Were you referring to ranked or regs? There are plenty of valid reasons not to put it in for regs, but this was primarily referring to ranked, where being down a person because of a d/c is a 99% chance of a loss, unless you seriously overpower the other team.

I'm confused, how is this exploitable?

Having to reform groups after every warzone was tons of fun too.

The thing is - I do, for the most part, agree with you. I never found it difficult to find other people to queue with. That didn't stop the "Premades are ruining non-ranked warzones" thread in the PvP forum from getting over 200k views and 588 pages of posts, though. Whether we agree with it or not, I suspect there will be complaints, and a lot of them. I'm also not sure I'm convinced that queue times wouldn't suffer if a lot of the people who are currently pugging get frustrated and quit. I guess time will tell.

We don't really want them to get discouraged and stop PvPing, though, do we? After all, isn't one of the big points of 2.4 making PvP accessible to a broader range of people, not just the hardcore?

Just to be clear, I was talking about regular queues, not ranked. Solo queue'd people will get arena pops in the regular queue and end up facing 4 man premades, which will be about as fun as facing superqueued 2x4 person groups in warzones. Unless there's matchmaking for *regular* arenas that I'm unaware of. (I never had an issue getting my *own* premades but in this case I could definitely see the point of the complainers.)

Not to mention premades facing 4 pugs. I can hear the complaints already.

There's very little point in me paying for a game I no longer desire to play. No, I don't expect the game to be built around my wishes and desires, but that doesn't mean I'm not allowed to be disappointed that it changed from the game I enjoyed. And no, I'm not sure why I'm still posting either. I know people hate these kinds of posts. I'm sorry. I've spent a lot of time on these forums over the last year and a half...coming here is kind of a habit that it appears I'm going to need to break.

I give it - 24 - 48 hours after 2.4 comes out until threads start popping up about people getting wrecked by premades in regular arenas, since there is no option to exclude them from the regular warzone queue. And since those premades *have* to do regs to finish dailies/weeklies, "go queue ranked" won't be really a valid complaint anymore. This has potential to scare people off from even queuing for regular warzones, IMO. As for myself, I've come to the (sad) conclusion that if arenas aren't my thing - this is no longer the game for me. I'm genuinely sad, I've had a lot of fun playing it (since beta.) I guess you're right though, in the grander scheme of things, my subscription doesn't really matter. (My sincere apologies if this sounds overly melodramatic, it's just that I'd rather NOT unsub. It happens, games change, but I don't have to LIKE it. :/ ) I haven't seen anyone comment on option #2, by the way. It might not have been *enough* for some people, but it would have at least been an acknowledgement that for some people (even a minority) - this decision really sucked.

Here's the thing. Is what you're saying true? I'd say, most likely yes. If we're talking about a few hundred people out of thousands, that could likely be an inconsequential number as far as BW is concerned. With that being said, even if an *individual* member is inconsequential, I don't think that actions which make them feel inconsequential are generally the way to go especially if they can be avoided with minimal expense or effort. And regardless of what it's labeled as, the removal of 8v8 ranked after people paid to transfer to play it had the effect of making people feel inconsequential, like their subs didn't matter. Regarding the removal of ranked 8v8, I think there are a couple of ways this could have been handled that would have lessened the impact significantly. 1)Leave ranked 8v8 intact, but make it PERFECTLY clear that the focus and development time is going to be focused solely on 4v4 arenas for the foreseeable future, due to their appeal to the larger player base. This might have caused some minor grumbling, but likely not on the scale of entire PvP guilds disbanding/leaving the game entirely. People grumble about it in the future? They were already told how it was going to go, it was their choice to continue playing. 2)If the above was not possible for whatever reason, then I do think that allowing (free) transfers back to original servers for those who had been shown to have participated in a ranked match since the introduction of transfers would also have lessened the impact. If the player quit anyway, zero money lost. If the player decided to go back to their old server and play with people they knew there - the only loss is the money the player *might* have paid to transfer back; the gain is the continuing subscription. What #2 above would have shown these subscribers is that "yes, we're aware that many of you paid to transfer to play a game option that will no longer be available to you. We regret that this may have caused you inconvenience, but we'd like you to stick around." In the absence of either of these - or a better suggestion someone else might come up with..what some people are left with IS a feeling that their subs don't matter. Which may be true, but....am I crazy for thinking that leaving a customer with that impression should be avoided if possible? Was it *really* impossible to do either option 1 or option 2?

If you don't mind, I'd like to take a quick shot at a bit of an explanation of where that kind of attitude comes from. I'll note, though, that I'm not claiming to speak for the OP, this is just my personal observation. I think the frustration for many comes from what appears to be a significant over reliance on metrics, compared to actual player experience on live. (Not to say that it should completely swing the other way, mind you, because you can't really account for varying player skill.) Metrics aren't going to show you, for example, how many melee were absolutely miserable for MONTHS after 1.4 (Bubble Stun.) Unless the specific metric you're focusing on is "how long do players spend not in control of their character," things like that end up taking way too long to be addressed. I think there's also a concern with how the metrics deal with outliers - if a class is not performing well in general, but a select dedicated few stubbornly stick to the class and perform reasonably well out of sheer determination, is that factored into the equation? Players will flock to the class perceived as FOTM and many will still struggle with it, how does that affect the "metrics" overall? Basically, there is very little shared about what these metrics are, and how they are used. (Weren't we supposed to get a "mathy" post explaining bolster? Did that ever get posted?) If there was more transparency there, there'd also be more opportunity for constructive discussion. "I know your metric shows *this,* but in the live game, it's actually happening like *that,* and *here* is where you might want to consider making an adjustment." Instead, it feels like we are just being asked to trust metrics that aren't really shared with us, and then when people see things like bubble stun left in the game for month after month; THAT'S when people start wondering what on earth the devs are looking at to determine that the current state of gameplay is acceptable. TL,DR: I think showing us, to the extent that it's possible, the actual math instead of telling us to "heal to full" would be a significant improvement.

These folks took the time to basically rewrite the entire petition based off feedback from the original thread. Do you think that maybe...we could try not to carry the drama over into this one?

/sign

That part of the post (rejoining) was 99% pertaining to ranked matches. " Why doesn’t this work for at least Ranked WZs for PvP? Once one team loses a player due to a disconnect in their Ranked match, they automatically lose." Ranked matches don't backfill. So if you lose someone, you're short a person for the rest of the game. It has cost teams matches - and rating...on numerous occasions. And as far as I know, ranked arenas will have the exact same issue. I believe the original post is about to be edited to make it more clear that this is what's being referred to.

Just 8v8 ranked. I say "just," but it's the reason some of us were still subbed.

If I had a dollar for every time I've heard..."I really like(d) the PvP in SWTOR, but....." over the last couple of weeks.. Stupid big hairy "but."

That's the sad part. Most of my friends are playing other stuff right now - not because they WANT to be....but because bad PvP decisions just frustrated them to the point where it killed their desire to log in to this one.

Signed petition and linked to my guild. Most of them unsubbed in frustration. And yes, I'm a little bitter about it, people enjoyed the PvP, just not the decisions that were made surrounding it.

Lol. So bearing in mind that 8 man ranked is going away - if I want to play with even one other friend, I can only do arenas? No thanks.

Too bad people who'd prefer to do warzones only don't have that option. Short of leaving arenas if they pop, which would be kind of a crappy thing to do.

As a member of a PvP guild whose members are mostly playing other games right now - I feel for you. I have lots of friends that primarily PvE as well, and a lot of their guilds aren't in the greatest shape either.

These two posts have it right, IMO. Combined with bugs which WERE found and WERE reported extensively making it to live anyway - bolster bug, for example - I can understand why many find it more trouble than it's worth.

While there are times that that has been true - I have seen the threats to unsub and then you see the person online a week later....I don't think it's the case this time, I have seen a substantial number of people completely disappear. Some of them may come back for 2.4 but I don't know how many or how long they'll stay.

Funny, because that's exactly what we're* doing this afternoon. Sitting in mumble playing other games that aren't SWTOR. Believe it or not, most of us are redownloading WoW, of all things. How sad is that? *my POT5 guild.

I know of guilds who did pretty much exactly what you're suggesting. Want to know what happened? After a couple of losses, the outsiders would start leaving the groups.