Devs honestly what is your vision for pvp?

.35 seconds is long enough for me to come out of blocking and get halfway through or even complete a melee combo and still get block broken.

.35 seconds is long enough for me to complete half a solar flare, block and eat an interruption.

.35 seconds is an eternity.

Most feel counters are gimmicky for reasons already stated and every time issues regarding counters in PvP are brought to light, those issues are either shouted out of existence or simply dismissed because select individuals don't agree.

Judging from the current situation, the current feedback trend needs a hard shift as the changes born of said feedback hasn't yielded any fruitful results. PvP populations are anemic across all servers, count the "uspc villains is a ghost town" threads or any server besides USPS.

The sharp decline in FNL participation is also another tell of PvP ailments. Not that there's ever any new faces for fnl tournaments. I wonder why...

Sadly this is the same waltz that's been danced several times before. The vocal circle of counter-farmers want things to revolve around the current, flawed system, while the mostly silent majority stay away from the flawed pvp game.
All the while new players try pvp and are confused by immunities and off-kilter counter mechanics, only to be told to get better at guessing what button to press next or get a better connection.

Latency was NEVER an issue for me personally before the current mashup of counter windows, immunities ect. Started to creep into the game. Yet now my problems MUST be down to my connection? I don't think so.
The system has just become so cluttered that it is constantly falling over itself. The old adage of 'keep it simple stupid' should apply here. Strip the system back to basics and progress from there, if the current system is a failure as said by Mepps, what is there to lose?

Have the counter windows ect. As scrim options if necessary, to allow fans of that system to keep playing as they were.

If everything up til now has failed, it's time for radical change.

Cheers!

Exactly! PvP is skill based period regardless of core mechanics. It will always boil down to who knows their power and weapon the best rather than who has the most intimate knowledge of the combat mechanics not found anywhere in a tutorial or anywhere else that might be readily available. How many new players enter the arena aware of the fact they can cancel a dodge roll window with a block window? How many get countered outside of the animations, sometimes way outside, and know it's a matter of a counter window artificially extended due to latency or whatever you want to call it these days?

NUN!

Pvp stopped being "skill based" for a while, nowadays, it's just who uses "hl" "wolf" "rifle" "bow" and "handblast" in my opinion, back when t1 or t2 pvp gear was the best and people had "furious" "fortified" "rejuvenating" and "imperious" avatar bombraider gear pvp was more skill based than ever and there wasn't this grind because you earned more marks in open world than now along with arena marks. There was also the influence gear but influence is nothing now than a badge vets can say they have on their characters since you can't spend it. I got 11957 influence

EDIT: also every power had a chance to be good back then, every weapon was good, and tanks and roles were used and meaned something. It was way more skill based back then

I miss my buff colas, my trinkets, my troll shields and I miss mentals reflection. It used to work very well in PvP but now it's at the bottom of the illusion tree under two even more useless powers, a health debuff and invisibility.

I would like to see a revamp for the following maps:

Shadowlands: it's a map where your luck counts more than your skill.
Lair Battle x2: Both players should be killed to win a round.
Moon: very fine the way it is, I just miss the old rock fight on there, can we have both old and new version?
Safehouses x4: they are boring.
Headquarters x8: very boring, lasts too long.

Another point is that we have no new map in a long time. We should have more options and a 3x based map too.
About powers and weapons: WM/AM should be removed or have the damage value balanced in arenas.

And I'm pretty sure that general PvP player base would like to see a quick change, or at least a quick response about OP powers and moves being used/exploited in Arena/Legends. Whats the fun of facing a Nature dps, HL dps and a fire tank? Why is Two Face broken in a such long time? This imbalances tear down all PvP fun.

All the power/legends diversity is a strong point of the game. At moment we have 12 powersets (3 more coming) and about 32 legends characters (and more coming each month)! But whats the matter of all of this diversity when you have to be/use the FOTM to be superior and win matches?

Actually even if you have the fastest internet connection in the world a reality of mmo's is that whatever is happening on your screen is happening about 2/3rds of a second later on everyone else's screens. Prior to the window even if you had the fastest reaction time in the world you could not react to counters, just guess. That was agreed upon by both developers and top end players alike. That's why windows had to be added in.

If you don't believe me grab a friend and enter a PvP match. Despite playing right next to him there will be a delay of about 2/3rds of a second.

You must have missed the age of DoT's in legends then if you think core mechanics don't play a role in these things. Say you take away counter immunity. DoT's become massively over powered. Extend hard stuns by too much and there's a good chance someone can get lucky on their first counter and not give the other person a chance to recover and let skill play the dominant factor.

How mechanics behave in EVERY GAME determine it's level of difficulty and the skill required to master it.

Well the luck in shadowlands has a lot more to do with replacing wave respawn timers with set respawn timers than anything else. Though I would like to see the NPC's in that map spawn less than constantly. It pushes the focus of the fight too much onto whether or not the NPC's are going to spawn, because in most cases your opponent will be coming back and you'll be stuck at less than full health when really that shouldn't happen nearly that often.

DoTs have been reduced.

If you weren't able to read your opponent well enough to accurately guess the moment of vulnerability, you weren't very good. Introducing the window hasn't solved anything. Someone else put it nicely, and I agree, the combat system trips on it's own feet more often than not.

The devs agreeing with so called "top end" players just further reinforces the fact that most feedback regarding PVP isn't considered and that if you haven't won a tournament or scored enough brownie points, don't even bother.

First it was feats. Then I got better. Then PvE just wasn't interesting or challenging.

I still play for those rare moments against players of comparable skill levels who aren't out to cheese the eff out of whatever the new hotness might be. The back and forth matches determined by time rather than points, preferably down to the wire. The batcaves with less than 20 points each and only 10 seconds left.

Rare thrills that have become rarer.

The competitive nature of PvP and the concept of rewarding skilled players over gear was what drove me into it.
I think what would keep me PvPing day in and day out is when I start winning with my team and that's how we would feel rewarded because of our skill. A lag free PvP scenario would really even the playing field for people. But everytime I consistently lose, I get fustrated and discourage and I don't run PvP. But there's nothing you guys can do about that, a loss is a loss.

Just to correct some misconceptions you have Ivy.

1.) There is no melee combo in DCUO that can be fully completed in 350 ms. If you are pulling off a full Melee Combo and being Block Broken something is off with your connection or the opponents.

2.) Solar Flare (even half of it) has a interrupt window of 1350 ms (all Block Breakers for that matter do). Not 350 ms. When you block this does not close that window.

3.) 350 ms is probably right around or actually faster than an average person's reaction time. I'm pretty quick but even I'm not that quick on a consistent basis. It is the reason why Clutch is so good at Legends. His reaction time is ridiculous. When I do the following test I normally get somewhere in the range of 265-285 ms on a average out of 5 tries (like I just did it for fun and had a average of 267 ms):

http://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime

When Clutch did it his average out of 5 tries was something like 150-170 ms. Fastest reaction in the world? Of course not...but it's damn high up there in the world of DCUO I'd imagine .

Essentially without the counter windows in place PVP becomes a guessing game of when a player is going to block instead of a reaction game to when a player did block. Anticipating when a player is gonna do something in PVP that will be counterable is still a big part of PVP in DCUO but without counter windows there is no reaction based skill to it.

You clearly missed my point then. Even if DoT's were reduced the reason they still aren't over powered is because of the game's mechanics. Without counter immunity DoT's would continue to deal damage after being countered making it more about who spammed more DoT's.

"Guess the moment of vulnerability". That there was the problem because all you could do at best was take an educated guess.

Aside from the facts that the developers have stated time and time again that they listen to feedback from all sources, including the abomination that is Google Plus if I recall correctly, this is simply untrue. They won't listen to you when in your case you have your facts wrong about how long windows actually last.

I'm probably not the best example for this question, but I liked listening to Mark Hamill and Kevin Conroy some more. What kept me staying was the combat. That's actually pretty much what got me into and kept me here for the entire game.

Though I think if you want to build more people up, you need to focus less on updates and more on making new stuff and breeding the community through open world PvP and PvP based events. A good chunk of people in game will just realize stuff got nerfed and other stuff got buffed and while that's great for more experienced players who really delve into those things and enjoy analyzing them, I don't think it'll keep new players involved. So like I said, one major update per year that can introduce new things to do and one minor update for all the balancing changes.

I started PVP for the Feats and only the Feats. After a while I ended up starting to love it. It is now the sole reason I play this game.

The enjoyment of fighting others that can change their mind at any given second to do something different is so much more thrilling to me than fighting an NPC that has the same attacks scripted to happen at the same time.

Just fix the wonky CC and I'll be beyond ecstatic. lol

Well back when I got the game in late (September 2011) I just pved with barely any pvp until I joined a league called checkmate a month later not knowing they were mainly a pvp league but they also did alot of pve.

So once I started pvping with them I've started to love it more and more because of the way it was back then (when avatar bombraider was best pvp gear). Then when checkmate gear was the best pvp (checkmate due to some issues split into 2 leagues and died) I only started pvping because I started enjoying it more than pve.

Around the time you guys introduced season 1 of pvp ,map rotations and other things started to get me not pvping as much and I started taking short breaks until I quit (sept of 2012 and came back sept 2014) for 2 years and now I do not enjoy it nearly as much because too much has changed.

Its too much a grind and this over powered flavor of the month powers and weapons are a big turn off, back then every power had a chance of competing and if you were good with a power it was because you had skill ( even full fortified avatar bombraider tanks even though hard to beat were beatable by dps and other roles) .Wm ruins pvp because people sit back or fly high doing nothing but wm block breaks , the damage on some of the wm is ridiculous. AMs have ruined some powers like gadgets, I used to love gadgets but now its too vulnerable.

Lately I've just been pveing with some pvp on my alt just to get gear but I barely do that anymore.

Thank you for the clarification.

I think we can do fine without the reaction based part as it's too subject to latency or lag or outdated hardware or any of the multitude of reasons I've heard to justify the windows.

Edit: knowing what I do now several powers that BB appear to have significantly shorter interrupt windows or can be clipped.

PvP is life PvP is love

There was reason why pvp was a huge block fest for a while. Talking about the time when block had no window nor forced duration.

What it meant was -> you could spam block key 5 times a second, and someone spamming blockbreakers was just as likely to miss his block breakers than he was to get lucky and hit one.
Thats why tap block was spammed. Second someone tried to guess with a BB, he was likely to miss and get punished (so much about the counter move...)
When no one went for a lucky guess with their BB, it came down to situation where 1 of the guys ended up having 3 of their left taps blocked over time before the other one (because right tap reset did not work back then) and got countered.
And going for an left hold was just a death sentence with how much tap block was spammed.
Hitting BB had nothing to do with skill, it was pure luck. Even when you were 100% sure he is going to block in a second, trying to hit that 0,1 second block window in an online game with a block breaker that does only check for block once at start if the animation and is not continues ( like most BBs back than were and are now)...just pure luck.

Now take out counters completely, what will you get?
5 guys stacking on each other as close as possible with pets to split as much damage as possible calling out focus targets and spamming most damaging WM/AM ranged combos (aka on current case DW) together to burst someone down before opponents do it first.
Who ever is focus fired would need to start spamming lunge for dodge effect to mitigate as much damage as possible and continue spamming range WM the second his not targeted.
And that's it, complete optimal PvP in a nutshell.
If you don't like counters, there are lots and LOTS of MMOs out there you would probably enjoy much, much more.

262 ms here...guess we are getting old...should get away from the way, let them young chaps have their fun.

Always been PvP minded player. While in PvE the strength of the boss is limited by AI and certain skill level of community, in PvP there is always someone either better than you or just right there waiting to take your place. While PvE can get stale, PvP is ever changing competition (i guess...unless you are Clutch... :>).

Competition. Hopefully server merge will solve this. As long as there is competition, reason to keep stepping up my game, there is reason to PvP.
So thanks for the server merge you guys are working on.
Another feature what would really help in towards of competition is PvP leaderboards.
Even if there would not be in game support for it, something outside of the game make via API would go a long way. Just to know where you sit rank wise in the world. It would be a reason to actually queue for PvP. As i can say for a fact that Hope Brothers has not queued for PvP for ever now. Every rare match we have had has been a scrimmage. Now if there was leaderboards, there would be actual reason to queue up instead of just scrimmage.

When i'm talking something outside of the game, i mean something like GW2 did:
https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/en/eu/pvp
Information is good, always.