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We recently sat down with SWTOR Director of Production, Dallas Dickinson, to talk about warzones, PvP server rule sets, and what the future holds for PvP enthusiasts in Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Swtorhub: Do you think normalized power levels has helped increase accessibility for new or more casual PvP players vs. slicing warzones into individual level range brackets?

Dallas: Yeah, and I do think there are some pros and cons to that. We’re certainly listening to player feedback because there are valid arguments on either side.

For the base of the system, which is to say, if I want to play a warzone right now, I can always get into one. I think the way that we’re currently implemented is great, but there are some edge cases there that we’re trying to address. They may not be addressed immediately, but in future launches we might change the system a little bit to address some of the feelings of imbalance that I think people are already talking about; especially when you get really, really high end players in there.

Swtorhub: Definitely. One of the main concerns I’ve seen come up fairly frequently revolves around the disparity between the number of abilities a level 10 and a level 30+ player might have access to in the same match. Damage amounts may be normalized, but that higher level player simply has a far greater assortment of tools in their toolbox for healing, damage mitigation, mobility, or crowd control.

Dallas: Exactly, and that is the original design. If you’re playing against somebody that’s 30 levels higher than you, you’re bolstered to be statistically equivalent but that higher level player will have more tools. That makes it actually more important that you learn how to play with your character in a group, so it’s a shared tool set of a little cadre of four people running around a warzone.

But yeah, there are some imbalances the further apart you get in level disparity that we’re looking into how to address in the near future.

Head over to Swtorhub.com to continue reading The Future of PvP in The Old Republic.