Broadsword just poured gasoline into the dumpster fire by introducing the ability to progress through PvP Seasons by whipping out your credit card, thereby effectively enabling you to buy old Ranked PvP rewards for Cartel Coins.
To be clear up front, they didn’t directly list old Ranked PvP and past season rewards on the Cartel Market, but that’s only because they’re trying to be sneaky about it (or are being downright negligent).
With the release of PvP Season 8 alongside Game Update 7.7, Broadsword introduced the ability to purchase levels in the PvP Seasons Reward Track with Cartel Coins, so these prestigious cosmetics are now obtainable by anyone who sends a little bit of extra cash Broadsword’s way.
Past Ranked PvP and post-revamp seasonal rewards not only look cool but are symbols of exceptional skill and dedication. Selling them for Cartel Coins means you’re no longer required to set foot in a Warzone or Arena to get them, let alone try to win.
How to Get Ranked PvP Rewards without PvPing
All past Ranked PvP Rewards are available for sale on the PvP Seasons Vendor. Each item costs a substantial amount of PvP Seasons Tokens.
You get PvP Seasons Tokens from the PvP Season Rewards Track and from taking part in enough PvP over the course of the season, tracked through achievements. They also very occasionally show up as a login reward for subscribers.
Now, you can purchase all the PvP Seasons Tokens available on the PvP Seasons Rewards Track for Cartel Coins and spend those Tokens on past Ranked PvP rewards available on the vendor.
Currently, you can get 12 PvP Seasons Tokens from the Rewards Track and 8 Tokens from the season’s participation achievements.
Most Ranked PvP rewards cost 16-20 Tokens, so you only need to buy 2 whole PvP Seasons (which come out every 6 months) to get a single Ranked PvP Reward (Weapon Set, Mount, or Armor Set), but completing an entire season costs only 3,000 Cartel Coins.
What is Broadsword’s Angle?
Conveniently, Master the Fight Bundles give you 6 months sub time and 5,000 CC + monthly 500 (8,000 CC total), which is just enough time and CC to buy those PvP Seasons and grab a past Ranked PvP Reward of your choosing. How thoughtful of Broadsword to give you all that and more, for $99.99!
You don’t even need to get the bundle either! Set up a Security Key and subscribe for 6 months and that’s enough for a season, too!
Broadsword has gotten more predatory with their microtransaction practices as of late, most recently by rugpulling 2 months of the subscription and security key CC allowance to unlock Bessie and the first customization for use on other characters and the additional speed boosts exclusively on mounts from their $100 bundles that they backtracked later.
Removing skill incentives for an inherently competitive game mode is the exact opposite of what you need to do to make it more popular.
I would have a bit more sympathy for Broadsword if they properly supported PvP, but they don’t.
They hardly ever release new maps, never improve balance of existing ones, take years to occasionally fix glaring issues, and don’t moderate the game mode at all (and haven’t for years, which is also part of why they had to get rid of Ranked).
If Broadsword doesn’t change course, I’d say it’s only a matter of time before they install a Cartel Coin-operated kill switch in front of every NiM boss. After all, if you’re gonna let your players sell NiM clears and pilot buyer accounts for actual $USD, you might as well take that McNugget money for yourself!
How Broadsword Should Fix This
Now that Ranked PvP has ended, there’s nothing inherently wrong with selling progress in a PvP Season with CC. After all, this is the foundation of Battle Pass systems in PvP games.
The real issue now is that PvP Seasons Tokens are on the track itself because you can spend them to get past Ranked Rewards. Before the introduction of CC for progression, it was still acceptable because progressing the track required skill and dedication.
Assuming Broadsword has their heart set on keeping Cartel Coins as a method of progressing the season, an acceptable solution must then either:
- Make past Ranked PvP rewards obtainable in a different skill-based way that’s still PvP-related and easy to understand
- Separate PvP Seasons Tokens from the PvP Season Track itself
I can’t think of a way to do Option 1 that satisfies those requirements, but there is a fairly elegant way to do Option 2 that revolves around giving all PvP Seasons Tokens for Weekly Objectives.
- Remove all PvP Seasons Tokens from the Track and Seasonal Achievements and instead give 1 Token each time you complete a Weekly Objective (4 Tokens/week)
- Increase the prices of most items on the PvP Seasons Vendor by to counteract the resulting inflation
- Standardize Replica Ranked PvP rewards offerings and add missing items to Giradda’s inventory
- Season 0 Firebrand gear is missing
- Season 1 weapons are not sold as a set
- Existing PvP deco prices are ludicrous and out of step with how they were
- Make the sets previewable
- Remove the insulting Warzone Medpac and Adrenal from the track.
- Add 2 Personnel decos of NPCs wearing the armor sets on the track and have the seasons vendors sell NPC decos of vendor version of armor.
- Add 3 decos to the track using existing assets:
- Add regular decos from planets where Warzones and Arenas take place (not necessarily within PvP areas themselves)
- Add Rishi PvP Hook decos to include layouts of each Arena map.
- Add a PvP Hook to the Alderaan SH
- Make additional copies available on the PvP Seasons Vendors
These changes would enable Broadsword to ethically sell PvP Season levels for Cartel Coins while retaining the existing incentives to queue for PvP and fixing some of the additional issues with the current system.
Thankfully, it takes 2 seasons of non-participation to get a past Ranked PvP reward, so there’s still time to fix this before entitled “players” can finish paying to win.
