You inadvertently bring up a good point. Valor should be linked for all toons on the same server. So should datacrons, codex entries, rating, and I guess social level. Also ops leader should not be chosen by who has the highest amount of valor at any given time. It's utterly counter intuitive. Little things.

I could also ask my magic eight ball for all the relevance that has. Your welcome to link a video of a ranked game that proves your point. I know I've never seen anything beyond a 1 for 2 gain and even that is rare.

What does my server have to do with anything? Also you already missed the train on my argument and the correct derogatory use of the word cute. For what it's worth Pot5. For double the worth, yes if you desire, I will beat you with any class/spec.

Absolutely. It takes roughly 3 seconds to reflex cleanse a stun from your rotation. That's third or fourth GCD at best. That means in the best situations your are burning one GCD to gain two GCDs. Your welcome to link me even two instances of mez cleansing in arenas or ranked that was beneficial. Also you shouldn't ever need to cleanse stealth mezzes and the only other relevant 8 sec mezes are flashbang/whirlwind. If your argument is that cleanse is in the game so you can deal with flashbang/whirlwind I'd give you the confused smiley face in real life.

I did. Oh... and again. And then a third time for kicks.

He has a point. Is there any compelling reason for cleanse to exist outside of CD clears? The only time it's ever used is to cleanse the dots of under performing dot classes. And if the ability just exists to kick bad specs while they are down why even have it? This seems like a case of everyone else has it so we have to as well. Cleanse doesn't serve much of a functional purpose in competitive swtor.

The problem with ranked as I see it is twofold. The primary problem and something that nobody has mentioned is that the game coddles you. It doesn't force you to get better to overcome obstacles. The bar is set so low that the vast majority of people in warzones are not even obtaining 10% of their class effectiveness/output. Expecting them to further understand mechanics is a stretch. I mean if I asked most -ranked- teams what the base damage of acid or fire is in huttball or the duration of each quarter tick on spawn I would be met with blank stares. Forget about Dr. pug understanding that entrench is not a hack or why stacking all crit is not a good idea. Many people drone on and on about the low skillcap of swtor, but there are probably only thirty to fourty people across all the servers that actually have a clue. This is exhibited quite clearly in the shockingly stale state of single team ranked dominance on every server. If the skill cap was so low then the gulf between the best team and every other team wouldn't exist. Ranked would be functional. This is clearly not the case. Widely varying skill (probably depicted as an exaggerated bell curve) lends itself to a stratification of winners vs losers and the exclusivity that has crushed ranked participation. Ultimately this suggests two possible causes to my mind, neither of them reassuring in their ability to be fixed. Either the skill cap is simply too high (I think not) or the game simply needs to be made significantly harder so as to force the average player to get better. Unfortunately, these seem like design flaws more then anything thus the outlook for competitive play is pretty gloomy. Here's hoping though.

8v8 solo and 4 person queue with rating.

Herderp? I haven't seen a player come anywhere near any skill cap for any class. If skill cap is perfect execution, the best I've seen and played is around 80%. Just being the best at a class is pretty easy. Similarly being the best in the game isn't that hard. Actually reaching the much talked about 'skill cap' is so hypothetical it's impossible. You might have one game ever at the top of your class on perfect form that you could call skill capped. It's certainly not a state you exist in.

Surprisingly I agree with the part of the assessment that labels them as boring. I've steamrolled through a fair share of these now and they just aren't that fun. I'm not going to sit down and write a speculative post on why it's not enjoyable. It just isn't. Maybe four person RWZ queues are the way to go.

It's pretty glaring. Going off what I've seen there are maybe 200 rated players on pot5 (that's probably even a bit generous) and I'm led to believe that we have one of the better servers in this respect. Assuming 500k subs and 8 NA servers we're talking a low estimate of 50k subbed players per server. These aren't necessarily accurate numbers but a guess based on their last quarter report. That's .4% of the playerbase involved in ranked warzones. It's not all gravy among that .4% either, there are widely varying cliques and skill strata competing to lessen it further. The gametype can be a lot of fun and maybe in another world it would have succeeded. It's a numbers failure, Bioware alluded to as much.

No apology necessary, I got the ranked games I wanted and I'm ready for arenas.

I don't follow. You can't presume failure and then call it fact. Arenas will work if the rating succeeds in matching opponents of similar skill. That requires participation. It does not follow that because 8v8 didn't have sufficient participation to do any of the things it needed to that a significantly more accessible game type will fail for the same reason. Inductive fallacy.

Hold on. Let me put this another way. 8v8 RWZs were such a failure that you had to transfer to another server to even access the game type. How can you even think with a straight face that people want 8v8. It suffers from irrelevancy and a simple lack of interest/participation. Moreover removing a game type that makes people feel as if they are required to server transfer is not even a little bit stupid. The small handful of players that whine whenever something is announced will get over it and find something new to whine about. Life goes on. As for server transfers, that's the beautiful thing about free will. People got what they desperately wanted and now they are deciding they didn't want it because of a change that can't retroactively ruin your experience. It's August. You have 2 months till 2.4, get all the 8v8 in you can stomach before burning out and coming back to try arenas.

Have you met the forums. Tomorrow's discussion: eulogy for hundreds of ranked complaint threads followed by a heated debate on nerfing free will.

Did you wake up on the wrong side of last year? It's still preseason one. Ranked is/was broken. It's arguably the largest failure in the game's lifespan. It's virtually inaccessible to most of the playerbase. We have what, maybe 8 teams on pvp servers queueing a night. So 64 people doing ranked out of ten thousand plus per server. By any measure of success that is the opposite of what you want. Those 64 are crying pretty loudly, but it's a drop in the hat and perfectly reasonable to discontinue the colossal failure that is 8v8.

Hold on so you were arguing before that arenas are bad because the rating will produce a situation in which queues take a long time, a situation that has already occurred in gametype defeating proportions with 8v8. And you are stating here that rating plays no role in anything. Can you just flick your own ears for me. You don't see the problem with a competitive system where the rating is pointless? New plan: everybody goes to the world series this year.

Sounds like they are doing the right thing getting rid of it then, yeah?

This makes no sense if you think about it with even a crumb of reason. There are players in 8v8 ranked that have reached 4k rating. That's about as stratified as you can possibly get. How does it then follow that increasing that pool of players with a more accessible game type would be anything like signing a death-sentence? You are aware that on many servers ranked completely died because of one dominant team? Yeah, I get it, you are raging right now, don't let me stop you. But to argue against arenas based on queue times is utterly absurd. Have you met 8v8 RWZs? There's no reality in which arenas is not an improvement in that respect.

What really? People still don't understand how fire works. I'll explain. Fire does 5k damage base every half second. For the purposes of damage reduction fire counts as kinetic damage. What this means is that an ion tank specced in AP for the stun reduction and popping energy shield while getting stunned will take approx 1400 damage per half second. More or less depending on other buffs. Ballistic shield on that power tech would reduce the damage to less than 500. Guardians can do a similar trick if the spec into vigilance for the extra defensive cd/damage reduction. Shadow tanks are in a rough spot here as no matter what they are going to be taking around 3-4k per second. Hope that clears it up.

Better. Ranked game to boot.

Terethyn- Shadow Alethyi- Scoundrel

The 90.9 win percent with 1000 games played is more impressive. As far as rating goes I assume they just copied the math from chess so the average rating of any team you play would have to be 3200 to gain even one point. 0-3203 should technically give zero rating. Bug report! Impressive regardless.

Where's dat shadow transfer; I think we could do some ganking magic.

If you boil down the complaints in this thread against the validity of a tracking sheet they fall into three categories. A. The team thinks they are better than they are and want to save face. B. The team thinks they are too good to record their wins/losses. C. You question the validity of a win tracking spreadsheet for determining top guilds. Given that there isn't an alternative for tracking and ranking teams beyond hearsay, an objection on informational grounds feels silly. This is more information than no information. It's about as straightforward and objective as it can be. Per A If you have so much ego at stake as to fear your B team mucking up a google spreadsheet I'd say calm down. Per B If you think you are too good to post your record I'd suggest coming down to earth or alternatively proving it. There are only two guilds right now with a greater than 80 win % and I don't think either of them would claim dominance yet. Make of that what you will.