Assuming a 50/50 win rate in warzones (which by definition, is the average), completing your WZ dailies get you 18 credits towards your Ilum daily. You only need 12 more. The side that controls Ilum has people leaving much much more quickly (more than twice as fast) so they have far fewer defenders. One or two assaults and most of both sides are done with the daily and leave. With valour now pointless, there's absolutely no reason to stick around beyond only 12 kills/boxes

IGNORE VALOUR It will be effectively USELESS once 1.2 hits so they're hardly gonna try to implement anything between now and then. If you're close to hitting Battlemaster is might be useful so you can snag a couple of pieces in the next few weeks, but beyond that all the valour you get from now on is just about pointless beyond a title and *maybe* a mount without a speed increase.

Who cares about the 4 medal cap now we know valour is utterly useless once 1.2 hits?

Honest question: Do you think that the next 6 weeks (or probably considerably more) will be better for PVP overall, when everyone knows valour is useless? How many hardcore PVPers will be left by the time 1.2 finally goes live, if the carrot of increasing valour for assumed potential future benefit has been removed?

You aren't even L50 yet, so presumably don't have experience of valour being the only means of progression. If gear progression is so irrelvent to you, and you find enjoyment solely in the act of PVPing, why does it matter to you that others hold a different view?

No, it's being told there will be no more cars allowed on the roads in a few months time, but you can keep your keyring to show off with if you want. Do you still want to buy that car, even at a reduced price? Or alternatively, the manufacturer announces that prices will be significantly reduced in a month (or two, or three, or whenever 1.2 finally arrives). Who will pay that higher price between now and then? It might be different if they announced them as imminent changes (ie: next patch), but they're effectively saying two things: 1) All valour gained previously will be effectively useless Ok, not a lot you can do about that. You gained the valour when you thought it was beneficial, and gained the benefits from it up until now 2) All valour gained from now on will be effectively useless Why bother doing pvp when you know there are no rewards? Unless you have immediate short-term access to certain pieces of gear, PVP offers nothing whatsoever until 1.2 goes live (whenever that happens)

There are two reasons for doing warzones. The same two reasons which drive every aspect of an MMO: 1: Fun 2: Progression For some, those aspects are completely seperate and they can enjoy one without the other. For most however, those aspects are related to a greater or lesser degree. We now know that the 'progression' aspect in PVP has been all but removed for most people. Unless you're a newish Battlemaster with gear slots to upgrade, close to hitting Battlemaster, or a brand new 50 not in full Champion gear yet, there is no progression in PVP until 1.2 launches. Unless you're getting gear upgrades or can get to BM teir in time, any valour you get is worthless until they get round to releasing 1.2 in March, sorry, April, late April, maybe... For me, the 'fun' of the same three warzones over and over isn't enough in itself. In the same was as progression alone wouldn't be enough if it wasn't fun, warzones without progression isn't gonna cut it for me. I'll potter around on my alts for a bit, bringing my 8th and final character above L20. I'll max out missions and gathering on the last few alts who haven't already maxed them (all professions maxed already). I'll build up stocks of rarer materials for the initla rush when they finally add to crafting (I scaled back working the GTN for profit once I hit 10mil). PVP was the only true endzone grind in the game. Ops and FPs just struck me as a pure fapfapfapfap-end: You have won/lost. Minimal tactics, few alternatives to the traditional simplified tank'n'spank. I don't want to quit, but I'm left wondering what it can fill my time with now

The answer is simple: The cover mechanic was a nice idea in theory, but in practice it's horrible

All that means is that more people have hit 50 and have nothing better to do than Warzones, Flashpoints and Operations. Since most of those involve being on the Fleet (at the very least to pick up dailies/weeklies), it stands to reason there are more people there.

Classic from Everquest: A moss snake kicks you for 21 damage

Combat log will probably be a text output to a text file. 'Third party' mod to monitor your dps would then be nothing more complicated than a realtime text file monitor with simple arithmetic tools to give personal totals, average dps, etc. It's no indication of any ingame mods or anything more gamechanging than that, and no access or info on game code would be required

Getting to L12 is not 'torturous', it's an afternoon session of gameplay... I should know, I've got 7 chars all over L20, one at 11, and rerolled a few of them already. Once you've got the hang of the game from your first runthrough, the subsequent ones fly by

Titles were meaningless in the grand scheme of things anyway. You had no way of knowing whether a 'Battlemaster' got there through: skillfully leading the team to victory in myriad warfronts, medal farming without any conern for whether the team won or lost so long as he got his medals every time, The short period of insane gains during the 1.1 Ilum debarkle Kill trading in Ilum The only peron who knows that is the player themselves, and the pride in your own achievements won't be affected. I'm rushing to hit BM before the 1.1.5 patch goes in, because then I'll know I did it 'the hard way'. Noone else will know, noone else will care. I'll be no more 'elite' than someone who did it post 1.1.5, and maybe them being in BM gear too will be the extra push we needed to win that last warfront. Gaining valor today is already a lot slower than when some of the complaining battlemasters did it. Ilum 'no valor gained' bug hindering open world pvp valor gain /stuck exploit removed so you can't get back to the fight quickly after death, missing kill credits Shockwater fixed, removing two medals from a large number of classes Expertise buff stacking allowing access to some medals for certain classes they can no longer reach The rates of valor gain have been changing since release. Post-patch we'll have no way of knowing if BMs got there 'the hard way', but that's no different from the situation right now.

This annoys me. If someone has zero expertise but 49/50 mods in every slot and blues/purples everywhere else, then I'll assume they're just starting out. If they've got greens, empty slots, or woefully substandard mods then they don't care enough for me to care whether they're starting out of not. Even more infuriating are people with a few cent pieces and L40 mods and greens

Three things the changes will prevent: Players ignoring the objectives to run off somewhere so they can farm the 'one on one' medal Players taking minor secondary healer or guarding abilities to farm those medals, even though it detracts from their primary roles Healers being penalised for concentrating on healing instead of farming medals

I thought you already got paid considerably more, by virtue of being able to turn most warzones into wins simply because of your very presence and skill? If Jim's abilities make him twice as likely to win a warzone than Bob, then unless Bob is sharing every warzone with Jim, then Jim will have more wins and hence more pay.

And how do you measure that performance? Medals? When some (like healing, defending, etc) are totally unavailable to certain classes. A button mashing chimp of one class can already get more medals than the most skilled PVPer ever born of another class, simply because of the way the medal system was distributed

Actually, you're wrong. The point of PVE gear (and PVP gear) is to equip your TEAM better so your TEAM can win more often. A team is only as bad as their weakest links, and despite the epeen-swinging elitists on here claiming they've been winning warzones single handedly for years, the facts are that most of the other 7 people in the warzone also contribute. There will always be freeloaders who do nothing, but those who do contribute in champ gear, will contribute more in BM gear. Just like with a raid (and I'm used to having to equip 50+ people), distributing the gear is FAR more effective than having a couple of exclusively geared supermen.

Absolutely. It is totally unprofessional to totally ignore this problem, especially when they found time to identify, fix and patch the /stuck exploit but they can't even take 5 minutes to post about this? Having to suicide every 3-5 kills, missing at least as many credits while you try to die, and then a whole load more runnning back from a complete unneccessary death? A quick look in the background and it should be obvious which process is blocking the kill credits and generating the specific 'no valor gained' message. Why hasn't that been fixed?

The update was a MONTH AGO, lol. Ilum is still broken and buggy as hell. People still have to suicide every few kills because of the 'no valor gained' bug. It's not 'crying' to expect some progress on issues like these...

I notice most of the objections are along these lines. How somehow facing 'equals' is an abhorant and absurd suggestion. I'd venture the truth is more that they'd be less able to compete if their advantage was evened out. I did valor levels 1-55 without joining a single premade, although I've made plenty of friends in pug warzones and Ilum battles (we're one of the more balances rep/imp servers)and enjoy seeing certain people and/or guilds end up in my team. Any BM pre-made will roll over 95% of the opposing teams they get pitted against. It's not a matter of the opposition lacking skill, the fact that one team has at least 4 BMs (instead of L50, 0 valor green-wearing new-to-pvp folks) is already more than enough of advantage before you even consider the bonus coordination aspects.

Never used it myself, but it does seem rather unbalanced that some classes can get the basic medals in dps, healing and guarding in every warzone with next to no effort, but other classes are restricted to 5 or 6 medals at most unless they have huge expertise and can reach the higher teir medals in their specialisation.

Everquest was amazing. It wouldn't work in today's insta-gratification world though. Vanguard had promise which was unfortunately ruined by getting oushed out of the door too fast and left to flounder. WoW broke all records and grew and grew, creating the mold for most of that which came after it. I never played WoW, but I dabbled in LOTRO, Rift and now SWTOR, and they are all reskins of each other with minor bells and whistles. Nothing wrong with that per se, although I do yearn for a new generation of games to come along and break the mold in the way EQ did when it started. Success does not necessarily denote quality though. Zynga proves that beyond all doubt. Short commitment dip-in/dip-out games are the way to make money and don't have the constant push for new content gamers require in games that require a lot more long term dedication. For that reason, most MMORPGs will stick to the tried and tested 'banker' formula created by WoW for the forseeable future. I do hope however that when that market gets well and truely saturated (if it isn't already) that 'niche' games will emerge to tap back into the early MMO market again.

Official forums give Bioware control over the primary forums for the game. They can lock them down during times of high negativity (like downtimes), close posts, 'consolidate' threads into a single unreadable unthreaded quagmire post, warn/ban users, etc. Because they're the 'official' forums, they're the first port of call, and therefore anyone setting up an 'unofficial' forum wouldn't get much traffic. If there were no official forums, there would be several 'unofficial' ones fighting it out to become the top dog, and eventually everyone would flock to the 'main' unofficial forum in the same way as they did to the official ones. Only this time, Bioware would have no control, no way of answering threads unless they joined too, and what limited interations there are would have to be third hand.

But the fact they're an integrated part of the program makes the entire program unlikely to be permissable. Kinda like a kid trying to convince their parents they only wanted that copy of Playboy for the articles...