular for players to dismiss any pvp in a game. The fact remains that there is no such thing as a pve only game, and developers neglecting the pvp side of their games do so at their peril.

I believe in recent years developers have fallen for the myth that people who love pvp are a vocal minority because this is a popular myth in "the forums". This is not the case by any stretch of the imagination. While pvp centric games have not had any success, this is not because pvp is unimportant it's because you can't have a game that does not balance both pve and pvp well.

Take the game of World of Warcraft. A game that has both play a major role at end game. The standard by which the rest of the MMO industry is judged, developers who have tried to emulate the success have repeatedly neglected the pvp side of this.

There is no clearer example of the complete failure in recognizing why WOW was so successful than the recent WOW clone Rift. A game that basically directly copied all of the systems in WOW but did not truly understand them. Putting in the basics of pvp, but not understanding them at all, and ultimately failing to deliver a pvp end game to it's players who have since mostly moved on.

Rift which had the potential to be a true contender, neglected it's pvp fan base, and their game became nothing more than a place holder for SWTOR.

SWTOR can not make this mistake. Bioware and EA can not not afford to fall for the myth that "pvp is a vocal minority". They must give proper attention to all of their game, to keep all of their players or suffer the fate of Rift.

PVP players need and end game to be complete, and competitive. Whether it's competitive instances, or meaningful battles for world objectives the players must be properly challenged. I honestly hope SWTOR fulfills the dream of a complete end game MMORPG, that gives the proper attention due both the PVP and the PVE aspects of it's game.