Basically what the topic says, I played this game a lot when it first came out and had fond memories, so I thought I'd check in and see if it was still enjoyable enough to resub; got to level 12 and decided to try a flashpoint. Got yelled at for engaging with the first pack and then kicked. Tried to talk about it in General to figure out if maybe I just got a bad group, and got yelled at again. I'd use stronger language to actually describe it, but the forum won't let me. So I guess fond memories are all I'm going to have. The single player is fun and the story is still enjoyable, but the community is toxic even by MMO standards. Maybe if the game's not dead in five years, I'll try again.

I am starting to believe that the PVP kids don't actually read and just twitch-repost the same arguments that have been addressed time and time and time again. Oh well, can't force people to learn to read.

Full time jobs don't leave much time for keeping up with forums, so I'm just going to address a couple of the points that have been brought up so far. 1. Why am I being insulting to the PVP players and calling them out on not wanting to fight on a slightly higher gear level rather than a massively overpowering gear level? I'd hope the answer to that one lies in the question. As for why I choose to word it the way I do, it's because I'm tired of the PVP crowd slinging insults casually and not getting called on their ********. 2. But won't normalizing stats SOMEHOW unbalance everything else? Even if PVE gear has better set bonuses for PVE and PVP gear has better set bonuses for PVP? How? Remember, expertise gear, while it has lower stats than PVE gear, also directly increases damage done and decreases damage taken from other players. It's almost like expertise acts as both primary damage stats and primary defense stats all at the same time. So just add those stats and do away with the middle man. The only difference is now all the gear is good in all the game. 3. But lol Bioware just wants to make money off forcing you to grind two sets of gear! And that's fine, and it's their right as a company to do so. What it isn't is good business to do it in this manner. The more of your player base you can include in any given part of your game, the more vibrant your overall game will be. Long queue times and impossibly skewed matches don't make anyone want to play, which leads to burnout and subscription loss. 4. You're just dumb and bitter and must be a BADDIE! And you must be an illiterate ****. 5. Are you Finnius from AoC? No, but if he also talked sense, I'm glad we share a namesake. Never met the guy. 6. But what if X gear is easier to get than Y gear?! Won't the PVP players be screwed over?! Have you ever seriously raided? Getting a specific piece of gear to drop can be like pulling teeth, but most raiders accept that. On the other hand, PVP gear is gained in a steady progression, win or lose. I don't hear many PVE players screaming that if a PVPer has gear and skill he should be disallowed from a raid. I do hear PVPers wailing that raiders should not be able to PVP, even if they have the same gear and skill. Seems like a double standard. 7. But what if PVPers start dominating end game PVE content?! Huh?! What then?! If your PVP-centered gear that just happens to have the same stats as the PVE-centered gear but no set bonuses that are terribly well suited to PVE ends up getting you into more raids than a similarly geared guy in PVE gear, it's likely because you're a better raider than him. So good for you, more power to ya. Now let's all try and be civil and hope that one day in the next ten years someone on the PVP design team will actually address how stupid an idea expertise is.

Less a defense of expertise and more an explanation, but it's something. What it comes down to, so far as I can tell, is that people want to pretend that even with the same stats and better set bonuses for PVP, high end PVE gear would somehow be 'better' in PVP. Which leads me to seriously doubt the confidence you PVPers seem to have in your skills.

What a well-reasoned and thought-out response, and such a sterling and rational reason for keeping a bad stat in the game. Truly, you are a poet. Ok, enough of the sarcasm. This and "it's needed for balance" are basically the only arguments for keeping expertise around, both of which are easily refuted by noting that everything expertise does could be done more elegantly by a global buff / debuff while normalizing stats across PVP and PVE gear, and giving PVP gear PVP-centric set bonuses to make sure it stays on top of PVE gear in WZs. And open world PVP, if we ever get that. (Which, as mentioned, is another area that expertise locks half or more of your game out of.). Any PVPers have a REAL argument for keeping it around? I'm kind of curious. NOTE: Yes, I'm aware this is a word for word repost of an earlier post. I'm just going to keep copy and pasting it until one of the pro-expertise camp decides to comment, rationally and intelligently, on why it wouldn't work. The glove's been thrown, have at.

What a well-reasoned and thought-out response, and such a sterling and rational reason for keeping a bad stat in the game. Truly, you are a poet. Ok, enough of the sarcasm. This and "it's needed for balance" are basically the only arguments for keeping expertise around, both of which are easily refuted by noting that everything expertise does could be done more elegantly by a global buff / debuff while normalizing stats across PVP and PVE gear, and giving PVP gear PVP-centric set bonuses to make sure it stays on top of PVE gear in WZs. And open world PVP, if we ever get that. (Which, as mentioned, is another area that expertise locks half or more of your game out of.). Any PVPers have a REAL argument for keeping it around? I'm kind of curious.

Also typical PVP whine whenever someone makes a suggestion to balance PVP so that they can have actual competition rather than steamroll slaughterfests. But I suppose you're not actually interested in that, so do be a dear and keep it to yourself.

God I hate prokid internet slang. Yes, I have a problem with expertise as a mechanic because I'm a stuffed animal with a wildly popular cartoon in the late 1980s - early 90s. Makes perfect sense. If you think the only reason someone is opposed to a stat that forces end-game gear from PVE to be utterly pointless in all aspects of PVP while seeing no problem with the same tier from PVP being just fine through most of PVE content is because they're bad, just say so. Just expect me to call you out for being a hypocrite.

Not needed. Everything expertise does can be done better with a global buff / debuff to adjust damage and healing levels to where design wants them to be in post-50 PVP. For example, if design wants damage done and damage taken from players adjusted to a specific percentage, then buff ALL players to that percentage. Redistribute expertise into other stats and suddenly all of your gear becomes useful. Differentiate PVP and PVE gear by means of stats and set bonus, not 'lol I have more expertise, I win.' Seems like bad, sloppy design in an otherwise elegantly designed game.

Awesome, headway. (And just for clarification, had two posts in there in short order - the previous one wasn't at you, it was at the guy above.) Just because WoW made a huge balls-up in designing the way their PVP and PVE content fit together doesn't mean TOR has to make the same mistake. Progress, people.

I'm not trying to start a flame war with a barely literate forum troll. I'm talking about closing an artificial gear gap that separates gear of the supposedly same tiers into two unequal groups. It's amazing how you can spout off that I must just be a bad scrub without knowing what I play, what my records are, even what server I'm on. Not everyone who advocates for change to benefit the community as a whole is unskilled. I'd wager it's people who can't deal with the thought of equal footing and skill-based PVP rather than gear-based who have more to lose.

I've spelled it out in plain terms earlier in this very thread, but I'll do so again for your benefit. If you remove expertise from PVP gear, you then use those stat points to cover the spread to equivalent PVE levels. This may or may not take the form of the exact same stats or skew it in favor of offense or defense as is desired, but you'll end up with the same stat spread. Now stop pretending I'm advocating a flat removal with no recompense.

People keep making this argument and it keeps being untrue. Expertise normalizes damage done and taken to roughly equal levels while buffing healing a bit. There is NO reason the same can't be done with a global buff / debuff inside WZs. The difference in stats and set bonus then becomes the defining factor of PVP gear vs. PVE gear, which makes matches much more even. The guy in good PVP gear still has an advantage over the guy in good PVE gear, but it's not skewing the metrics to the degree that the PVE guy has literally no chance.

So there's been a lot of talk about 'scrub mentality' which is frankly BS and doesn't really apply to a mechanical conversation about why expertise, as a stat, is harmful to your overall game design. Lack of skill and unwillingness to gear is one thing. Giving one side an advantage on gearing compared to the other side is entirely another. As it stands the BM set is equivalent to the Columi set. The disparity in these sets should favor BM in PVP and Columi in PVE, which it does - just greatly more so in favor of BM in PVE and slightly more in favor of Columi in PVE. There is no real comparison between the two for PVP. BM wins hands down. But let's take another step down and see what happens. (Obviously without tinkering with remoding the gear and such.) Recruit gear is perfectly viable for gearing in HM FPs. (Tested it a bit to make sure.) Tionese gear in a WZ will get you steamrolled with little to no reward. Now a step up - WH gear in PVP is obviously quite good. It also holds up well in normal ops, higher end FPs, and nearly all the open-world PVE content. Rakata gear in PVP is about as good as Tionese. Are you seeing what I'm getting at here? The highest end PVE gear might as well be worthless in post-50 PVP. The highest-end PVP gear remains viable enough to gear you into end-game PVE content via the rewards you'll get from running HM FPs and low-level Ops without requiring that you buy an intermediary PVE set that strips most of your stats off. Justify it however you want, that's not good for the community. I put in time and effort to get good PVE gear. I'm not saying I want it to be better than PVP gear. I just want it to be good enough that I don't have to ignore it in favor of blues in order to PVP.

I've never really understood the problem with having both sides of your game be at least viable in both sides of your game. Nowhere have I said that I want my PVE gear to be zomg roxxor s00p3rhax in PVP. I want my PVE gear to be as useful as your PVP gear is in PVE. The fact remains that you can do all of the gearing runs up through Columi and a bit of Rakata for PVE in PVP gear without much trouble. You cannot say the same for PVP. I cannot gear for PVP without going through an intermediary gear set that greatly reduces ALL my other stats. Which is to say, the moderate amount of expertise on the recruit set weighs more heavily than well over 1000 points in combined other stats. That is fundamentally flawed design. The argument that PVP can't be balanced without expertise has been refuted quite a few times, but let me do it again one more time. In the pre-50 bracket there's a mechanic called Bolster. I'm not advocating normalizing stat levels in post-50 PVP, but it proves that a global buff / debuff system is certainly viable. So if you want to normalize damage, use that global buff / debuff system to normalize it to whatever game design feels is necessary and leave the gear differentiation to stats and set bonus - PVP set bonus should always be better in PVP and PVE should always be better in PVE. There's even a simple way to do that - specifically reference PCs and NPCs in the set bonuses. Of course, that means the only major advantage you'd get from PVE gear in PVP is your stats. But with the removal of expertise, design is free to streamline that between the two sets as well. With a better PVP set bonus, the PVP gear still wins out. It just doesn't crush the non-PVP gear before it like an atom bomb.