Staff Writer Mike "Krelumian" Schaffnit jumped into Star Wars: The Old Republic to share his experiences with all.

These are the basics to such a new and incredibly fun game type that has fueled my nightly enjoyment since my friends and I gained access. If you can find a group of people that will work together, the PvP in this game is incredible fun. It's like learning how to ride a new, shiny bike.

The PvP system is not without flaws, however, as the amount of time you will spend being crowd-controlled will more than infuriate you. Now this isn't to say you are without a form of CC break, as every class has a skill to do so, but for the Sith Warrior the ability cooldown is 2 minutes long. To make matters worse, it seems that no ability shares diminishing returns with any of the other abilities. 

This can lead to endless amounts of time eating chain CC while on top of hazards, without any form of reliable escape for multiple encounters. You effectively get one CC break for every five that you have to eat. As you play more you learn to adapt to the "most effective" times to remove these abilities, but it still is something that I hope to see addressed in the future.

My final note on the PvP system is that group queues are far more difficult than they should be, due to the fact that, upon entering a Warzone, you drop out of your collective group. This means that, after the Warzone is over, you have to manually invite everyone back to the group in order to queue together again. It makes matters even worse when these players need to be on your friends list for fast right-click invites because you can't invite through the guild list interface. 

After the Warzone is over, you best make sure every player has unchecked the "Requeue Warzone" or, when the group tries to queue together, you will be left out completely. In the end it can just feel cumbersome and slow, when you're used to much more streamlined PvP integration in other MMOs.

During the early access period I was able to get to level 27 on my Sith Warrior, but fellow guild mates were able to manage into the low 30's. With the floodgates now open, I'm really going to have to sit down over the holidays and grind my way to max level so I can see what the game has to offer on the raiding side of content!

Mike "Krelumian" Schaffnit, Staff Writer.