PvP 3.3. PvP Mentors, Pre-set Action Points, and Cheat Prevention (sort of)!

[Februs]

FINALLY SE has taken some of the longest running PvP feedback and made some interesting announcements.

*DISCLAIMER: Keep in mind that this information is taken from an unofficial translation of the latest Live Letter found here. So, as always, take this with a grain of salt until it has been officially confirmed by the horse's mouth. In the meantime, lets dive in and see what's up.

• PvP Mentors!
  
  This is the fist surprise announcement, as well as the most sparse. The announcement simply stated that there were "new mentor marks," including "PvE Mentor," "Trade Mentor," and "PvP Mentor."
  
  How will this work? I have no idea. I haven't really been involved with the current mentor system at all, so I'm in the dark here. I do know, however, that several players in the PvP community have requested this feature for both learning and teaching purposes. So, quite a few of you should be pleased to see that it has an official designation.
  
  That said, you should keep in mind that this is a designation only. SE has made no announcements regarding PvP training rooms, skirmish matches, dueling, or any other such methods that could be utilized by a mentor to sponsor a new player. You'll be limited to whatever functions exist within the current mentor system, until such a time as SE successfully expands our current PvP related resources. All in all, it's not a huge adjustment, but it's a step in the right direction.
  
  
  
• Pre-set Action Points!
  
  For those of you who recall their previous excuse of it taking too much time and resources, I present to you: the sound of the other shoe.
  
  This was the big one for me. The wording of the translation is not 100% clear on how this will work (SE was likely scarce on the details), and, again, this is an unofficial translation of something that was fairly vague in it's wording; however, it sounds as though we will now, FINALLY, be able to store our job action points separately as of Patch 3.3. If this is true (everyone cross your fingers right now), the benefit of this is three fold:
  
  Firstly, if this works the way that we are all assuming it will, you will no longer have to manually re-allocate your PvP action points each time you want to change jobs. No more time consuming menues. No more clunky macros.
  
  Secondly, PvP action points will be stored in a similar fashion to Gearsets. This means that you can store multiple PvP loadouts for the same job. In theory, if the lower level (lvl 50) PvP game modes were still active, then you could customize your loudouts across level brackets. More likely, however, people will use this feature to customize their Action Points across the different game modes. For example, some PvP actions are more uesful in Feast than they are in Frontlines, and vice versa. Players could now customize a "Feast loudout" and a "Frontlines loudout" which emphasize whichever skills will see more use. I don't expect many people to do this, but it's a nice option.
  
  Thirdly, and Finally, I give you:
  
  
  
• Cheat Prevention Measures!
  
  It seems that one of the reasons that SE implemented the separate storage for PvP Action Points is to add in a fail safe check for cheaters. According to the unofficial translation, each time a player switches their PvP loud out, the game will run a loading screen/bar which checks for any known cheating software. If it finds any of this software active, down comes the beautiful hammer of justice.
  
  Cheater's beware.
  
  The word is still out on how long of a check this is, if it will stall your game at all, or exactly how extensive of a check it is. The announcement was made specifically for PvP, but, in theory, the same program could be applied to any gear switch in the game. It could also be used, in theory, to check for bots.
  
  How effective will this "check" be? No idea. We'll have to wait and see. I'd like to hope that it will be an effective means for SE to police their PvP game modes and finally put a stop the a well known problem; however, we can't say that for certain until we see it in action. Presumably it will be an automated system as well, so we also can't discount the possibility that it will make mistakes or have oversights. Regardless, it is a sign that SE takes the problem at least somewhat seriously, so that's a good thing.
  
  
  
• EDIT: HuD Customization:
  
  I forgot to mention this one. Changes are being made HuD customization. My understanding is that we will be able to have saved HuD pre-sets (up to 4, if I recall correctly) which we can switch between as needed. This is not a PvP specific adjustment. The same function can be used to create a custom HuD for Raiding, Healing, Viewer/camera mode, etc. However, I figured this was worth a mention, because it gives us the option to create a custom HuD pre-set for PvP without the trouble of using a macro. Customization options seem to include anything that is currently identifiable within the current "HuD menu" in your settings; so, you still may or may not want to rely on some macros for things that are considered "system settings" such as "floating text."

Now, AGAIN, this is not an official statement from SE, and we'll have to wait and see how much of this rings true. We'll also have to wait and see how, exactly, these things play out, especially in regards to Action Points. SE was pretty adamant on not making this kind of adjustment in the past, so I'm still a little hesitant to believe that it will be all sunshine and rainbows.

That said, if all of these things are implemented, then it would be appear to be a pretty healthy dose of good news for us regular PvP'ers. At the very least, it's good to see that SE is taking a serious stance on PvP and taking player feedback into account. I'm looking forward to future updates and news.