I had a good time; definitely on board with doing it again. My favorite part was the guy who looked at his team and saw only strike fighters, and proceeded to complain in /ops about how he was going to lose because his team was all "noobs". My teams had varying degrees of success all evening, but I'm happy to report that particular group of "noobs" won their match handily.

I'm not really looking for someone to take sides, I'm mostly curious if other people have had the same experience. Failing that, tips on how to avoid being double-teamed and slaughtered pretty quickly would be nice. I also noted that in the 5 or so arenas I participated in, I didn't see a single other mercenary (matches were all Imp vs Imp, so no Commandos, either), which made me wonder if Mercenaries just avoid ranked matches.

Resurrecting a thread for a few comments and questions. This past weekend, people were imploring people to queue for solo ranked on the Ebon Hawk, so I figured what the hell, right? It's pre-season, no one is going to get screwed because of me. I'm not an expert PvPer, but I think I have a pretty good handle on what abilities to use when. My reflexes aren't what they might have been years ago, but that's getting old for you. I hold my own in WZs. I have full Obroan, which I know recently became obsolete, but isn't nothing either. I was Bodyguard specced. The first thing I was unprepared for was the level of vitriol thrown at me for merely being there. More than once I was greeted with complaints about how they would have to "carry my ***". I really liked my own teammates spamming general chat in the arena about how bad I was; that was particularly classy. However, it seemed like these people may have had a point, as I was slaughtered in every arena I played. I was always the first person on my team to die, and usually the first person overall. So, my questions: 1) Are people in ranked matches always that nasty? Unranked has a certain amount of congeniality to it. It does occasionally sinks to the level of "this team sucks", but I've never seen it reach "you suck and you shouldn't even be here" levels. This might be a question for the pvp forum... 2) I understand that healers get focused, but what I can do to prevent getting cut down in the first 15 seconds of the engagement? I can jet boost once, get off a single (maybe 2) kolto missile, instant-cast one Healing Scan, and maybe one or two other heals that don't get interrupted if I'm lucky. This is entirely insufficient to stay alive when 2 or 3 people are pounding on me. 3) Am I the only Bodyguard merc with this problem? This thread discusses DPS specs, but it does give me hope that my difficulties are not entirely a function of my own incompetence. 4) I was told by some people that full Brutalizer is really a requirement before stepping foot in a ranked arena. Agree? Disagree? TL;DR version: Is there any point in being a Bodyguard merc in ranked arenas?

Dunno if this is the place for this, or if it would be better in the Starfighter forum, but can we please have a way to customize HUD colors in GSF? Right now, those of us who are red/green colorblind are disadvantaged. If I've got something in front of my ship like an asteroid or whatever, I can't really see the diamond telling me where my target is. I have to steer towards space so I have a black background before I can find it. It would be nice if we could make it bigger too, but I'd be happy if I could change it to blue or yellow or something.