I also noticed that she's a fictional character, too!

I remember reading in the data files pre-release that there were quests related to the whole slave line. I saw it myself, and though my memory is fuzzy, given the names of the quests, it does seem like this quest shouldn't just end where some players are saying they've gotten too. They were titled things like "Defiant", "Pleading", "Desperate", "Acceptance", "A Slave Forever". Makes me think maybe the stuff past the point where the quest ends now isn't working or requires you to get further into the game. I also got up to around Tatooine, and still had interactions with her as a slave. Though after a certain point it started repeating earlier quest lines under new quest names, which lead me to believe it wasn't finished or was bugged at the time. That was an old beta test, though. The game itself tells you that you can keep her as a slave, and "mold her to your will". Albeit in a creepy, blood-filled quest that has a possibly insane sage giving you that information. Not that that wouldn't make your character an evil, evil, person. But then, you are playing a Sith, and assuming you're willing to keep slaves, your character is probably evil by default.

Clearly this is an unbiased post that should be taken seriously when the developers begin work on the next patch. That was sarcasm by the way. They aren't going to make a counter to whatever class you play "unplayable", because you don't know how to fight against them. I've played a tank, healer, and DPS to 50 by now, and i've had no problem taking one down, you just have to be ready to smack them with interrupts and know how the class works. Sages and Sorcs are heavily charge/channel skill dependent. So any class that has even two of them (IE: Almost all of them. All classes get your basic interrupt, and almost all will have 2 more (at least) ways to interrupt or stop them.) will be able to lock them down fairly well until they die. The counter to that is that if you're dumb enough to let them get three charges or channels off on you, then yeah, they're really going to hurt you. So don't. Also, inquisitors are a mirror of sage. I've noticed that BH's and Inqs get alot of people screaming about tracer missile and lightning attacks, mostly because they're more visible and distinguishable from their comparative mirror attacks. I don't see too many people whining about the mirrors, despite them doing the exact same thing. Which is another reason why it's hard to take these sort of posts seriously. Also, tracer missile is easy to counter. Interrupt puts a skill on a longer cooldown. So if you see someone spamming it, and thinking it's their main attack, smack them with it, and watch as their brain goes into "Oh crap, what now?" mode as they try to figure out what to main DPS with.

There were one or two servers out of the bunch, yeah. But it was painfully obvious that Warhammer Online was dying by degrees. The PVP system didn't have anything to counter-balance population imbalances, like NPC aid, or anything like that. So you could literally see the underdog faction of any imbalanced server withering and dying over the course of a month whenever one side had an advantage for too long. This was because WAR was almost entirely PVP centric in terms of its progression, meaning if one side had a significant advantage they could pretty much ruin the game for the other side with even half-way decent planning. This lead to un-subscriptions, and people rerolling to other servers. Some servers managed to stave this off for longer thanks to good balance between skilled guilds, or roughly equal populations. But as more and more servers died, more and more people flocked to one side or the other, and started the process all over again. There's nothing like that in TOR. The closest thing to that is Ilum. Which is not a major gameplay factor. Though I do wish Ilum would include some sort of NPC spawning and automated defense/capping mechanic for the underpopulated side, to compensate for when one side just zergs the zone. And on the servers that weren't heavily populated, it was pretty obvious that the game wasn't doing well. TOR has no indications like that. Almost all of the servers are booming. The problem is, in a highly populated game that's doing well, new players typically want to roll on the servers where they know they'll find new players, as opposed to the server that's going to be dead. Doubly so if that server is some sort of designated hub for a segment of the community. They really don't have any reason not too, unless the developers give them a reason too (Transfers, and such.). WoW had a band-aid fix for this. Offer free transfers out. However, that particular fix also had the downside of pretty much obliterating a few existing servers communities.

Yeah. There are a few servers that didn't really get the lions share of the population at release. And that should most certainly be addressed, either by merges, or by funneling people to them via free transfers. But the current low servers are more the result of community planning in the case of the RP servers, or just bad luck. It has nothing to do with the population dropping by some insane amount. A slight dip in the population immediately after the free month is normal. Some people are only in the game for the free ride, or to troll. And others forget to sub. Others still adopt a "play it for free for one month, come back in three to see how much has been done" method to gauge how good the developer team is. There's a myriad number of things effecting dips and increases in population. Call me if we start seeing all the servers with 30-50 in one instance of the fleet station. Then i'll worry.

You really have no idea what you're talking about. You should probably listen to the people who have been trying to explain things to you for the past few pages, instead of trolling their responses. The population caps on the servers were raised. This means that servers will show as being lighter in population then they were before. It doesn't mean that the population dropped. Further confusing some people is the fact that the "holiday" season is over. People are focused on college, work, and school right now. Also, the doom and gloomers who have been spamming this forum, and others in an attempt to hurt the game, are being forced out now that their free month is up. On the latter point I say good riddance to bad apples. The game is perfectly fine. I've leveled three characters to cap so far, and geared one fully out in T2. Any bugs are simple minor things that come with release and get patched out shortly after, as BW has been demonstrating. Edit: And yes, there are actually people who want the game to die. Mostly because it's EA associated in the case of many. Some of the posts I see on third party forums are absolutely insane. It's like bizzaro-fanboyism. Edit: Also, laughing at the guy you quoted and were agreeing with, saying that server merges would inexplicably generate new bugs that would somehow cause the game to die a screaming death. As if the process of moving a file from one folder to another would somehow create a horde of new bugs to appear to torment and make the users miserable for eternity onwards. Lack of software and game design experience all ITT.

Marauders tend to be a bit underpowered compared to the channel and charge spam of certain classes at the end game. Their utility in a fight is also still kind of lacking. Speaking as someone who's played one to fifty, I have to say that I have a much easier time playing certain other classes like Powertechs, and being successful at DPS and other meta-roles, then I do a Marauder, which requires many bars of skills slotted and easily activatable in order to be competitive. Nevermind a much greater awareness of nearby fights in order to not be useless, since our two big things are a periodic few second long buff we give to people who are actually in our group (Doesn't seem to count the entire team. Just people we've invited beforehand.), and our ability to DPS while intermittently applying an attack that reduces incoming healing by 20 percent. This is coming from someone who regularly does very good DPS, too. However, that DPS is coming at least partially from the fact that i'm over-geared in PVP gear compared to many players, and I typically run with a team that knows to compensate for the huge flaws this class tends to have in the sustainability department. Also, watchman/annihilation is pretty weak in terms of DPS and utility compared to carnage/the other mirror. Watchman just requires less skill to play in terms of advanced game mechanics, and is much more approachable as a result. Carnage tends to be really crazy in terms of requiring you to never make a mistake, and having almost literally every skill we get slotted, outside of core stuff for other trees like Rupture. However, it's also by far the best tree out of the bunch when it comes to DPSing if you can figure out how to play it properly. It also requires a proper understanding of the stats system to get the most out of it, since it's very multi-attack heavy. Rage is just flat out broken in terms of putting out reliable DPS from encounter to encounter. Prior to 40, it's also incredibly useless. Once you are 40, it becomes very situational in its usefulness, ranging from "amazingly good" to "absolutely worthless". The core DPS mechanic of the class is building up about 4 ticks of one buff, and 2 buffs all in all from skills, so you can use a smash that will automatically crit for insane damage. Problem is, you don't get a reliable way to trigger this until 40 due to one of the core skills being in the tree at that tier. Furthermore, one of the core methods of DPSing is easily interruptible, and is a channel. Adding onto that, smash itself is very hit or miss in terms of usage. If a large number of players or mobs aren't nearby, you're not really getting the bang for the buck out if that you should, given the huge charge-up time for the 5 buffs you need. I figure i'll get flamed for pointing this out, but it really does need to be said. Slight edit: The complaint that we can "leap and pin you" constantly is fallacious. A marauder has two roots. One is leap. Which lasts only for maybe 3 few seconds, which, combined with the travel time to the target means we get like one second of time to attack you before you can start running again. The other is ravage. Which requires you to talent heavily into carnage to unlock it, and also seems to remove the ability to stun standard tier mobs when using it too. It is also a channel, which means you can just smack us and remove it. Also, we can't actually do anything to you other then use ravage on you while we're rooting you with it. Choke is a channel, and as a result, isn't really that useful outside of a delaying tactic or an impromptu interrupt. It's mostly a gimmick skill for rage's core tree mechanic, with some uses in stopping enemy channels that are a threat. Our slow requires us to be in melee range to apply. Which means if we're using it, we're probably already focused on trying to kill you, instead of applying a slow, which we would preferably need before we can use our main attacks. Compare this to other classes. Which have numerous ways of CCing people down at range, stunning them, or otherwise making their lives miserable. Marauders, instead, get things like Obfuscate, which lowers accuracy for a few seconds, or a number of abilities that are defensive based, and are on fairly long cooldowns. The idea of the class seems to be a glass cannon centered around actively applying buffs to yourself to stay alive. However, this concept is also kind of new from what I recall. Most of the utility was only added in towards the end of beta due to the (very valid) complaints that the class was underpowered, and probably could do with a bit of tweaking to make it more effective.

Your assumption assumes alot of things. Mainly, that DPS continues to spike upwards as you get levels, independent of a system that bolster could accommodate for. I for one have found that you can compete with (non buff exploiting) 50's, provided you know what you're doing. From a certain point onwards, all levels do is give more utility. See: Almost literally every skill from about 30/35 onwards for Marauder, for instance. In fact, the bolster system puts you quite on par 50's unless they start stacking an insane number of buffs. The exception to this is the drop-off you see starting around the 40's. But by then, you should be familiar with your class. It's not uncommon for me to see players that know what they're doing beating out 50 DPS AC's. I do it regularly on my sniper, too, for instance. Huttball is wonderful for that if you can find a perch above the melee that won't get interrupted too easily. Now, if you're making the argument that 50's are more experienced in gameplay mechanics, that's a different issue. But it's also one that doesn't require bracketing, as that experience will become more common-place as the game continues onwards. I disagree with a "10 percent cap on expertise". This invalidates the purpose of end-game gear. Nevermind the grind, which keeps people subscribed. A better solution was posted earlier on in the topic. Also, given that other secondary stats seem to have it, i'm sure there's already a soft-cap on expertise now as it is. Biochem and buff stacking does need to be dealt with, however, as it's a big reason on why a good deal of 50's seem unstoppable. And it's slowly becoming more and more common-place for people to say (At least on my server.) to roll Biochem for a character you're taking to 50, due to the huge edge it gives when compared with the other crew skills. All that being said, it's kind of hard to argue against a statement that gives a lot of opinions. All I can give is opinions and impressions to go against it, since there's no facts to check or counter.

Because now is the time to discuss this? Not a month after release when this issue may already be set in stone due to issues with the API or developer focusing? People keep trying to change the topic of the discussion whenever someone corners them on the issue of abusive mods and addons in a competitive and cooperative setting. This is a topic to talk about mods and whether they're needed. That's pertinent information.

The problem with including valor calculations into a match-making system is that it really doesn't take into account an issue of skill, like you want it too. Valor's just a number to grind to lengthen out the PVP end-game gear grind, nothing more. It'd be better to take into account things like your gears score, expertise of players, and other hard stats that actually make an impact in battle.

You will. Sorry to disappoint. Try resource maps, course plotters (Which optimize gathering, and make it harder for people who don't use them to get resources.), enemy indicators and distance indicators (Making it impossible to be ambushed if pay attention by other players.), auction house mods that automatically scan and undercut potential competition, or manipulate it in a way that's detrimental to the economy, but profitable to you. Would you like me to go on? Mods by themselves are not a bad thing. It's when the API lets players make mods that give an edge to those who use them over those who don't that they become a serious issue. WoW made that mistake. It's been paying for it bit by bit over the past few years, in developer man hours, player frustration, and money spent on the game that could have gone to content development. I'd rather not see the same mistakes repeated here.

This is coming from the guy with a self righteous signature talking about not being a TOR fanboy. Fact of the matter is, mods are bad if the API is not properly managed. WoW is the best case of this. You can do some things in there that would be considered outright cheats, hacks, or exploits, in other games. Especially in other MMO's, where you're playing with other players. Blizzard lets this happen, only dealing with the worst of the worst, because due to the games popularity the modding scene has grown into a beast too large to kill or cull without a serious investment of resources and time. They screwed up at release by giving way too much freedom to the modding community, and the modding community, predictably, took advantage of this. This isn't "fanboying" or "being egotistical" as you put it. It's an assessment of the history of games within the genre. It's a fact. People don't want to see the same mistakes made in earlier MMO's repeated in a game they enjoy playing. This is a reasonable expectation.

The bonus from gear is nowhere near the bonus from stacked consumables. We've already gone over this multiple times now. It's good that you're starting to see part of the bigger picture, but you need to dig a little deeper, i'm afraid. As an example, i'm almost fully decked out in T2 and T1 gear. I have a little over 10 percent expertise boosts to my reduction and damage output. You're not going to see someone with 40/50 percent expertise boosts just from gear in a warzone, even with BM. The reason being that expertise percentages per point do not scale that way. You can easily get that much from stacking consumables and power-ups, however. In fact, a sub-50 can outdo a geared 50 in the expertise department just by stacking a simple overcharge stim, and an overcharge power-up. Going from 0, that would give you 30 percent boosts to your expertise by percentage boost. The numbers go up quite quickly once you start getting geared with expertise points, sub-50 too, once expertise enhancements in PVP gear become available. Which, as mentioned by another poster, does not start at 50, but rather, before that. The benefit from gear is vastly over-stated compared to the real culprit that makes 50's steamroll enemy players. Which is why bracketing isn't going to solve anything. You're still going to see people rolling over enemy teams. Now people will just build twinks to do it sub-50, instead of saving up marks until 50 and buying a crap-ton of bags to go with all their saved up overcharge consumables. Edit: Just did another test, the difference between T1 gear and T3 gear is only maybe a dozen expertise points per gear. Note that this is points, not percentages. You need so many points to get a full percentage. Most T1 pieces of armor have 39 expertise. T3 has 50/49. Assuming there is an expertise softcap similar to how most other stats have softcaps, that is really not that big of a gain. Especially since most people will skip T1 almost altogether and go straight to T2 thanks to bag draws. Even assuming that they went to release without a softcap, which it seems unlikely they didn't include, that's not that big of a gain to your expertise, especially when compared to buff stacking.

Again. You did not read the OP. You need to go back and read it again before you keep posting. If you can't even be bothered to do that, you shouldn't bother to post. Buff stacking is additive in the percentages. Not multiplicative in the percentages. When you pop an expertise buff, it ADDS the equivalent expertise that gives you 15 percent. IE: Player A would not have 0 percent after taking the buff. Player A would have 15 percent damage reduction and damage boosting after taking the buff.

Justcallmetarzan, you seem to not understand that this is not a topic arguing over what is now. It's a topic suggesting fixes to the current situation. For instance, bracketing is stupid. It does not solve the underlying problem that the devs are claiming bracketing is needed for. Your posts even admit that. As you said when you completely ignored my post in favor of cherry-picking a single sentence to make your statement: Setting aside the fact that you apparently didn't even bother to read the OP and realize that this isn't directly about that, setting aside the fact that even though it isn't, the OP and several other posters posted fixes to this issue which would not require the inclusion of a 50's bracket, and setting aside the fact that you apparently have some sort of unique vision disorder that keeps you from seeing these things every time they're posted, how precisely do you think this issue is not going to be even more prevalent with expertise buff stacking when T3 becomes more prevalent in the 50's only bracket? It already is a serious issue now. It just gets worse and worse as time goes on, and the people abusing it get more and more higher end gear. You're trying to make an argument off of the basis of "no, you!" and ignoring aspects of the greater whole of the system.

Way to ignore the rest of my post, buddy! Troll harder.

Battlemaster takes Valor Rank 60 to even start getting pieces of it. And keep in mind that not only does that mean you have to start the random gear bag grind from scratch, but also that they're changing BM tokens to commendations only soon. Which will further increase the amount of time needed to get full BM. You're looking at the sort of grind that could take over a month to do, maybe more, depending on how BM gear gets modified by Bioware. Also, I mentioned a fix for that issue that doesn't require bracketing in my OP. And it's been mentioned multiple times by several people now throughout the topic. In fact, someone proposed an alternate solution that is entirely doable with a bit of tweaking not a page or two ago. Simply tallying up and averaging out to the median of the expertise bonuses 50's possess in a given PVP match could also be a fix, if the averaged expertise was assigned to players. It would require some fine tuning on Bioware's part, but it's entirely doable. Especially with the resources they have available. This would keep them at about the median of strength, while not giving anyone a significant advantage (Except for the people who are twinked/set up specifically for PVP. But that's unavoidable no matter what system you use.). It would also be another possible solution that would remove the need for 50's bracketing. I have mixed feelings about this solution. On one hand, it removes the issue of expertise being the dominant stat in PVP if you start seeing alot of people showing up in T3 full sets. On the other hand, it also homogenizes things a bit, if the numbers aren't tweaked carefully in the bolstering system. Bioware could probably do it, however. Like I said before however, either way they need to deal with expertise buff stacking first before any of this is really viable, though. It's not going to go away just because you try and shove it off in a corner. As another person pointed out, you can do the same thing pre-50. It's just that most people haven't figured it out yet.

And exactly what constitutes greater power? All new gear tiers do is adjust the number requirements for PVP at 50 upwards. It's a cosmetic thing, when you get down to it, that has the appearances of being something that makes PVP more complex. A carrot on a stick, if you will. Yet, no new mechanics are implemented with the advent of new gear, nor is there some ground-shattering new way of PVPing that increases the overall choices you have as a competitor within the system. A simple minor tweak to the bolstering system to grant sub 50's scaling expertise could easily keep them competitive while offering geared 50's the opportunity to still have fun and partake in the grind. All that being said, that only really applies to the second posted possible solution out of the two. The other/s are just as viable.

If they put it in cross server queuing, i'm quitting. It takes a bare minimum of effort to let 50's play with sub 50's, as I posted here (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=162505) explaining how. Cross server queuing is just a destructive, and really, lazy developers way of avoiding dealing with the real issues that unbalance PVP at 50. That thing ruined WoW and was in fact one of the final nails in the coffin of people actually speaking with each other on my server. I play MMO's for the community. Not to faceroll with a bunch of faceless goons. Thanks to people actually learning to socialize in TOR again, i've met more people who I group with here, then I have in the last year of WoW's "semi AFK" queue spamming system. If I wanted to play with a bunch of faceless avatars, i'd go play Battlefield 3 or Counterstrike. Why would I ever want to sit through the destruction of another community thanks to cross server queues again? Edit: And just to head off the trolls who think they know better. There's no issue of conceited players on here thinking I don't want to go "up against pros" or something. In fact, I typically roll with a premade against other premades given how borked the current system is, and I win far more matches then I ever lose. I just don't want the system to go back to being a pointless grind that only exists for the inevitable carrot on the stick, like it's become in WOW. You had might as well go play a single player game with well designed bots, with a cross server queuing system up. It encourages a lack of communication, lack of good play, and lack of community on your server. It's crap.

You apparently skipped over the parts of my post where I addressed what you have an issue with. I included potential solutions that would fix the scaling issue in my posts while removing the need for a 50's only bracket. I'd repeat what I said, but apparently the forum has suddenly decided that I live in France. This has lead to every button and aspect of the web-site being in French, which makes it a royal pain to actually post anything without having to decipher which buttons are where. So it'll have to wait for now. Maybe somebody else can fill you in in the mean-time. Edit: By the way, did you know that SW:TOR is rated PEGI 16? I do, now.

On the issue of expertise being an all in one super stat, there is an easy fix for this. All you'd need to do is divide it into two stats. One related to attack and healing, and the other defense. You could even create a nice gear meta-game that rewards people who actually think their gear choices through. Remove the current "expertise" items, take the code/data for them, dupe the current PVP items so that there's an extra set for each, then assign more of one stat then the other to each one, with the second stat having less, so that a player isn't gimping themselves by going all offense/healing or all defense. The benefits of this idea is that it removes the ability for someone to become a tanking, DPSing, killing machine, that people can't stop, even if they stack buffs. After all, you'd have to choose between going full offense, or full defense, if you wanted to stack buffs in a situation like this. This also opens up more tactical options in PVP for teams that want to strategize, and ensures that no one is the lord and master of everything on the battlefield. Or you could just remove the bracket and do the benchmark idea I mentioned in relation to players having expertise. This idea is good, and very viable over the long term, because it'd be as simple as tuning the base expertise granted to pre-50's upwards any time they release a new tier of armor. The benefits of this system mean that pre-50's are never really screwed out of progressing against 50's that are geared out with newer tiers. It also maintains the current (excellent) queue times, ensuring no one has to wait an hour to get into a PVP match. This would eventually obsolete older tiers mechanically, but since the developers already confirmed that the ability to take out armoring and other "locked" slots in end-game PVP and PVE gear is coming back, this really doesn't matter. Given the upcoming changes to how end-game gear works, the gear itself would still be usable for cosmetic purposes, which would be all it's good for (And, currently, all it really is good for right now once you hit the next tier anyways. You just can't use obsoleted end-game sets in combat at the moment, since the armoring slot is locked out.), however, that really wouldn't be that big of an issue once they re-enable custom armor being on par with end-game armor, which, as stated, is coming.

There are some pretty stupid posts in this topic. Yeah, he likes PVPing, he never said he wanted to world PVP 24/7, which tends to be a gank-fest, and has its own set of issues. World PVP and scenario PVP are two seperate things, and on active servers, scenario PVP is usually very active. The 1.1 patch is going to break that in favor of trying to put a band-aid over a much bigger issue, shoving it out of the eyes of most players in the meantime. I made a huge topic explaining why the bracketing thing isn't fixing the real cause of fifties steam-rolling. Here's a hint. It isn't fifties. It's something some of the fifties are doing that they shouldn't be, that's making them better then any other fifty out there. Also, cross realm queues are counter-intuitive to building a community. If I wanted to play a game with a bunch of faceless goons i'd go play Counterstrike, not a MMO. Nevermind that it really cuts down on knowing just who you're playing with, quality wise. Dirk Anger from the Starwheedle server might be a complete moron and i'll never know it until he decides to repeatedly grab the ball on our team, and run to our goal line, handing the enemy team a point. But I can look at the guilds and players that queue regularly on my server, and know whether to focus on certain types of objectives, or to just drop group because five them are going to spend the match AFKing in the corner to farm commendations.

You still aren't listening. I said that I wasn't sure if the operative was the one who threw the stun or not. I corrected that when it was brought up. I just typed up over a page worth of text in five minutes, some typos might occur. It's not that big of a deal, and certainly not a reason for this freak-out of yours. And that has nothing to do with the actual ability of an operative or scoundrel to murder the crap out of someone if they do this. Nor does it pertain to the core aspect of this topic. Are you trolling? Or are you just not reading the posts and seeing what you want to see?

Instead of capsing, maybe you should read my post again.

I suppose I could go back in time and give you a video, if I had a time machine. However, i'm not going to sit in a warzone all day in the hopes that a scoundrel or operative will decide to go on a buff induced killing spree while i'm standing nearby. That's ridiculous to expect of anyone. It's possible someone else hit the tank with a stun, and I just didn't see it. However, it still doesn't change the core of that argument. And even if it did, that was mostly a side-comment. The main reason I made this topic was to try and explain the issue of why bracketing is a feel good fix, as opposed to one that actually fixes the real problem. All it's going to do is slow down queue times at 50, and once people adapt to the changes, most likely lead to this becoming much more prevalent on many servers with organized guilds that do this. I posted an easy fix for most of the posted issues in my OP. Though I do feel that the fixes in question should only be implemented after they remove stacking. Stacking is the core issue that causes so much imbalance and rage from players, and without it gone the same problems are going to exist irrespective of the presence of a 50's only bracket or not.