The thing is, this kind of behavior is not a swtor specific issue, or even a video game specific issue. PvP is by nature competitive, and like any other kind of competitive activity (ie. sports) there is a certain subset of the population that will do anything they can to win. The problem is, this game has never had a large enough pool of ranked PvP players on any server to facilitate a functioning matchmaking system, where you would ideally get matched up against people of your skill level. So, overtime, on pretty much every server, 1 or 2 guilds emerged as the top PvP guilds due to having the most skilled players, which in turned caused a snowball effect in which any top players who were looking for a guild would ultimately join an already established powerhouse, because skilled players naturally want to play with other people with their mindset. Cross server queueing would, or at least, would have fixed this if it was implemented at any time during the existence of 8's, and it would definitely help in 4s. It would have allowed the top guilds from around the world to play against eachother without having to resort to paid transfers (many players, including myself, spent a pretty significant amount of money to get our characters over from a completely dead server to one where PvP was happening) or having to wait for the PTS to be up (ranked on the pts was really fun, but it was challenging to schedule with guilds from other servers and many guilds just didn't want to bother with it, which I can't blame them for). But on top of that, cross server queues would have given an opportunity to smaller guilds on each server to be able to go into ranked and play against teams of their skill level and improve at their own pace, as opposed to just getting destroyed by the best teams on their server. Also, I should mention, just in case some newer players aren't ware, its not like cross server is this random idea someone brought up in the forums once that Bioware just doesn't want to do. Cross server was PROMISED as an upcoming feature at the guild summit back in February of 2012. I even seem to recall Gabe Amantangelo saying that the reason for the ranked preseason (which ended up lasting over a year) was because they didn't want to go into season 1 without a cross server infrastructure in place, because it would just be silly without it. That's why, when it comes to PvP, I really can't take anything this dev team does seriously. Even if the game was perfectly balanced, making every single class and spec equally viable for ranked, fixed all of the bolster bugs completely, brought back 8v8 ranked warzones, and tripled the rate in which we receive PvP content, the fact that they actively decided not to do the one thing which would have helped the competitive PvP community more than anything shows that they really just don't care, especially since they promised it in the first place.

i actually was curious about the population of the french and german servers last night so i made some toons to check it out. Yeah its unfortunate, they all seem to be in a pretty sad state. They are gonna need to do something sooner or those servers will be 100% dead. The situation there is getting just as bad as it was before the first merges.

100% incorrect

wow what a great thread i completely support u, buff jedi nerf sith

If they want anything that even remotely resembles a successful pvp season they simply need to add cross server. There is not a single server in this game that has consistent ranked pops throughout the day, much less enough people to have an elo based matchmaking system work at all.

the real irony is that literally any item in the game, including white gear with no stats at all, or level 2 greens u get from mob drops on korriban is better than what was at one point the best possible pvp gear in the game.

I swear to god that some of the people in this thread have to be trolling. Not even 2 weeks ago, concealment operatives were right up there with madness assassins as the worst pvp classes in the game, with mediocre burst, horrible sustained damage, horrible survivability. And now that for the first time since the initial operative nerf in like 1.1 they are somewhat decent, people want them nerfed again. Lets look at this objectively. In PvP, operative dps are good at one thing, and one thing only, and that is stalking someone from behind, opening up on them, and killing them before they can react (and even then, you could argue that a good player of basically any class could react to this and be able to survive long enough for help to come). Also, you could argue that deception assassins are still way better than operatives at this due to having actual survivability but i digress. In a large team fights in void star, civil war, etc, concealment operatives are bad. They are also straight up useless in huttball as well as all forms of arenas primarily due to their piss poor survivability. In fact, I'd go as far to say that lethality is still a much better dps spec for operative in most situations due to being able to put out a ton of damage with dot spamming while still being able to do very solid burst with cull.

How is this even a compromise, all you did was take the one thing that a concealment operative is good at (opening burst and cc) and make it way worse. Concealment/Scrapper is not even remotely OP or broken. It still has good opening burst, good all around cc, average to below average sustained damage that is highly crit dependent, and absolutely terrible survivability.

i agree that its extremely stupid but there is a really easy solution. just go to the gtn and buy some crappy greens of any level and u will get max expertise in warzones. problem essentially solved.

r u mad

What does this have to do with arenas?

min max your obroan gear or buy gear for the next character.

This is honestly one of the worst Pub sides in the game for doing basically anything (PvE, PvP, etc). However, if you really want to play ranked arenas, it might still be worth transferring here anyway due to how totally dead they are on pretty much every other server.

This, the blue 46's aren't nearly as good as your stats on the character sheet would indicate, which raises an entirely new, and perhaps more serious bug to the table.

There is no hidden cut off, 28% is not the same as 21%. That being said, 28% crit is wayyyyyyyy too much for lethality operatives, but judging by your youtube channel you have bigger things to worry about besides how much crit your gear has.

My level 45 sniper is still using level 12 blue gear from the planetary comms vendor, has 29k health, and is capable of leading every game in damage by a significant margin in both marksman and lethality. Imo it just isn't worth it to continuously buy more gear off the planetary comms vendors if all you want to do is pvp as it just does not matter at all.

they are both pretty good and desirable.

The obvious choice is sniper, you get to just sit here while wrecking everybody from 35 meters away and do 500k more damage than anyone else in your wz.

This was the first MMO I ever played enough to reach a level that is "hardcore" enough to be able to see the highest level of play that a game has to offer in terms of PvP. Because of that, I've never really had an opinion one way or another on the actual guard mechanic as its always just felt like a standard feature to me and I couldn't really imagine the game without it. With that being said, anyone on TOFN or POT5 (the only two servers remaining which have some semblance of an active ranked arena scene in both solos and 4's) could tell you the current metagame is extremely flawed, and while its not just guard that is causing that, when the two best and most consistently effected ranked arena strategies are to burn the **** out of the tank because its the only target that can't be guarded and to run 2 healer comps to cheese wins in acid, you know you have serious, core gameplay issue that won't be solved simply by tuning damage for various classes and specs. If you want truly balanced (and more importantly, fun) arena gameplay, then there needs to be a significant overhaul of the PvP in SWTOR, and to just completely disregard any possible issues the guard mechanic brings to rated arenas is irresponsible, just as it would be to disregard any other possible class change. Additionally, while I don't agree with Mega on everything, he is way more qualified to discuss this than any of the people who have done literally ZERO ranked warzones. I find it absolutely hilarious that people who have never even played any form of ranked PvP in SWTOR argue as if they are qualified to discuss the topic of balance, when the only frame of reference they have are normals. And in normals, class balance really doesn't matter at all as you are going to win or lose purely on the number of morons on your team. If the amount of morons on your team exceeds that of the other team, then the odds are overwhelmingly against you even if your team's composition is significantly better.

The fact that you are consider abilities like death field and smash to be equivalent to a lethality operative sitting way out of the fight spamming aoe dots and grenades shows that you are either trolling or have next to no understanding of how to actually win warzones in this game.

im fine with that honestly

hooray im so excited for every new companion/character i see to be bisexual. hopefully bioware also adds romance options for the droid companions and treek because if they didnt it would be just wrong.

Just because a concealment can 1v1 terrible players doesn't mean its a viable spec. Go try running an operative dps in solo ranked or 4's and then tell me they are still good.

they initially promised it at the guild summit like 2 years ago but they've never delivered and have since taken back their promise and said that it isn't going to happen anytime soon. This is despite the fact that the 4v4 ranked queue is either completely dead or dying on every server and solo ranked queue times are getting longer and longer.

this thread makes me laugh hard, ty guys. btw, anyone know who the level 52 scoundrel on pub side is who named his character "Ravinder" with the legacy name "Sucks". I don't care too much about not having the name anymore but I'd just like to know who envied me enough to do it.