Agreed. I don't mind the mechanic in isolation, but when someone does it repeatedly as you indicate, it totally sucks.

Excellent post, although I would argue that level 50 warzones are more broken than you indicate.

Prior to 1.1, the game was playable at level 50. Not ideal for everyone, but playable by everyone. Now it's not playable and that is Bioware's fault. Queues of an hour plus for level 50s? Yeah, that's totally my fault.

Yeah. I really don't feel like I rushed. We have roughly 100 players in our guild and most are 50 at this point. I'm not saying everyone is or even most of the population, but there are enough of us that we should matter to BW.

If the PvP game was really that bad for sub 50, then I guess I understand why it had to be done. I PvP with some lowbies and they never complained. I'm just upset that overnight the entire PvP scene, which I was enjoying, basically became unplayable. There had to be a middle ground or else they should have waited for a better solution.

On Bondar Crystal, I have been able to queue at night during peak hours. Ilum was serviceable (at least I could do the daily). There were still major problems but at least I had something to do. Prior to the patch I had something to do 24x7. Something is better than nothing IMO.

As a player who tends to play mostly early in the morning, patch 1.1.0a introduced a frustrating problem for me. This morning I logged in at about 6am, as I often do. I queued myself for a WZ and then headed to Ilum to attempt to do the daily. The republic population on Ilum was 4, and none of the other 3 were doing PvP. I decided to see if I could farm armaments and pick up a few random open world kills. Unfortunately, since the armaments are concentrated only at the central assault, and since there were about 15 imperials there, this proved to be impossible. Oh well, at least I can do Warzones which are balanced. If only that were the case! I then proceeded to wait in a queue for approximately one hour for my queue to pop (it didn't). The fact is that on my server, there just aren't enough level 50's to support PvPing in anything but peak hours. Prior to the separation of brackets, this worked fine. This makes me think the split was TOO SOON. I'm all for splitting the brackets up, but they should have waited until enough people were at level 50 for the ecosystem to be viable. The bottom line is that prior to 1.1.0, I could participate in Ilum and Warzones during my odd play schedule, and now I simply cannot. It wasn't ideal before, but at least it was possible.

I'm a morning player and this has made it basically impossible to queue. I was on at 6am this morning and couldn't get a WZ after waiting in queue for an hour. There just aren't enough 50's for this to work during off peak hours.

There is always going to be a gear race for end game PvP, even without expertise. Remove expertise and people will just be complaining about high end raiding gear giving an unfair advantage. Whenever gear exists, competition is not purely skill based.

I think that the OP raises some interesting points about the games marketing but the truth is that most gamers didn't pay that close attention. I actually think this comment is much closer to the truth. The imperial classes are just cooler (now empirically proven).

I actually think the bigger problem is that yesterdays patch revealed a core issue with the game. It revealed that there is a severe imbalance in factions on most servers (of course we all knew this), but that the game itself is designed for balanced factions (at least for open world pvp). This is a core design issue and I don't think it will be fixed without going back to the core design of open world PvP. I think it won't be really fixed until at least 2.0 - nevermind an emergency 5am patch.

Off topic, but lol.