Trust me, you're not as clever as you thought you were. Yes, it was obvious that you were attempting at irony, but the stuff you spewed out was so ridiculous that I had to turn it onto you by making you admit that. Thanks for playing, and thanks for falling into the usual pitfalls of telling people to leave if they don't like how things are going. We all know that die hard fans falls back to this when they've run out of things to excuse others with and amounts to throwing a tantrum as last resort.

Another example why it's sad that the situation is so bad that people like GrumpySwe believes that FRAPSing one's own game play every single moment, eating up hard drive space, from now until eternity is the a good way way to protect one's self from BioWare's CM monkeys. May god have mercy on the people who aren't technically savvy.

This makes me wonder just how many of the "fraudulent" reports that the CMs "exposed" in the past were actually legitimate. They were all quick, "it's a fraud, we're locking this down" actions. It's a whole lot easier to shut down one legitimate person who never expected this sort of level of CM tomfoolery and falsely humiliating them by claiming he's a fraud in an environment with unscrupulous community members eager to curry favours with BIoWare Austin by acting like vicious pit bulls tearing at the wrongly accused. I think Seal Team Sith was fortunate that they had a lot of players present when this fiasco happened, took plenty of screenshots, and most importantly, had the tenacity to challenge a large company to fight against their wronging. This is really sad though, a whole lot of things happened with SWTOR over these few months. If my friends ever asked me about SWTOR and BioWare in the years to come, my answer will likely be: "I've never seen a video game developer make all the wrong choices and so thoroughly ruin their reputation with their conducts and policies that players need to view everything they say with intense scrutiny. It's frightening how much trust they've ended up losing in everything from being able to deliver game content, future features that community actually wants, game mechanic philosophies, all the way down to the legitimacy of their CM teams' rulings."

I don't think so. I think they don't like PVP in general, and are only saying stuff like SWTOR has PVP in order to keep another niche of players subscribed. Why do I say this? Look at our open world PVP content? It's gotten no attention at all, buggy and eventually shelved. Look at the world designs? It's doesn't even encourage open world PVP at all with the exception of one or two worlds. They don't provide us the open world PVP contents. Fine. Enthusiastic players decides to do BioWare Austin's job by rallying together players to provoke an open world PVP conflict and ends up being illegally threatened and stopped by the GM. It's obvious BioWare Austin has a company culture that's against PVP and it shows easily because they don't even have the professionalism to cater to all the niches. It's just like how they cater to Empire, giving them the best story, animation, game mechanics, and design aesthetics. Incredibly as it is, they actually don't care what their bias does to their customer base. BioWare Austin fails because BioWare Austin only cares about making -their- game, the way -they- want, not what the community wants. There's a reason why this game is failing.

Wow, absolutely impressive stuff here. How did monkeys like that GM and Artthen managed to keep their jobs from the purge? BioWare Austin has learned nothing as a company, they still let their carebear attitude ruin anything related to PVP in this game even when on servers where it's reasonably permitted. The only CM personnel that I can respect from this entire roster of monkeys is Eric Campbell, the rest are just freaking amateurs whom purpose seems to be destroying what good will is left in the community with whatever inane way they can think of. This isn't one player going around rampaging. This is a group of organized players working together to try to force a PVP confrontation with the other faction because BioWare couldn't be bothered to make any effort to provide any in-game open world PVP content anymore. BioWare Austin claimed they keep the PVP community in mind when they built the game, but it's obvious from the design now that they've done everything they can to stifle it. So the players doing the job that these BioWare Austin monkeys wouldn't do now gets their accounts threatened? What's worst, these monkeys have no backbone to respond to the community besides pissing away even more good will by moderating them and enraging the customer base even further? Honestly, the community needs to start spreading this stuff onto the gaming review and news websites. Push the immense farce that is the way how BioWare Austin handles PVP and community management into the public light so they are forced to, hopefully but there's a good chance they'll just shoot their feet even more, do what's right. That or at least we can let potential PVP oriented players know what a ridiculous farce the way BioWare Austin treats PVP content in this game and customer service in general. It's stuff like what happened in-game and then the crude responses by Artthen that I stop feeling sympathy for the BioWare Austin employees who are laid off. The good will just gets bulldozed by these guys. The bad CM monkeys continues to anger the customer base. The bad coders continues to drag their feet when they have teams several times bigger than other MMO development teams and bugs persists as a result. Terrible artists continues to shove un-Star Wars-like gear down our throats despite protests. This is an absolute train wreck.

I wouldn't be surprised if the "super secret" space combat revamp is going to be free-form space flight. Albeit a poorly built one. Do you know how ironic it'll be if they ended up doing the same thing that hack Gordon Walton came to? I'm going to laugh so hard if they lay out the new space combat update and it only slows down the hemorrhaging of players because they didn't bother to fix the rest of the game and then blame the failure of the entire game on that update alone when in actuality it kept niche gamers that would have otherwise unsubbed as well. I'll also give a reason that other people haven't covered yet. Empire bias. My goodness. Bad enough that Empire side got the best storyline and romance options, but they also have pretty awesome aesthetic designs, take a look at the fleet stations, the difference in atmosphere was startling at release, or the costumes before everyone got a turn being whacked by the ugly stick at end game gear. The PR marketing made the Empire look absolutely bad *** while the Republic got socked like helpless muppets. What's unacceptable is that even the game mechanics ended up favoring the Empire. Bounty Hunter heat system being better than the ammo system. Smuggler's stun used to root the user in order to activate the animation while the IA version didn't, that was at least changed. Inquisitor's shock was instant while the Consular version wasn't made for less viable options that hurt the casual, newbie player the most. Sith Warrior's area mez used to cause people to bend over in pain, but the animation got changed into causing people to fall down on their backs, flailing around like helpless infants. Was such a graphical change even needed when the Empire was already overwhelming popular? SWTOR developers allowed their love for the Empire go wild and it hurt the balance of the game. Any sane person would realize that if you need two to tango, and if you've allowed balance against the Republic to go too far people will leave and then you have nothing to play against which then cause even the Empire players to leave. Any professional developer would've kept their passion for one side off the table and promote both sides equally, but apparently BioWare Austin developers can't keep their love for angst and all that junk in check and devote honest fair effort to make both sides appealing. --EDIT: Just one last thing. What happened to strategic PVP? Wasn't one of the things that was going to stand SWTOR PVP apart from WoW to be how fights can be slower so more thought and strategy can be used? Nowadays people are getting gibbed nearly just as fast as in WoW.

I don't know about DAOC's final days, but I'm in agreement with your views on SWTOR. BioWare Austin has only themselves to blame this time around, there's a lot of blind hate going on. I don't have love for EA either, but at least I'm not blind to the mistakes BioWare Austin themselves made that got them to the situation they're in now.

No idea, but I honestly hope he's on his way out, same with Gabe. Georg is completely out of touch with the PVP community and common sense, when stubbornly insists on saying it's a great trade off for tank stats to only be effective against 2 of the 8 ACs in the game, despite community protests. This is a great example of why how BioWare only did what they wanted, they never engaged the community in extensive discussion on why they kept it the way they did nor did they allow the opportunity for general community feedback to influence designs. Also in regards to metrics. Metrics isn't worth anything if the people reading the data are incapable of interpreting it properly. Take the active population decline for example. During the Guild Summit, BioWare Austin claimed that everything was ok because subscription levels hasn't dropped off, but concurrent activity has. Concurrent activity is people that are actively playing the game, which in terms influences other players enjoyment since that's what a MMO is all about. This was either a case of shameless positive spinning, inability to interpret crucial data properly, or both. However I honestly believe it was the former, instead of the latter two. It's all of this that makes me shake my head when people are bashing EA for SWTOR's failure. I don't have much love for EA, myself, they really screwed up some of my favourite games too like BF3 not being moddable in order to shove DLCs down players throat. However I'm a player who has played SWTOR since closed beta last year. I've seen how BioWare had used their time. I've seen how their tight lipped policy, and refusal to regularly engage the community niches in-depth discussion both during closed beta and release has come to bite them in their rear end. Lack of communication and hubris was what contributely mostly to SWTOR's current situation. SWTOR might have been released early, but I was in closed beta. Dialogue errors and game play bugs that persisted build after build after build all the way into release, and existing even now, are still here. Inane changes to things that were nearly universally praised as being popular were changed on a whim. Did you know that you could've literally modded ANY gear you wanted in the game, there were no "orange" gear. If you liked the look from your green gear, you could've kept it. Did you know there was the hoodless version of the Jedi Battlelord gear in closed beta that was inexplicably taken out 2 builds before release? I certainly don't believe EA forced BioWare to do all that. They did that themselves. Heck, nearly a year (since I was championing for Jedi Guardian gear that didn't have hoods well in closed beta) after all is said and done, my Jedi Guardian is still forced to wear a hood! The technology is already there with the Twi'lek toggle toggle, but yet they claim otherwise. Why the heck am I still forced to wear a hood despite people begging for some variance? Why is BioWare saying, "Hey, we get that you don't like our designs, but we're still going to use the mistakes that we've built for the next few contents until we use them all up -AND THEN- get back on track"? Why didn't they say, "Ok, we get that you guys don't like it. We'll start making some new designs, yes it'll take more money, yes it'll take more development time, but we're going to show you we're not dragging our feet when it comes to improving ourselves"? Did EA tell BioWare to drag their feet around, or not communicate with the community? I honestly don't think so. The only thing EA did was release SWTOR too early, but even then the development progress during closed beta was pathetically slow. Do I love EA? Hell no. Do I know that they've destroyed other games? Heck yes. Do I think they were the prime reasons why BioWare Austin dropped the ball on SWTOR? Absolutely not. I have eyes, I had the opportunity to have more perspective on their development cycle due to being in closed beta. SWTOR largely ended up in the state it is now because of BioWare Austin itself.

I'd say yes in both storyline and some aspects of game mechanics.

I'm pretty sure that David Hunt has replaced Stephen Reid. He's been making a lot of posts that kept people informed about the Augment feature coming in at 1.3. Although there's still an absence in active communication with the PVP department. Time is not on BioWare Austin's side, they've had some successes but it's eclipsed by the failures resulting from their hubris. Blame whatever you want, make up whatever excuses you want, but it will not change the fact that something went horribly afoul when you lose this much of the subscribing player base and have so many near empty servers less than 6 months into release. There needs to be an earnest effort in keeping players informed about what's coming up, so they can have feedback, instead of keeping tight lipped about everything and then drop it out at the last minute and then looking surprised when a lot of the player base are disappointed because it wasn't anything they wanted. We can't call it deceptive practices since they guaranteed us nothing, only ambiguous descriptions and promises. It's a skillful act, but it garners them no benefit because in the end isn't the goal supposed to be about keeping as many players happy as possible? It's folly to take solace in the assurance of the die hard player base who remains subscribed despite whatever malign failings goes their way when the general player base is leaking away. BioWare Austin needs to start being honest, humble, engage the community, and most importantly they need to actually start doing what they claim to be doing: "Listening to the community and giving them what they want". Being tight lipped and avoiding community participation in shaping upcoming features is neither listening to the community, nor giving them what they want. However I'm sure that BioWare Austin and the die hard fans here will strike me down and claim I'm completely wrong on all levels. Things are clearly still alright in the offices of BioWare Austin, am I right?

Their policy of not saying anything until they're 100% sure it's coming is exactly one of the things that makes the community feel like the developers are out of touch. Did keeping a tight lip on Ilum on closed beta help you guys at all? Pretending everything was ok and being silent to the community back then sure didn't help garner sympathy when you eventually came clean months afterwards, when many PVPers are already angry, that you can't fix it. Did ignoring months of complaints about how un-Star Wars-like the end game gear appearance looks like help you guys either? How'd keeping a tight lip and going la la la until people even the casual players started leaving the game before you guys reluctantly answered on the forum that you'll work on it "but results are coming in the far future" work for you guys? The BioWare Austin doesn't seem to realize that players would like the input in the direction of the game, like James Ohlen claimed. Yes, the community has a tendency to make thousands of crazy requests, but there are definitely very unified opinions on common topics like "poor appearance customization", "direction of appearance", and "too quick time to kill in PVP due to expertise changes" that definitely warrants some genuine regular communications with. Right now BioWare Austin is just keeping all the cards hidden to themselves and, for some of the major features so far, dropping them out of the blue and looking bewildered when the community reacts negatively to it. Engaging the community in regular discussions on the FORUMS, not some other third party social media website, is truly the first step in regaining the confidence of the people who are already upset with all the things that's been happening, and endearing yourself to the others who still hold support for BioWare Austin. However I honestly don't think BioWare Austin will listen. Their policies are completelyout of touch with the community and it's digging their graves ever so slowly.

Funny how no one ever screams, "Oh god, Juggernaut tanks in DPS gear is OP!"

It's not even just lack of communication. BioWare Austin enjoys being vague and secretive about everything, but it doesn't help them one bit in the end. Take the legacy system. BioWare Austin claims that it'll go a long way to balance up faction, yet since 1.2 my lowbie alts are still going through the planets with only 5 other people, this is a medium population server. Other players that I know either already had their existing alts, or didn't bother to play one at all, and some have even decided to put the game on the shelf for now until it gets better in the future. If BioWare Austin even had the shred of genuine sincerity to engage the community, they could've gotten feed backs that actually addressed community needs, not what they just speculate. They've tried that since beta and it hasn't gone very well for them. No communication definitely fosters ill will and when these secretive features finally comes live and blows up in their face it doesn't garner them any sympathy either from most of the people I'm acquainted with either. This hubris that BioWare Austin insists on indulging themselves with is hardly beneficial for themselves and us as players of the community. It's amazing James Ohlen can claim they listen to the community when they don't even actively engage in communications with us regularly. A weekly Q&A that cherry picks questions is hardly sufficient effort.

I definitely feel it's dying, and at this point SWTOR really needs to die a quick and inglorious death to show the MMO industry what happens when you don't have regular active communication with the community, make misleading/vague/cryptic info on things to come, and have the hubris to play favourites when it comes to listening to player feedbacks. You guys probably don't know this but back in closed beta there was the general closed beta testers, and then there was a hidden selected group of closed beta testers called the "Revanites" that the developers actually communicated regularly with. They pulled the same stunt at release with the Guild Summit. These guys act like they're already AAA MMO developers on par with WoW at launch when in fact there are so many things to learn and that can only be done through trial and error via active sincere communication with the player base. Even WoW in its early days had developers who engaged players on the forum in explaining why so or so changes were made. Such humility was glaringly absent with the BioWare Austin team. SWTOR is probably going to keep on going towards an inevitable end, and if anyone asks me I can simply sum up the cause in one single word, "Hubris".

Heh heh, I was about to post that link too but you got to it before I did. I salute your vigilance, sir! It's even on page #1.

Vague answer again? If BioWare Austin's history with SWTOR is anything to go by, we're in for another disaster folks.

Are you kidding? Damn our tastes must be REALLY different then. All of my Guardian's head gear makes me look like Geordi La Forge from Star Trek. I thought I was playing Star Wars?!

Then let the Rio dance party stuff come further down the line. I hate the Rio dance party stuff, but maybe someone else might fancy it. At least it gives them options of looking like some refugee a sci-fi B movie from the 80s. We don't even have options now. Hooded cloaks or clown suits that has no Star Wars feelings to it whatsoever. You are right too. It was a ploy to get people to keep subscribed. BioWare Austin has a talent with vague descriptions and stretching the truth. It's like they took Obi-Wan's, "From a certain perspective" excuse and take it to a whole new level. Five months is more than enough time given to them to do things right but they've doggedly missed the point and fail to deliver on every single turn when it comes to delivering a system that lets players choose how they want to look like. What we have right now is a RNG grind fest of epic proportions for some, while an impossibility for others. We can't even use the Jedi Battlelord gear set without being discriminated in a raid and PVP setting because we can't use augments it yet. Even after the long grind to get the credits, the armouring and mods, etc. Apparently the solution is in 1.3. Honestly I'm more disturbed at the fact that the augment add on might just be another obtuse implementation that punishes players with another grueling sets of grinding and may very well still miss the point and largely fail to address the community's desire for an easily accessible appearance customization system. At least that's what BioWare Austin has historically been doing from closed beta all the way up till now in this area.

I know it's intentional too. Back in beta they had Jedi Battlelord gear with hood down, but 2 builds before the end they removed it. The thing was -IN- there, and they removed it and forced everyone one to wear hoods. Sounds like an honest mistake? I thought so too until I saw the promotional screenshots, so many Jedi Guardian/Sentinel without hoods, but in actuality there was no such option in-game. Even the latest website revamp had a Guardian in Jedi Battlelord gear with hood down, the exact one that I had in closed beta. All this has led me to the conclusion that they know hood down is something attractive to the community to the point they'd use it for their own PR material, but they insist on being completely missing the point with its implementation. Remember how the promise of how there'll a be a lot more orange added to crew skills in 1.2? Have you guys honestly seen these "many new additions of orange schematics" in-game? I sure haven't found much at all personally or via the datamined database.

Oh you bet they've heard you. They're hard at work trying to figure how they can take our feedback and come up with something that completely misses the point and can only be achieved in the most grindiest and obtuse manner possible.

Exactly. Guardian here. Master Strike being uninterruptable and not being mentioned at all? OP really doesn't see his stuns, knockbacks, and mezzes as being his lifelines in PVP, does he? I dare anybody to try to take only 5 steps away from my Master Strike and see if they can get out of its range in time before the third hit strikes. The damage boost was needed, but the uninterruptable bit certainly was not. Forcing another class to pop a stun/knockback to stop a painful hit already makes Guardians of all specs a whole lot formidable, now that it's uninterruptable it drops our skill ceiling. It's even worst for Combat Sentinels with the root. OP is blatantly biased, that or doesn't truly comprehend the advantages he's got with his AC, either way shrugging off Master Strike buffage in 1.2 is a sure fire way to sinking your credibility. As the previous said, not having to pay focus to interrupt and to Awe it's given me the opportunity to stop myself from taking damage when I'm done Slashing people in Focus spec and exhausted my focus points. I've lost count how many times I've stopped an incoming Ravage/Master Strike when my Force Push and Stasis CD are down by popping Awe and not have to waste another GCD to fuel my momentum. Every. Little. Bit. Counts. And these are only things that benefited us Guardians as well. You might be able to delude yourself that you're somehow winning all these fights through sheer gameplay talents alone, but trust me you're largely just coasting by through stacked game mechanics just like most average Shadow Tank DPS, and Assault Vanguards. Your (honest) lack of knowledge of the advantages of your own AC is just ample proof of that.

I can't tell which is more funnier now. The fact that the OP got caught messing around as a FOTMer himself in two other threads. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=437082&page=6 Or the fact that the people here are actually falling for his QQing hook, line, and sinker even after the punchline has already been revealed. Ooooh SWTOR community, you never cease to amuse me.

I'll just leave this here with the threads that the OP has made about him wanting to reroll to the next FOTM class. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=398482 <--- OP wants to reroll as a Marauder http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=365208 <--- OP admitting to be a FOTM reroller and asking what to reroll as. Credits goes to Brytag and sparkyboyyoyyo respectively for discovering these two threads that the OP made. We've got some really interesting people around in the PVP community.

Totally do it!

You know what I always say. BioWare Austin has a habit of never getting the point. I know there's a lot of Republic players who are tired of nothing but hoods on their gear. Yes, they can appreciate the mystique of having your face mostly hidden by hood, but they want something else. So what does BioWare Austin does? They don't give you a hood down option, they make the hood uglier looking and mucked with its charms. There's already a working code for removing hoods, the proof is with Twi'leks. Code doesn't discriminate against races, the hood doesn't just only work for Twi'leks magically and no one else. Code -is- there. The sad thing is that BioWare isn't implementing it, and that's probably because they're going to implement it in a way that also misses the point completely and horribly disfigure our characters for lowering their hoods.