Exactly the same, no difference at all.

I completely understand why the low pop people see this as a welcome change, but changing PvP isn't a solution to that problem, server merges/free transfer is. As someone that does 10-15 WZs a day (sometimes more) it's really disheartening to see all the people signing up just because they get free stuff with minimal effort. This recent change made that problem worse. Ranked WZs might fix this, 8-man queueing absolutely would. The mentality that seems prevalent in todays society about as long as you attend you are already a winner is in my opinion ruining the challenge and enjoyment of doing something that truly took effort.

You could've easily gone with a higher ratio of wins required though, being able to skip one WZ if you win is not really a solid incentive on a high population server. I've seen some comments on how this isn't ranked WZs and you shouldn't really care if you win or lose, for some of us that usually only run in groups of four and take it semi-serious it's a pain when the other 4 decide to go AFK near an objective. It's not really an issue about getting gear quickly, but the pride of winning and knowing your entire team did well.

The way I see it, it's bad for the following reasons: Quite a few players only do their dailies in PvP, now they can just go AFK and still get the rewards. From my experience, instead of leaving, they just sit idle at a turret. I've won several matches where 3-5 people left early because the leavers are usually the baddies. (now they stay in the game doing nothing) There are better ways to promote PvP (Ranked WZs with leaderboards being one) Now this is taken from my experience playing today, it might change later, but for now I've noticed less people willing to try and get a win. People have even said they aren't really focusing on winning since it still counts.

I didn't know a win counted for two matches, at least that's something. But I'd still prefer the old way. Regarding the low-pop server I can't really say much because I think it's a different issue all-together. Deserter debuff is needed for the leavers, not just for rated WZs, which may or may not ever come.

Warzone daily missions changed from 3 wins to 6 played. While this might sound like a good idea it's really not. This encourages people to not bother winning. I've seen this already in the Warzones played today, after 2 minutes in Civil War where the enemy got two turrets 80% of the team just stood at our one turret to get the medals, because their daily would count anyways. Please stop rewarding people for showing up.

After the new design, which looks alright, you made it so the search field gets focus on page load. This makes sense for sites like google, Amazon and other sites where you mostly know what you are looking for and want to get there quickly. But on forums you usually browse, sometimes you click a thread and quickly decides it's of no interest, so you press backspace to get back to the topic list. But you can't. Because you are already focused on the search field.

Have the exact same problem. Certain sounds stop playing after a while, like the sound of my blasters, or the alarm in void star. Started with 1.2

I got 99 problems but downtime aint one. WoW has weekly maintenance, Rift has weekly maintenance. More or less every mmo has weekly downtime. And with major patches like 1.2 there will always be unscheduled downtime to fix something that slipped through the cracks.

Because sometimes they need to update the game, and sometimes they just need to flush out some old resources.

I PUG´ed it yesterday, as a Merc healer with half rakata half columi I had no problem doing the second boss. We did 4 tries before everyone learnt how to avoid stuff. So this is a group problem, not a game problem. More hard content please.

Actually smaller patches are a lot easier to maintain. The code doesn't become "fragmented" when it goes live since you don't work on some magical part of the game, you code directly into whatever version is the latest on the development server. Preferably by using some form of version control to maintain and keep track of changes. Commit often, release often. That's pretty much the golden standard of software development today. Also I would venture to say that if you made a hotfix to development and told QA "Hey, today we are making sure the pylons in EV can't be broken" that fix could be out on live within 24-hours. Why hold back simple things like that for months to release it in one big patch? I'm sorry, but I don't agree with your arguments about it taking more time to hurl everything into one big patch. Speaking from experience it makes everything a lot harder to debug.

Just use the rocks like everyone else.

Why do you post two question marks after every question? OP made a fair comparison, even including things he feels SWTOR does better than Rift and I must say I agree on all the points he made. How dual(multi)-spec makes anything easy mode is beyond me, is it better to have people go and respec for a price every time a healer leaves the raid, or the tank needs to go? No.

I think we all can agree that the FPS issue and Ability Delay issues needs sorting ASAP. Getting 0.5 FPS avg (with CTD ever 10 minutes) in Ilum on a one year old computer is hardly acceptable.

You mean so literally the entire day for Europeans are wasted instead of just half? Slightly exaggerated, but you get the point.

To be honest Arlya, your post did come off rather arrogant. If people weren't affected they wouldn't be bothered to post here. We have the feeling the way the downtime is at the moment it's only based on US players and the Europeans can just consider themselves lucky that the timezone isn't even more apart. While no one is claiming that every European plays from 0800 to 1600, a fair chunk of people do. My server for instance is usually pretty full starting at 1400 and onwards. I think everyone can agree that WoW set the gold standard for how to do server maintenance, with Rift following up in the same pattern. Bioware/EA is actually degrading service that people are accustomed to.

We've come to expect more these days, I wish Trion managed this game and not Bioware/EA.

Read the letter in its entirety and I absolutely agree with every single point. The CS is not worthy such big names as BW and EA.

While not at all sexual in any way, the first line that made me laugh so far was Blizz`s comment after I put a blaster in someones face to have a guy get to the point: "Boss use blaster like remote? Put annoying man on fast-forward." ps. I'm paraphrasing.

Actually that post doesn't promise anything, it might even mean that this is their opinion of best time slot for the maintenance. There is a heavy bias on the US maintenance time though. Until they come out and say they will have separate downtimes there will be no peace or comfort for the EU players.

You can't really compare it to games launched several years ago, like WoW or EQ. MMOs have since become big business and there are much bigger requirements and demands for quality of service now than it was only 2-3 years ago. The best game to compare it to would be Rift, which is just over 6 months old and the latest western MMO to launch. Rift had separate maintenance windows for EU and US from the very beginning. There is no point really discussing the fact that it takes 8 hours since that's what they deem necessary and we won't and shouldn't try to change that. What we can do however is ask for the same treatment as our North American friends, nothing more, nothing less.

I wouldn't hold my breath. Only way to even have them think about changing their minds is bad publicity. Shareholders don't read the forum, decision makers at EA don't read the forums and let's face it, we aren't worth much to them. We are just the "vocal minority". I suggest we start alerting the media, sites like eurogamer.net and possibly RPS. A 1000 posts thread and a lot of unhappy customer should at least warrant a small news post. We win nothing by discussing all the off-topic stuff that's been creeping up in here.

I've said it before but it bears repeating, Rift managed to have EU times from the get-go. With a much smaller budget. There is no excuse for EA/BW not having this already, since it's proven it's quite possible for a new MMO to have great success with this model. Remember EU pays for this product just as our North American friends, and should we not get the same service?

Sorting the party frames is a must, as I healer it's making the job much harder having to bounce all over the raid frames to find the ones in need of healing. Moveable and scalable elements is also a must, raise your hand everyone that has had their companion return from a gathering mission when you are the middle of a fight healing the group...