people can quote flat sub numbers all they want. The game doesn't pass the eyeball test. It's painfully easy to log in and see fewer people playing fewer hours. Guild rosters are decimated, and it's not an isolated thing. Even on a high pop server like Jung Ma, we knew the top echelon of PvP players, and nearly all of them have quit or are playing drastically less time. I accept that we're not the majority of MMO players, and that an MMO would be foolish to cater only to us. Unlike a lot of others, I couldn't care less if TOR was casual friendly. I don't care if they can easily get gear, finish operations, or solo outdoor heroics. Make the game fun for them-- it's no harm to me. All that matters to me and the people I play with is that the game has something for us-- some kind of engaging, competitive play. It's non-existant in PvP, and we're playing less and less or cancelling outright because of that. (My sub is up in 4 days.) As bad as PvP is, I'm glad I'm not a competitive raider-- I think those guys have it even worse. Operations are simplistic and ridiculously easy as far as mechanics-- the only challenge is overcoming rampant bugs. So yeah, believe what you want, or just ask around different guilds to see how many are growing or even staying stable. With the exception of zerg invite guilds, I haven't seen any that haven't had rosters decline noticeably, if not significantly or even critically.

you need to look a little further. there are other talents that enhance that healing trance, SIGNIFICANTLY. It'll become one of your higher throughput spells, and also has excellent efficiency. it'll also proc your free regen mechanic. so yeah, it's very worth it.

LOL. Nicely done. Anyone who hasn't seen a door exploited in VS hasn't been looking (or hasn't been playing them. )

that's almost our exact makeup, but we'd drop the commando (too easy to LOS/interrupt) for a balance sage, who has better offheal utility, similar burst, much better LOS/interrupt counters, but granted lacks the armor debuff.

1.) Mythic's been involved throughout the design process. 2.) Got a source where it says they're "taking over" the design of Ilum? 3.) Even if they are, that's necessarily not a good thing to those of us who played WAR and got disgusted by its issues.

pay attention. pre-season is not the same thing as Beta, which is what you're inferring. They're rolling out a new PvP mechanic that's going to involve an ELO rating. They're calling it "preseason" because they need a chance to see how it will work before the results matter. nothing to see here. move on.

I assume you're talking about Voidstar ties (you weren't very clear). It's a random roll. Seriously. BW confirmed it. In huttball, it's the team that holds the ball as time expires, or the last team to do so.

it's really as simple as the aesthetics. a sorc in BM gear looks menacing and powerful. A sage in BM gear looks like a flying nun on his/her wedding day. It's not hard to see which faction would end up being the more popular. but, to get to your point, you're correct on the impact of a same faction WZ. that's one of the few ways they could've generated a balancing force-- by making WZ queues extremely painful for the over populated side. that said, they're not going to revert that change. And, there's really not much else they can do at this point-- the damage is done.

got proof? Because right now, we have 4 man queues. BW's talked about rateds. People have asked about 8 man queues. BW's talked more about rateds, but refused to confirm/deny 8 man queues. People asked some more, and got nothing but more silence. Why is that, exactly?

I think it's safe to say that they know we want to know. Question is, why won't they confirm or deny? We're a competitive PvP guild-- we don't want to queue against full PuG groups any more than they want to queue against us. We're just afraid that we're going to get the kind of system that balances a 4 man premade with an average 2,000 ranking with 4 pugs with a 200 ranking to match the other side's 1100 average ranking. No premade is good enough to overcome half the team being terrible players against even average competition. That's not even considering the possibility of players who are just trolling or intentionally throwing games-- it's a recipe for disaster to require competitive players to play with people they don't know in ranked matches.

We all know that. The question is a.) do they know that and b.) if so, are they going to do it anyway? Bioware's been conspicuously silent about queue size changes for the rated system, which is coming soon. We should've gotten confirmation, one way or another, a long time ago.

A little sad to see it's all PvE-focused. You should do a similar test group for PVP feedback. God knows the game needs it.

Then you don't have much experience. The initial launch was decent-- long login queues (2-5+ hours on my server) weren't unexpected by MMO vets, but I wouldn't call them evidence of a first rate launch. However, things quickly went downhill from there. Every patch has either not fixed something that was supposed to be fixed, or broken something that was previously not broken. It's BY FAR been the worst showing of patch QA that I've ever seen. Customer service has been a nightmare-- just the idiocy of saying "oh, that patch note that's been up for 2 weeks on the PTS and also passed the Live Push vetting was actually a mistake" was staggering. Seeing in-game responses of "please check the forums to see if there's a solution to your problem. Ticket closed" just doesn't hack it when someone's character is stuck and unaccessible. Promised game mechanics have been a disaster-- crafting literally serves no purpose, other than the ridiculously overpowered initial biomed schematics which have since been corrected. Now, it's pointless. Ilum was touted as world pvp, but began as an exercise in point flipping that actually disincentivized killing opponents, then devolved into a bugged mess of zerg on zerg, and is now about to be rendered completely moot. Bug/Exploit responses have been horrifically slow, and/or shockingly ineffective. Frozen shockwater, Voidstar door glitching, Ilum turret farming, Huttball instant death pulls, the entire "stuff not counting toward quests" bugs, the Operations bugs (they fixed Soa... nvm, they broke Soa worse.) The list goes on and on. On top of all that, the endgame design is just... poor. Gear progression makes no sense in terms of time spent vs. benefit gained. Endgame crafting is a joke. Endgame PvE is a joke (my guild of pvp-geared pvp'ers cleared all hard mode operations bosses, minus the aforementioned buggy Soa, in less than 20 total raid-hours.) Endgame PvP is a joke-- no rating system, no full group queues, no player investment in bases, battlekeeps, etc, Ilum, etc. Daniel Erickson was quoted as saying "we're betting heavily on the re-roll game" at one point early last year, and that was clearly truthful. Unfortunately, re-rolling for a new story doesn't even work for some of the KoToR fans, since the amount of time you spend in your class story pales in comparison to the time you spend doing the same stupid quests you've already done on Taris, or Balmorra, or Belsavis. Anyway, point is the subscription loss, however slight or severe, is a symptom of the disease-- this game is a poor excuse for an MMO. As someone else pointed out, if it'd been released as KoToR3, With MMO Elements, at least it would've been branded and billed correctly. As it is, all we got was a poorly delivered, uninspired MMO that's a waste of subscription money.

only the first 4 medals count. Problem solved. Learn to read ALL of the notes.

nice job linking a quote from 3 days after official launch, when everyone was still playing during the free month, and most were still leveling. People don't need to look at server status pages, fleet pop, or anything else. Just look/ask around. Ask someone in a guild (any guild) how many of their original players still log in regularly. Those are individually small samples, but they tell the tale easily. BW bet heavily on the leveling game, which was completely foolish for a modern MMO. Now, they're paying the price.

Just like normal players, there are good premades and bad premades. Just because some random guild puts 4 people in a WZ doesn't mean it's going to fight as a coordinated or effective team. I've seen at least one 4 man premade team where all 4 had no pvp gear at all. But, if you're up against a 4 man team from a dedicated and experienced PvP guild, you're going to get mopped. It happens. Move on.

we hold weekly pvp practices there-- it's really not a big issue. drop guild, fight, reguild. it's that simple.

I have a pretty extensive history with PVP, and to my knowledge, the only "unsaid" rule I can remember was no deathblows in SWG. Even then, you were a WHOLE lot smarter if you specified it in advance. So, in short, anything goes unless it's mutually agreed to be prohibited before the fight starts.

yep, even worse with Sage KB, which has a retardedly long animation. You have to be somewhat psychic to land it correctly in tight spots.

you're all assuming we'll get 8 man queues. We all know that makes sense... but BW's been very quiet every time the question is asked. Sometimes, silence is an answer in itself.

yep. I wouldn't be remotely happy with a 50% win rate, though. On topic-- we prefer to use 2/4/2 or 2/2/4 also. Sometimes, depending on group makeup, we'll go 1/5/2 and really sell out for mid. We only like doing that when our solo guy is a tank-spec shadow, since they have the best tools to win or delay a point. Of course, all of that gets blown to hell when pugs go pugapotomus mode, which is most always. But, that's what we try to do, anyway.

good luck winning a VS. You'll never cap a door.

Unbelieveable. All those options for how to settle a tie based on actual team performance, and someone thought "what the hell, just RNG it." was an acceptable choice? To quote one of my guildmates, "I feel like I just got RickRolled."

it's probably the RNG equivalent of a coin flip, and BW's too embarrassed to admit it.

competent teams can keep it from being taken for an entire game.