I agree; though it'll be hard to get pve-ers to agree with you. Right now, the entire social points system is horrendously broken. You don't get any for doing heroic 4 fps or doing OPs. In order to get them, pve-ers typically carry lowbies through starting fps. It's stupidly broken for both sides.

Not entirely. The requirement is on BOTH teams. If they have no healers and little gear, they will die by the time you deal 5k damage to them (due to your team-mates also beating them). That means you'd need 60 kills to actually hit 300k. While possible, it isn't a high probability since that typically causes them to give up and go hide somewhere. As for all the comments about ignoring objectives, they have a point. In order for it to work in Ald, you have to be part of the zerg squad. As much fun as that may be, it makes me really upset when I call for help and watch all 7 of you abandon the base that just got attacked. And if your team-mates are stupid and fight mids, you have to join them in their incompetence. You can get the medal and play objectives perfectly, but it requires that all your team be in the correct spot and that they permit you to be part of the zerg squad.

No, they have a point. Some of them only get to play a few hours in a day. Wins not counting prevents them from finishing their quest. You can tell them to get a premade and stomp the other team; however, as a BM that has done so, I can tell you that the shorter games tend to glitch and not count more often than full length games. It took me 7 wins yesterday and 5 wins today to finish my daily. That really is broken. You could tell them to go pve instead but then the SOA platform will bug and they will discover the joys of having holes all over in the floor with no way to descend when he shatters it again. They could go defend the shipment but that's equally botched. The number of end game bugs is staggering. Fix it BW. Paying to beta test everything is not acceptable.

I had this happen to me a few weeks ago. I was riding my speeder through fleet after raid when this level 20 sorc looks at me. I die and roll to a stop at his feet. I now walk backwards with a mirror through fleet. Or maybe it was the EV random death bug. I prefer to think it was the sorc.

Actually, it is rather difficult to defensively stop a premade with sorc pull coordination. The real solution is to take control of the ball and do it yourself. If you grab the ball after the score first, they have 3 teammates sitting in no mans land while your team scores repeatedly. The best defense is a good offense when people go for sorc chains. You just have to be anticipating the ball location every step of the way because the game will move extremely quick.

That really depends on the person. Do I support a change that minimizes or even removes the gap caused by expertise? Yes. However, there is still a big problem. The stats on the gear still boost the player. Since the PVE equivalent is given higher stats, the raiders get the edge in pvp which is rather ridiculous. To top it off, pvpers are stuck with subpar gear whenever they want to go pve. When I level my alt; I'm screwed if I go quest at level 30 after leveling from 20 to 30 in pvp. It's just more stupid pve bias in a game that already has some massive issues. PS: It took me 4 wins to finish my daily today BW; yesterday took 5. Fix your stupid game.

I agree with this. The fact is that we don't really know if it is an exploit. BW doesn't seem to care. However, doing it on my server generally lands you on "hate lists" that lead you to being fed to the wolves in pvp. I've seen team-mates point out said players to the competition and then laugh while they die (instead of helping). I've also seen players abandom killing someone with 15% HP just to kill the player who likes to explode the ball carrier. I've seen friendly sorcerers pull said players into fire. Not too mention getting a PVE group gets much, much harder. It doesn't lead anywhere good when people recognize half the players every match.

I think you guys give them too much credit. While they have some great tricks, they really aren't that bad. (I play an assassin). The only thing I'd state is that roots and slows need some form of DR. Also, the resolve bar needs to be fixed. A smart sorcerer that uses all of their CCs correctly can basically stop a melee from doing anything. It has far less to do with them being OP and more to do with the ridiculous issues of resolve, slows, and roots. As for the rerolls, one could propose another hypothesis. It's the only ranged class with a lightsaber. Ranged is easier to play in pvp (snipers could argue with me). It's no wonder they are so popular.

People know about probability. Many know about the law of large numbers. However, many people don't like it. They could modify the system to remove all outliers. Yes, it would change the distribution. If done correctly, it would not change the average amount of time taken to gear up. It would also be far more fair. There is a BM on my server, he hit it about 5 days before I did. He's opened over 40 BM bags. He has gotten one commendation and 0 unassembled gear pieces (he was BM before the patch). Meanwhile, I've opened 33 of them. I've averaged a piece / commendation every 3 bags. I'm nearly in complete BM gear. He is just screwed. Yes, the law of large numbers dictates that it is not the norm, but can happen. However, that doesn't make it any less infuriating for the poor guy. Wow used to have this system. There was one quest that literally took me 4 levels to complete. I killed thousands of mobs to get the drop. (It was just a normal quest, not some end game one either). That quest had a lower than normal drop rate. Combined with the law of large numbers, it took me ages to complete it. Blizz did finally fix it because it was utter nonsense to be the outlier. BW should do the same with these bags. Even if they nerf the drop rate, if they actually implement a system so you can't be past a certain outlier, it would go far to appease their fans.

My server has developed it's own fix for Ilum dailies and weeklies. Typically a group of Imps plays easter egg hunter and complains in general chat for the hour+ it takes to get done. Occasionally a republic will come along and get stomped into the ground. After a while, an organized group of repubs will come through, steam roll the imps, and then proceed to easter egg hunt while the imps regroup. This means you typically wait for over an hour trying to get the group to kill the dominating faction -or- easter egg hunt for the same time. But, this has all changed! Now, they kill swap in mids. Even as I speak, I've been informed by guildies, there is a group of roughly 40 imps and 40 repubs just kill swapping. They've been doing this for a while. People are getting insane amounts of valor. (The "DR" in this game doesn't exist. Don't believe it if they tell you that it does.) The dailies are trivialized. (The lag is terrible). Fix stupid Ilum.

This is true for normal modes and completely false for hard modes. The post was referring to hard modes. I'll give you a real case in point. You start the hard mode quest. It progresses as normal. You kill the final boss in BT. A quest automatically completes to give you your heroic level commendations. You continue with the remainder of the BT quest. You select return to fleet and boom! The quest is done. No rewards are given. Ask anyone that runs any hard modes in this game. It works for regular FPs. It doesn't work for hard modes.

I agree, guard shouldn't transfer CCs! Oh, this is a nerf guard post? Forget that! I'm just tired of an op knocking both us us down with one move! What's up with CC transferring on guard?

They really need to fix hard modes and look into points for ops / pvp. I don't know why this is still bugged BW. However, the fact that hard modes mysteriously don't count for social or alignment points is getting old. I typically run at least one hard mode fp a day. Somehow, that doesn't count as a social activity. I run an ops a few times a week. Somehow, that doesn't count as a social activity. I run my warzones for the pvp daily; also not a social activity. Fix your broken system BW. Doing quests together and non-hard fps are not the only social activities in your game.

Basically, yes. I have the exact same bug (inverted though). 166 dark side points, 10000 light side. Quests, FlashPoints, and Diplomacy do NOT decrease the dark side amount. I submitted a ticket on it about 2 weeks ago. The ticket was mysteriously closed (which is supposed to mean escalated). It's still broken. I've heard from others that it may start randomly working if you continue to farm points. No indicator as to how to trigger that though.

The underdog portion of this post is key. The real trick to balance is to actually allow for a balance point. That means you need to create a system with give and take on rewards. Pushing your side down on the teeter-totter should push the other side up. If you want to be up, they need to push back down. So many games seem to have missed this key aspect. 1. Invert Ilum and valor gains. How does it make sense that the team that is in possession of the entire field get more "valor?" They are "valorously" massacring the last shreds of resistance? I don't think so. The team that has no control should get the valor boost on the kill and when they take an objective. However, the buff should only be applied if they are actively fighting to get the objectives (taking them or took one recently). Make it require enough time to take over that people would come to the fight and so that your gains aren't immediately lost. 2. Give a different reward for Ilum possession. If controlling Ilum gave you greater valor from warzones and nothing for staying there, you'd leave! You'd come back when the opposition started taking it back and you actually started getting stuff for your efforts -and/or- to keep the warzone buff. 3. Make the buffs worldwide and update correctly. Zoning in and out of the zone to keep current buffs is moronic. 4. Make the daily / weekly for Ilum be pvp oriented. Make it require you to win warzones or get kills while you control Ilum -or- require you to kill players in Ilum. Ilum is a nightmare on my server. It's just imperial Easter egg hunter gone horribly awry (yes, I'm an imperial). Every now and again, a roving band of republic will joust an objective for kills. But mostly it is just massive complaining from imperials while any republic get obliterated (3:1 or worse). Please just tweak the system BW. You are so close. Don't fall into the trap where you don't give and take. WoW did it and it was horrible. Build a seesaw and people will go up and down. Don't give the winner all the spoils.

Hmm, if I reverse engineer your math, I see a giant problem. 15 minute queue with a 16 minute game means roughly 6 matches in 3 hours. (5.81 if you prefer). At 5.81 matches, that 2612 valor would give 449.57 valor per match. Wait, how is it possible to get even less valor per match when your formula guarantees that the longer match will always be higher? You've got an error somewhere. We can take your equation and reduce it or we can logically state the question (assuming medals per match to be equivalent). Is the gain of playing at the high speed worth more than 50 valor per minute you get by prolonging the match? {{ The real equation is if one more minute including the medal gain is worth more than the short game gain per minute }}. In your equation above, you post 630 valor for a five minute game. Assuming no additional medals, the break even point is when the queue hits 7.6 minutes. (630 valor for 12.6 (5 + 7.6) minutes means waiting an additional minute will give you the same valor (50) IF you don't get another single medal. You gave them an additional 3 medals for prolonging the match for 11 minutes. Let's assume you get 10 additional valor (lower than your extrapolation) per each minute you push past. This puts the break even point at 5.5 minute queue times. TLDR: Your math is wrong. You know you always get 50 additional valor by stalling for a minute. You know that the gain per minute of going faster must be greater than that amount. As a result, your own data says that if your queue is over ~5 minutes, you're ahead to farm the warzone.

I have to agree. This has gone on too long. Valor no longer means anything in this game. The daily is broken horribly. Yes, I know it is the player's fault for cheating. However, it is BW's responsibility to stop it. In school / college, it is the student's fault; however, it is the responsibility of the faculty and staff to put an end to it. It is the responsibility of law enforcement to stop misbehavior. It is your job to put an end to this nonsense BW. Do it. I can promise you that if you don't, your game will lose all self-respect. It's gotten to the point that I just don't care about your game anymore because I know I'll just quit in a few months to play something else.

While I understand the desire to penalize inappropriate actions. This is the perfect demonstration of the problem. When you don't cut valor based on the group size, you open yourself up to this nonsense. This is the problem. This is the same problem from yesterday. When a group of 25 republic heal a turret while 75 imps fodder themselves, both sides saw massive valor. Why? Because as long as you tagged it, you got valor. The amount of valor from that place needs to be fixed. The exploit is indicative of the underlying issue. The offender punishment is important, but fixing the exploitable content is top priority as well.

OP, there is a video on youtube that shows factions farming themselves (after patch). The players are pulling in over 5k valor every ten minutes. That's 30k+ an hour. The reason that people aren't hitting rank 70 and 80 is because they require insane valor amounts. I am a BM, grinding 60 took a bit of time. Hitting 70 would take me at least the same amount of time it took to go from 1 to 60! Getting to 80 would take insane amounts of valor. People are farming insane amounts of valor from that place. If it isn't fixed by the weekend, I bet there will be rank 80s running around. To hit rank 80 without it would take months of extreme amounts of pvp.

Well, there is a quest in this game requiring 30 "easter eggs" or kills. Amazingly enough, both of those must happen at a conflict area. (Namely, the bases, north, south, or central). You can kill random people while they travel; but amazingly enough, it doesn't count for your quest. So, they can go to the center to get ganked horribly but may get a stupid armament. Alternatively, they can look at the other areas. However, those just have an imp zerg group (as seen here). End result? They have the option to die a lot or leave. They sure aren't going to get the quest done by leaving. So, they sit by the gate and swap kills using ranged attacks and pulls.

Meanwhile many threads are created demanding "proof" of exploit and no one seems to step forward... On servers where this happened all day yesterday, they were pulling in serious valor. In this one, they are easily breaking 2.4k valor every ten minutes. It's easy to see that the valor system is now completely broken. So is Ilum.

They can't unless they drastically increase server population or x-realm pvp. My realm is a heavy load pve server. We are one of the top in terms of population. However, on non-peak hours, there are about 1 to 2 games going for either bracket. You play the same people in them. If you miss the game, you wait for that game to end before you get in the next one.

I really want to know what they are doing with pvp leveling gear. Seriously BW, what is going through your heads? You removed the level 50 blue stuff; why?! Then you price jacked the rest of it. Never mind the fact that buying the entire set before meant you were dropping quests. Now, in order to get it, you'll need to drop nearly the entire 10-17 planet! PVE is given gear hand over fist. Yet you've gone a step further to make gearing in PvP even worse? What are you thinking BW? Look, I try to defend you guys. But you are just killing me. I can't rationally understand any of the changes you've made to pvp (beyond minor class tweaks). Could you at least inform us of what you are doing? Of what you are thinking? -Or- could you actually listen to us instead of running the opposite way with every single reasonable pvp request made?

It really depended on the server. On my server, you could get a good amount of valor quickly for about an hour. After that, the place was so laggy and republic was so outnumbered that it just fell apart (corpse camping; which I refused to do). No one on my server really went that high. I talked to some people that were there; people may think they got a lot. They really didn't. It may have been double what they got from warzones in an hour. Who cares, an hour is nothing on BM grind. That said, it may have been worse on other servers. If BW just gets the large offenders, I'll be fine with it. That said, they need to fix the horrific easter egg hunt of imbalance that is ilum. Republic on my server was already struggling. Now it is gasping as it hits the floor.

Exactly. Aion has done it. Rift did it with a pvp exploit. WoW has done it. (You could purchase season 2 arena gear for free during BC. The following day, it was all gone. They rolled back all pvp gear acquisitions.) It's been done before. MMOs have historically had a zero tolerance policy for exploits. If you were lucky, you just lost the stuff. If you weren't, you lost it and had account penalties. When BW fails to live up to that, people see a system open for cheating. I'm a battlemaster, this isn't make or break in the sense that others get BM easier. I don't care. The real issue is knowing that people will try to do any exploit and any douchebaggery to get an edge because the 'penalty" is non-existent.