That's an assassin power. They wear light armor and it uses a lot of force, for an assassin. Classes are not all the same. Deal with it.

A sage specced fully into seer should never run dry when they're on their force-efficient sequence. In pvp I don't do this unless the other team sucks; a full force bar will keep me going for 30 to 40 seconds of spamming heals as fast as I can, and I'm probably going to get killed before I run out. (Now, the people who have a group of three or four all beating on a different tank and leaving me alone while I heal them... this is going to be an easy match to win) (I roll with a premade and have half my stuff in champion pieces so far, so I don't actually do this, I just call for help) Operative/scoundrel killing in 1v1 when they come at you out of stealth: knockback, stun, shield, HoT if you have it, remove debuffs if they used any, slow, move away, heal once, start stacking DoTs and it's a straight fight from there. Hope they didn't bring a friend or you're dead. Similarly if too many of those things are on cooldown. If you see the CC-from-stealth land on you then immediately break it and hit your AoE knockback, they're in range. Getting knocked out of stealth screws them over for ages.

You specced a scoundrel with a shadow talent tree? Impressive. I shall assume you meant "the middle one", scrapper. Scoundrels do seem to be rather lacking in sorcerer-killing abilities. The melee classes are much better at taking them out. I suggest you would be better served by making marauders your priority target - and given the armor-cutting ability of a scoundrel, the tank classes are also your prey. Shadows are the stealth class best suited to killing sorcerers. But you seem to be complaining that scoundrels should be a ganking class and you can't gank with it. No class is supposed to be able to do that. Every character is tough to kill solo - some classes are better able to beat down others, but in all cases you're looking at a fight that lasts upwards of 20 seconds. Scoundrels start out with a huge burst of damage. After this, they're supposed to fight. (Find you're getting killed much quicker than this in pvp? Either you're doing something wrong, or far more likely, there was somebody else attacking you that you didn't notice. Everybody dies to focus fire)

They were (temporarily?) removed due to some issue or other, I forget what. The PvP reward system is getting tweaked in the next big patch.

Yes. That is because this is its one huge, critical purpose. The force field is the death penalty. If you die, you're out of the match for a few seconds. If it wasn't there then every voidstar match would be 20 minutes of scrapping in front of the first door, because nobody would be able to get past the infinitely respawning defenders. Without the forcefield there would be no point in killing people. Alderaan also has the same game mechanic. Only instead of a forcefield, it's a speeder bike.

SWTOR runs as administrator. No non-administrator process can intercept key strokes sent to a process with a higher privilege level. That's just windows. (Rift doesn't run as administrator, I presume)

I say that all the time, yes. Everybody gets it.

Disabled due to issues. They're working on it.

Since I am not really interested in a pointless argument, I shall simply state that I disagree with pretty much everything the OP says.

That's got nothing to do with the class. Resolve is broken. Anybody can CC through it, sometimes.

Actually it's just high-level healers taking advantage of an easy way to get an extra medal. It's always on voidstar, if you look closely. The trick is simple: the AoE heal does about 2500 to everybody in range. When that's 6 people scrapping on top of a bomb point then you can rack up some big total numbers fast, largely because overheals count towards your total. This doesn't often have a massive impact on the progress of the fight, because it's unlikely that more than one or two people really needed it.

One melee is manageable: hit knockback the moment they arrive, then slow. When they shake it off and get back to you, stun and move away. If nobody's covering you by the time they get out of that, it's hopeless. Two means you're about to die and should look for something useful to do with your last 10 seconds - who needs a bubble?

What's a warfront? We're all just abusing the way healing is counted to get one of the painfully small number of medals a healer can get (300k healing). It's not actually doing that much good in the fight. And it only really works on voidstar where everybody clusters into one big scrap.

One of the biggest advantages a sage has is the cluelessness of other classes about what the bubble does. The number of times I've seen somebody waiting for a bubble to expire...

Few classes are quite as easy to kill as a sage/sorcerer. Few can have such a spectacular effect when nobody bothers, or knows how to kill them. I have lost count of the number of sith I've killed because they stood around bashing at me with their lightsaber and trying to out-dps me while I finished cast after cast. I usually pvp with a healer sage, and spend most of my time either: 1. Making everybody around me ridiculously hard to kill, because none of the opposing team are bothering me 2. Drawing the attention of a couple of enemies, and promptly kiting them a long way from the objective - I won't survive this, but my team has just had 30 seconds of a numerical advantage in their fight, so they probably won. Note that there is no class you can outrun; kiting in pvp is all about LOS. 3. Screwing up melee characters I'm also watching what the enemy are doing, and if I spot a sorcerer doing the same, I'm going to call the target and a couple of melee characters are going to flatten him.

This is a meaningless comparison. You must consider how often it is possible for you to do this, and how much the opposing team can do to stop you. You can only backstab an unaware target, or one that doesn't know to turn around or is stuck in a cast - and you can only stealth backstab once. You can keep healing repeatedly for ages. Clearly, for balance, the backstab must be a much larger number than the heal. Sages get such huge numbers in healing because they're so easy to stop. Similarly for whoever was complaining about being unable to knock down a healer. I do a lot of pvp, with a sage healer, wearing champion equipment. Competent players can knock me down easily in a 1v1. People who don't know how to tackle a sage get crushed. Healers who are getting into 1v1s are probably screwing up, because they're supposed to be backing up their team (although this does have its applications: I can often get 2 or 3 people to play "chase the healer" in huttball, and promptly lead them to the end of the field where the ball isn't and waste the next 30 seconds killing me, while my team scores).

I agree with the general point, but... I've looked at quite a few of these, and I think you have mischaracterized them. Let's pick a fairly blatant example: http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=1207977 19 pages of ranting, interspersed with people pointing out that the whole thing is completely fake, before a Bioware employee has time to get to the bottom of it and post conclusively that it was indeed all lies. These forums are being trolled. Quite heavily. Most of these stupid, unreasonable hater threads are started and perpetuated by people who are trolling the forums, for the sole purpose of creating massive pointless arguments. The speed at which people are feeding the trolls means that Bioware can't lock threads fast enough. As always, it takes longer to disprove something than it does to make up a complete lie, so the liars have the advantage. It does seem likely that the volume will decrease substantially once accounts start expiring, which will be nice. Until then, flag it when you see it, and don't feed the trolls. If you suspect a thread is fake, never post in it. (I've lost count of the number of times I've seen somebody post as an "expert" in an industry that I've actually worked in, and it has been obvious to me that it was a fake, but nobody outside the industry would spot it that easily)

It's not 2-3k over the lesser relics. It's roughly 0.5% more base damage, compared to the crit bonuses on the green relics.

So, here's a proposal: if you find it unacceptable that people are taking holidays over Christmas, then you should probably have kept working and taken your game-playing holidays in February when all your service providers are back at work.

If you dig into the business side, on software companies of any size, you'll find this is intentional. As far as the business people are concerned, the first version of any new product must be released in an unfinished state - they consider that anything else would be waiting too long to go to market. They know all about the "honeymoon period" and the impact of early reviews, and it is their considered position, as experts in turning software into money, that after considering all these factors, early releases are more profitable in the long run. As an engineer I don't really agree with this principle. Nor do I trust them very much; they don't appear to have error bars on their graphs and I don't think they've done a controlled trial of these ideas. But I accept that they probably still know how to do their jobs better than I would.

The behavior of players, especially on forums like these, makes game developers extremely unwilling to comment on changes that are not yet ready for release. This is because schedules slip, other priorities appear, bugs turn out to be more complex than expected, and changes get bumped back to a later release at the last minute. When this happens, the forums erupt in conspiracy theories about how this is all part of some grand plan to sell players as slaves to Tibetan yak farmers. Game developers find it much easier and less antagonistic to simply say nothing until the patch is ready for release - the low level grumbling about silence is preferable to the screaming when players get to see what's happening inside the sausage factory. So that's what they do. This, you might get - but not frequently. Ridiculously overworked. A lot of their time gets burned on reading through inane forum threads, sifting out the one paragraph of actual bug report, and sending it in. If they had to actually post about these things then it would take much longer.

(Also a professional software engineer) Limited manpower. They were fixing the really major bugs during those months. Because Christmas could not be delayed three months while they fixed every known bug. The release schedule here was driven by the holidays. This was a financial decision: they did the estimates and concluded that releasing in time for Christmas shopping would bring in more money than releasing in Q1 with more bugs fixed. People are not interchangeable. They have different skill sets and knowledge of the product. Complex software issues are the worst: even in a company the size of BioWare, there will be a tiny handful of people who have the expertise to figure them out. You realise that emotes are created by the artists? Do you really believe that the art team can fix software bugs? There will be a few people whose entire job is "creating animations". They spend five days a week animating. It's a highly specialized job. The only prioritization possible in what they do is to animate something different. That's just the superficial problem. The production issue is that many changes mean you have to test 20 other things. So one "easy" fix that takes a developer an hour to make, might also require two weeks of QA work before it could be released - while a different fix to a cosmetic issue might require no substantial QA work and be released immediately. So cosmetic fixes can come out first, even if it was the last thing the developer did on that day. Generally, changes to critical gameplay features like powers will need extensive testing, while text changes and bugged item rewards are fairly easy to test.

Doesn't even have to be a real healer. Any of the classes which can spec as a healer can do this, even if they went dps. Learn to play, guys.

The announcer tells you at the start. Weapons, name calling, and cheating are all encouraged.

Right now, there's a lot of inexperienced players complaining about "50s" in PvP. And they're wrong; I PvP a fair bit and can confidently state that many of the random 50s are inept and easy to defeat from a lower level. What's going on here is more subtle, and only an experienced player would spot it, because they're watching the opposing team's tactics. What is happening here is that one side enters a skilled, coordinated premade and the other side gets 8 random players attempting their daily mission. Every time, the premade group steamrolls the randoms. The premade happens to be players at level 50 - this is irrelevant. What is relevant is that they play dozens of matches every day and are coordinating via voice chat. What we need is for warzone queues to be tweaked to place premades against premades and randoms against randoms. Further, where enough players are queueing, those with lower valor should be matched against each other. This would dramatically improve the quality of life for pvpers. I almost always roll with a premade. It's not very interesting to draw a bunch of randoms on the other side and crush them. All the good fights I've ever had have been against other premades. I almost always go with a premade because I don't want to queue solo any more. If I queue solo, then I'm going to end up facing a premade with a bunch of randoms on my side, and they will crush us. It's a pointless experience. Let's have some fair matches.