I'm not sure I understand your question. If this is outside of a warzone why would the moderation team care where you /stuck?

I had this exact thought earlier today. Giving Watchman/Annihilation CC immunity on leap would make it a lot more attractive in PVP but presumably wouldn't matter much for PVE (might increase their uptime in some fights with knockbacks I guess). The main problem I see is the enhanced leap traits you get in the tree though. Because you can leap from close range (and more frequently) you might end with Sentinel's who are immune to CC 90%+ of the time. Which would be fun for them but might change the dynamics of PVP a bit more then desired. So maybe the proc might make them immune to some CC / knockbacks - like Hold the Line does for Troopers.

Solo ranked is suffering due to the exclusive queueing system (on my server anyway). If you can queue up for Operations and Flashpoints simultaneously why not ranked and unranked? I'm not sure by what criteria you're judging arenas a failure. Yes, there are a number of players who positively hate them (but the same thing could be said about Ancient Hypergates or even Huttball). But when they pop in the normal queue I don't find myself sighing. Yes, the uneven/mismatched ones are stupid (even more so than regular warzones) but they're over quite quickly usually. Class balance is a red herring for the most part.

The actual answer to your question is that without some form of bolster, people in PVE gear would get even more destroyed than they do currently. They already take a lot more damage than someone in PVP gear, but it would be absurd without some bolster. You can verify this with Open World PVP - my conqueror geared Sentinel can force-sweep PVE Sorcs for 15k. Now, you might say "Good, that's how it should be.". After all, if I try to tank TFM NiM in my Conqueror gear, I won't get very far. But the issue that due to the complete lack of matchmaking in normal warzones there is no equivalent of "Story Mode" for PVP. If a player decides they want to PVP at Level 55 they can queue up, and will end up against players in full PVP gear. Without bolster these games would be less fun than they are currently. But I'm not sure what your complaint is anyway. If you think these players in full raid gear are somehow at an advantage to you then feel free to try it yourself. Unless you have good healers on your team you will die much quicker than normal, especially once every smash monkey realises he can get 12k smashes on you and decides to target you for the rest of the match.

I'm not sure why people are assuming that this has anything to do with a AFK vote kick. Becoming unflagged for PVP in a warzone is a bug that I've encountered a few times (I even thought it might make me untargetable so I tried a rather blatant node cap but alas it didn't work). Usually it's fixed by initiating combat, but if you're deliberately avoiding combat then yes, you'll eventually be auto-kicked. A successful vote kick is exceedingly rare - even in games where one player has openly announced he's AFK'ing for the rest of the match you generally find the vote won't get enough support. I think I've seen perhaps one successful kick in the hundreds of matches I've played. Some other comments though: You should never self-harm / heal while solo defending. Aside from being an exceedingly lame tactic, it's putting you at risk from a stealth attacker for no reason other than boosting meaningless numbers. Additionally, if I see my team's node defender health drop (with no call) then I will assume the worst and stop what I'm doing and go run to help (or at least have a look). That's a waste of resources and reduces our effectiveness at mid. As others have said, you should be going mid when avoiding the explosion. You can throw a few heals down if nothing else. I disagree with those who say healers should *never* guard. Usually they're a bad choice, but if your team is healer heavy then it might make sense to have a healer guarding rather than your sole dps doing so.

The other team can't read your general chat (in PVP) unless they're the same faction as you. If you want to trash talk to the other faction you have to use /say (or /yell).

What is your objection to scoreboards?

Look, I appreciate you don't like Arenas but this isn't a good argument. You could use the same line of reasoning to say we should get rid of Huttball (which many of us like). It should be enough to say "I don't like arenas" without having to base your argument on scripture. Anyway, for myself - I think Arenas are OK, although I don't see them as a replacement to 8 vs 8 warzones. There's less variety in the mechanics and while they can definitely feel intense I'm not sure they're as much fun as regular PVP. Still, it's nice to have the option - I'd similarly appreciate an option to queue for 1 vs 1 duels. Definitely wouldn't want to do that all the time (especially as I'm rubbish) but it'd be fun once in a while.

If the Commando / Vanguard was anywhere near the Scoundrel then it's very likely to be smuggle. It doesn't have any activation sound (and even if it did I wouldn't rely on hearing it at distance). Of course, if the Commando / Vanguard was nowhere near the Scoundrel (hard to say if the latter was stealthed) or they were in combat then it's most likely something else (my guess would be lag, but could be an exploit but this should never be your first guess unless it's something blatant like the same player scoring 6 goals in 10 seconds in 5 Huttball matches in a row). As someone else has said it could also be a d/c or ragequit. I've been hitting a Sniper in the past only for them to "vanish" on me. Didn't see them again in that warzone so I assume they d/c'd...

Ancient Hypergates, I was the sole defender on my Sentinel. We were quite a bit ahead so I went to type "Guys, I think they'll attack, another defender here please" but realised that Ops chat was bugged. So, I reloaded my UI (i.e. ctrl+u twice) which obviously disables your ability to do much. The second I did it I was knocked down by someone / something. My UI took much longer than usual to reappear and we lost the pylon. We managed to win back the node before the round ended, but still I was rightly insulted for not calling. What I learnt : Check your Ops chat at the start of a warzone, not when you're the only node defender....

Mainly to help speed up gearing alts but also because in some cases the lower tier mod is actually more desirable (in the short term) than the one you get in the upgraded item.

You should only be seeing an arena every sixth or so map (on average). 2 in 15 wouldn't be unusual in that case. I have however have had Novare Coast at least 20 times in the last 4 days (out of about 40 warzones), to the point where I started leaving before the match started if there's enough time to find a replacement.

Even if you're in full BiS min-maxed PVP gear you're still affected by bolster.

Bad arena matches are over quite quickly (unless someone tries to hide, but that's not common) so I don't mind it when they pop in the normal queue - even if they are often pointlessly one-sided. Having said that, I'd prefer if they got going a bit quicker somehow. I appreciate the game has to wait for both sides to accept the queue, load in and then you have to allow some time to discuss tactics - but the ratio of time spent waiting vs playing seems to be a lot worse than in normal warzones.

I suspect it's fairly likely they'll tweak more than one of the PT/VG middle tree abilities to require the High Energy cell. At present, you only lose the faster movement, periodic ammo regen/heat vent and automatic critical HiB abilities. All nice enough but not vital. Because of the way the tree is structured I think you only end up having to waste one skill point to reach the upper tier abilities. I wouldn't go as far as saying they're on par with a full dps though. Even if they hit superficially similar numbers in Arenas some of that damage ends up being essentially noise against competent healers. If they lost the ability to guard then it's doubtful they would be anyway near as popular as they are now.

It takes a significant number of matches before you can realistically begin to judge class balance in any game and I'd hope that most players realise that. Having said that some classes do just feel more fun to play (especially early on) and you're probably right that it influences their decision to keep playing. It's not really an issue about generally being "OP" though - low level Scoundrel healing is fairly frustrating for example, and gives no hint how strong they can be later on. But anyway, I doubt that is a significant issue - although most players have some attachment to their main character the number of players who play regularly but don't have at least one alt is vanishingly small. In fact, of the people I know who play the game more than twice a week I can only think of one who has a single character but I can think of many who have 6+ characters.

While removing the limitation for F2P would likely result in more PVP activity it's strange to say that it's the cause of the decline in the first place. On The Red Eclipse I'd suggest the drop in 55 PVP can be attributed to : Players transferring to TOFN. (Some of those players transferred back, but then some of those re-transferred again while a larger number quit the game entirely). People just not playing anymore. Some went F2P yes, but in my experience a much large proportion simply stopped playing altogether. The queueing system is now (arguably) more fragmented than before. If you want to queue for Solo Ranked then you can't queue for normal warzones. And as Sayil says, there's still plenty of warzones going on - except at really off-peak hours, but that's almost always been the case.

I was talking about obtaining credits. I'm fine with PVP'ing many times for better gear. My issue is with the suggestion that we should all do PVE dailies which (for me) are a terrible waste of time. Again, I think I may have been unclear. What I'm saying is wretchedly dull is PVE dailies. You don't hone many PVP skills by doing PVE dailies.

Can you clarify what you mean by "zerg" in this context? From what I've seen, the team that rushes forward in an uncontrolled fashion often loses so I assume you don't mean that.

How do you propose to stop people wearing augmented gear in warzones? I wear my "PVP" gear on some characters when I'm out in the world generally - are you saying I shouldn't be allowed to augment what is my only set of gear? Having to spend lots of credits augmenting gear (twice in some cases) is a bit of a chore but I like the idea of augmenting. It allows people to (theoretically) fine tune their stats without having to grind yet more comms to get a better enhancement/mod (which are still ludicrously priced in the 2nd tier). The economics of PVP do need to be looked at though. Forcing players to waste their time doing dailies is idiotic and reduces the desire to play the game at all. People who say "it's only 45 minutes a day" worry me slightly - do you value your time that poorly that you don't mind spending time doing content which most players view as wretchedly dull? I work full time and it'd be irrational for me to value my free time less than my work time. 45 minutes a week day is therefore about $450 a month - which is way too much for any game.

It'd be nice if we got a protection per second calculation on the scoreboard. There are plenty of high protection scores (the TOFN PVP Records page lists a Guardian doing 2.23m protection) but most of the higher values seem to be abnormally long Civil War or Novare Coast matches.

I doubt the engine could cope with this natively but presumably a time-delayed spectator mode would eliminate the problem of view assisting the participants.

Yeah it is mildly inconvenient for the cases you mention. Bioware have said that their matchmaking system depends on static skill trees in order to give balance teams. Although apparently that system doesn't even apply outside of solo ranked queues, so.... But anyway you can always switch forms to get the ability to guard / higher damage resistance. Yes, it's not the same as having the tanking skills but it helps in a pinch (e.g. Huttball). And you can get most of the tanking medals just by taunting in a lot of matches.

I disagree. As it stands now, as soon as I see one of my team members go below 30% I put an emergency medpac on him. This means that unless you had already him targeted, it's very difficult to successfully hit him with one of the (generally hard hitting) execute abilities that some classes have. Even those classes without an execute may have abilities which can do more than 6-7k in a single move. At present, those abilities can't successfully kill someone because targets are so rarely in the 20-30% range. To say this would do absolutley nothing is absurd.

Make emergency medpac only "free" when you're below 20% health (down from 30%). Would make a big difference in PVP - less so for PVE.