The problem is that the source of the imbalance is not bad players or even lack of communication. It isn't even the absence of healers as you earlier suggested . . . it is gear imbalance, plain and simple. Of course, players who enjoy the success of premades would LIKE to believe its because of their superior skill -- social, tactical, strategic, or mastery of their class and understand of other classes -- and thus they come onto this forum and tell everyone to learn2play. But the reality is premades tend to be collections of players whose gear makes them elite, they then band together for the ultimate steroidal power trip. You see another elite player, you invite him to the group, and eventually you have a group of nothing but elite geared players reaping destruction upon anything in their path. Give everyone the same gear, however, and really the whole phenomena of a group of elite geared players vs poorly geared players goes away, problem solved. Unfortunately, this won't happen because Bioware believes they need to have some system of reward in place so that players feel PvP is worth their time.

Ok thanks! I did read somewhere that the knife made a difference to knife attacks, but I guess I was misinformed. Thanks again.

For concealment, is the quality of your knife actually more important toward your DPS than the quality of your main weapon (your blaster rifle)? I have a barrel I bought for my main weapon, but my knife is also custom quality, not sure which weapon I should put the new mod into. Any help will be greatly appreciated!

So don't complain unless you play a healer? -10 internetz for making no sense whatsoever

I see, the whole PvP problem is solved! Don't play unless you are a healer!

^^^THIS^^^ The problem isn't really even premades, imho. If everyone were equal, premades would only be a minor annoyance, as they are in pre-50 pvp. The problem is that 50 PvP is so completely imbalanced, it just isn't fun for a new player to be humiliated over and over and over and over, no matter how skilled they are, just to compete. It is much more rewarding just to roll a new character and PvP through pre-50 WZs where you really are competitive right out of the box. Premades are superior because the people who put the teams together recruit only the most elite players they can get, not because they possess uncanny organization or because their strategy, easily communicated using teamspeak, is so superior. They decimate their opposition because they are all uber geared up while their competition from the PUG includes people still in recruit gear, maybe 1 or 2 in EWH, and the rest somewhere in between. Yes, their communication would provide them with an advantage against a team without such communication, but not necessarily victory if the other team possessed equal gear all around. Gear is really the problem. You could even things out by having a matchmaking system that places teams against roughly equally geared teams, but then what is the point in even having all this PvP gear at that point?

I was topping the charts on my sin at level 15. The only classes that were rough in the teens were juggs and operatives, both late bloomers. Seriously though, I think any many ways pre-50 pvp is just more solo casual player friendly. More balance, slower pace, less CC, far fewer premades and less need to be organized. 50 pvp demands that you gear up (which is much easier to do if you have guildmates to help you), play as a team, and be serious. If you prefer casual, you will prefer pre-50, if you are very serious about pvp and getting organized you will prefer 50 pvp. If you look at people's complaints about level pre-50 pvp -- except for a few clueless people claiming pre-50 pvp is even more imbalanced than 50 pvp -- most of the complaints are about how players are unorganized, just focused on 1v1 rather than the maps objectives, that there are too many newbs in it, that no one plays as a team, etc. All of these complaints center around the same theme: that pre-50 pvp is "too casual". Conversely, if you look at the complaints about 50 pvp they are just the opposite, they center around the theme of how level 50 pvp is misery for the lone casual player. You need to gear up, you need at minimum to form a premade, preferably you should join an elite pvp guild, you should use voice communication, etc. If you don't do these things, if you just jump in a pug after a long hard day at work because you are bored, you will get destroyed . . . over and over. So 50 pvp is much less casual friendly than pre-50 pvp, and that really is the key difference. People prefer one over the other are people who prefer more solo styled casual play versus heavily team oriented serious play.

An excellent article from wired.com released this morning talks about SWTOR's move to free2play and the future of theme park MMOs: continue reading @ wired.com

It sounds too me that you don't really understand f2p, and that is perfectly OK since many people are in the same boat. The problem for people in your camp is that they are at a loss to explain why f2p is so rapidly replacing the subscription model in the MMO world and is nearing the point where it has entirely swept subscriptions right out of existence. If subscriptions are the best way to make money, why are most companies switching to f2play? The essence of the subscription model is that people pay for entertainment, it is the standard model used since anyone can remember. In this view, ultimately the key to making money is to get people who are willing to pay in order to play. The problem with this model is that in today's online world, there are SO many options that you just don't get enough people who are willing to commit to just one game in order to pay. The essence of the free model is that the key is popularity. In a world of so many options, a popular game = a better game, at least in the public's perception, and the better the game the more people want to play it, and the more people want to play it, the more other people think it might be worth trying. And with no cost whatsoever, what harm can there be in trying it? The more people playing it, the more money comes in just from skimming the top. Not from charging people TO play it, but from charging people for any extra perks they might want (a perk shop) and in some cases from charging companies to allow them to advertise through the game. This is the standard model used by internet companies and products across the board, from Facebook to Angrybirds. Right now SWTOR is using a hybrid model, usually these models are referred to as Pay2Win. If you want to win, you need to pay real money. (Sure, you can play some aspects of the game for free, but anything that involves grouping with other players requires that you pay in order to compete and participate realistically. Showing up to a raid wearing green/blue gear isn't going to work, period. Same for PvP. The hotbar issue is just the first thing players immediately noticed in terms of limitations that will prevent the f2play'er from really being able to participate, but it is hardly the worse or most clearly intended strategy to force someone from f2play into subscription.) The problem with the pay2win model is that new intelligent f2p players, who aren't necessarily in love with the game enough to subscribe, realize that they will never really be able to complete so there is no point in committing more time to the game and they leave. But even though those players were never going to pay in the first place, their presence in the game is vital in order to provide the game with energy and vibrancy. Lose enough of these players, and you are back to a dying SWTOR. SWTOR is still putting all its money on this stupid story thing. Admittedly, it does have great story, but it forgets that it has such tremendous potential in its group PvE and PvP content. PvP in SWTOR is terrific, and could be so much better with some work, for instance. But f2p only really applies to the solo story part of the game, participating in the other aspects of the game, which really are the aspects that keep a lot of people playing this game and need more love, these aspects of the game basically require a subscription which kills the much needed injection of fresh energy. With SWTOR's f2play, I had expected that subscribing would give you certain perks and advantages -- and admittedly, the free respecs is an example of just that -- but instead it appears subscribing more or less provides you with all the necessities you need to play any part of the game beyond the solo story arcs. It isn't giving you extras, it is giving you essentials.

The hotbars thing reveals that SWTOR isn't really free2play yet -- not in the true sense of the movement that is rapidly replacing the old subscriber model in the MMO world -- it is still a subscription based game that is merely using "free2play" as a way getting new players to try out the game, similar to how some games are free2play up until level 20. You can't REALLY play the game in its full glory without subscribing, so it is definitely not free2play in the true sense (like GW2 is). It is evolving from being a pure subscription model toward a pure free2play model, but it is obvious that it isn't there yet, subscriptions still represent the core of their revenue. I don't think you can even subscribe to GW2, even if you wanted to. The essence of true free2play model has to do with the underlying philosophy that shot so many internet giants to the top like Google and Facebook . . . namely, that the value of an internet product lies not in how much it costs per customer, but in how many people are using it. (If Facebook charged everyone a monthly fee it would die a very rapid death.) In the MMO world how many people "are using it" is vital. Just look at how amazing SWTOR felt the last couple days with so much more participation and energy flowing into the game all at once. The ideal for a MMO is to have lots and lots of people and enthusiasm revolving around the game so that more people want to be a part of it. Look at WoW, was it REALLY that much better of a game than all the alternatives out there? No, its success largely lied in the fact that everyone was playing it, so everyone else wanted to play it. No one wants to pay a monthly fee for a barren MMO in which you barely run into another player (e.g., Auto Assault . . . oh, don't remember that game?) Letting players play a skeleton version of the game for free -- which doesn't allow players to realistically compete in PvP or endgame PvE -- is just a fancy marketing ploy to get people to try out the game so eventually they subscribe. That isn't free2play, that is just a subscription based game using some aggressive advertisement strategies. Nevertheless, with this patch they have laid the foundation for a true free2play game which eventually they may very well transition into. (And they will have to advertise it as "TRUE free to play" in order to get back everyone who they pissed off from the first free2play scam.)

I think it is pretty obvious they don't quite get the philosophical essence of free2play which is if you give freely and generously, players will in return pay freely and generously. GW2 is a model of this. If, instead, you are stingy and make players feel like they need to buy stuff in order to compete, every purchase they make feels dirty and insulting on some level, and angers them just so slighting that after enough purchases they've had enough. I'm saying this as a subscriber.

The people arguing with the math -- or insisting that skill somehow mysteriously makes the math irrelevant (despite the fact that the statistics automatically take skill into account) -- are the same people who don't believe in climate change . . . stragglers not willing to catch up to the modern era. Nevertheless, the issue is, as usual, PvP. If you removed PvP from the equation these statistics would be damning and there would need to be balancing. Obviously in PvE raw dps matters tremendously. But in PvP other things need to be factored into consideration, such as: 1) Burst vs sustained DPS. In PvE against bosses this distinction is meaningless, but in PvP the ability to unload the majority of your damage in a brief interval can be devastating to your opponents. This is precisely why operatives and scoundrels have such terrible DPS according to the stats right now. They used to have comparable DPS, but it was all front loaded in a quick burst, resulting in players getting killed almost instantly (i.e, before or shortly after stun lock expired). The devs needed to tone them down, but they couldn't change the fact that these classes are designed for burst (at least through certain specs), so all they could do was lower dps which obviously hurt pve performance. 2) Range vs melee. There is an inherent advantage to being able to use range in PvP, whereas in PvE this advantage seems rather trivial. If you have sorcerors hitting as hard as mauraders you will have calls for nerf, not in PvE, but in PvP it is almost guaranteed. The reason people are OK with Maurader dps is precisely because there are ways of escaping it, of getting them off of you. It is much harder to escape Sorc dps. 3) Healing. In PvE the fact that a sorc has heals and bubbles doesn't matter much if they are dps spec because they aren't there to heal. But in PvP these abilities can be lifesavers and help diversify the players ability to manage each unique encounter. You can't just give healing capable classes the same dps as classes without healing, they tried that. The result was the 3 most complained about classes in the early days of the game were Mercs, Operatives, and Sorcs . . . the three healing classes. All three were nerfed. This was never due to their PvE performance, only to PvP. 4) CC. Look at the maurader, he has very little in the way of CC. He has to struggle to get in and stay in melee range. In PvE this isn't an issue really, mobs just stand there and take it. But in PvP no one is going to just stand there, you need to work to stay within melee range. A lot of the time you simply will not be doing dps because you can't. Against a sorc you will be knocked back, stunned, rooted, snared, mezzed, you name it. So naturally the damage you do do needs to be higher once you get into melee range. If you just gave mauraders the same dps (or even a measly amount higher) than other classes, this might be fine in PvE but in PvP it would just mean the class was more effort than it was worth. When the game first came out there was less DPS disparity, and the classes were closer to within this 5% ideal that keeps getting mentioned. But once PvP started class balance issues almost immediately appeared for the reasons I have given. Most of the classes performing poorly in DPS today are the direct result of the balancing measures that were taken in response to the early days of PvP. Nevertheless, I think most people would agree that -- in terms of class balance -- PvP is better today than it was a year ago.

The pay to play model created the illusion that every MMO made since WoW was something of a relative failure; and this illusion, in turn, created an atmosphere of cynicism and negativity about MMOs in general among the playbase. But the real failure was the pay2play model itself. Once that model is removed -- which I think will be complete in a few years (i.e., all MMOs will be f2p) -- it will seem that the MMO world is filled with one success after another. MMOs haven't been failing because they suck, they have been "failing" because a subscription model for gaming is an oxymoron.

If you knew me you'd know I'm definitely no fanboi of SWTOR. All of those games will be f2play in a couple years. You can quote me on that.

This was inevitable a long time ago, not because SWTOR failed, but because Free2Play represents the future of the industry. Instead of being a bunch of old farts, more conservative gamers need to wake up and realize that gaming just became a little bit more of what it already is: too good to be true.

Excellent post. Before WoW, all the games I played felt sandboxish to me. Although SWG took that philosophy to a new extreme, it didn't feel as if they were trying something radically new at the time, but rather flushing out something essentially that was always there in all MMOs. Even DAoC felt sandbox to me in comparison to today's games. Yes, there was a lot of WoW in DAoC even before WoW existed, but in those days you could just run out and explore and have adventures, you didn't need a NPC to tell you what adventures you were going to have and where to go to have them. A couple of years after WoW the new games all felt somewhat fake. The virtual reality feeling in MMOs where the player was supreme rapidly began to fade and become replaced with hand-holding quest givers and a world where the NPC was supreme. Quests are inherently at odds with the very idea of a massive online world shared with thousands of players because they try to give you this nonsense about being the savoir of the universe or what not while they are telling all your fellow players exactly the same thing! It feels completely phony, and the result has been that PvE has become associated with a kind of lame hand-holding single player game which is only there to make players feel comfortable until they reach the "real" game. A big part of that "real" game in the theme park era has been PvP. Player versus player has become one of the only remaining reminders of how MMOs used to be. In pvp, the content is player driven, you don't have any NPC telling you what to do or how to play. The world becomes real because all the phony "you are hero of the universe" nonsense is stripped away. It feels exciting because it requires intelligence and a degree of skill. After PvP, PvE seems even more of a mind-numbing experience. But that is not because PvE is inherently this way, it is because the WoW era has made PvE this way. There was a time, I think, when PvE was every bit as fun as PvP. The days when players drove PvE, not NPCs. I have this feeling that the MMO world is on the verge of giving up on the WoW routine and is about to re-examine some of the insights of the pre-WoW era. Perhaps, like with anything, it is a case of two steps forward, one step back. WoW represented that one step back, causing us old timers to lament the loss of the earlier era. But with the next two steps forward we will be playing games better than anything ever made. I feel like we are on the verge of that change.

You're right. This is a direct quote from the head honcho at Bioware in May of 2011: "The reaction that we've had, and a lot of people playing it have had -- we've done a lot of consumer testing and there's a lot more to go -- but the common reaction we get from our fans when we play it, or the testers, ourselves, and our teams, is that frankly once you've tried it, you just can't go back. You don't want to try other MMOs anymore. I think that's what imbuing the game with a sense of heroic purpose and identity achieves." -- Ray Muzyka They really thought the game was going to be a huge success, and making players feel special through the super-voiced acted solo quest lines was the key. The lack of a group finder was inconsequential . . .

"the free-to-play model works. I wouldn't say the information is perfect, but it pretty much apporaching perfection in that if something is great, people will hear about it. If it's free-to-play they may they get hooked on it and then you have the opportunity to monestise it." -- Greg Zeschuk (co-founder of Bioware and vice president at EA) If you think this game isn't going f2p you need to take a cold shower and wake up.

I've been playing MMOs since there were MMOs and I'm with the OP. In what damn dictionary of mmorpgs is it written that players must spend at least 25% of their time pointlessly running around? It is great if someone WANTS to run around, but this forced running to complete a quest which is also forced all feels extremely . . . forced. You people need to think outside the box. The world is changing, MMOs need to change as well.

It really isn't exploration if you are constantly being told where to go. I'm TOLD to go to point A, then I have to travel across half the map, avoiding as many obstacles and creatures as I can, occasionally having to fight mobs who knock me off my speeder and are just annoying. That's not exploration, that is just being a newspaper boy. Of course, you can wonder out and explore . . . but then it all kind of feels pointless (unless you are harvesting resources) until you run into some quest givers -- assuming you haven't wondered outside of your level range -- who then just . . . tell you where to go.

I can't believe anyone would seriously think this game ISN'T going Free2Play. You people need to seriously wake up and smell the coffee, because threatening to cancel your subscription doesn't mean **** if they are thinking of cancelling it for you.

This ^^ Free to play is the future of online gaming, whether conservative gamers like it or not. The reason for this is because the commodity in the world of gaming is no longer money, it's time and interest. TIME is god now, we just don't have time to play everything we want to play. Even if you could quit your job, strap a toilet to your *** and feed yourself intravenously, you wouldn't have enough time to even enjoy a fraction of the options that are available to us. Even if we had all the money to be able to afford every subscription fee and every game out, we wouldn't have time to play them all. This means games have to compete for our time, and the more time we give a certain game, the more precious commodity that game is gaining. Games, using the serial payment system, have been utterly wasting this precious commodity. Using the pay to play model it doesn't matter if someone plays 20 hours a day, or 15 minutes. The hardcore gamer, who should be more valuable as a customer, is utterly being wasted under the pay to play model. A revenue model needs to be developed that takes advantage of the amount of time customers are giving a game, and f2play is a step in that direction. The key to an online game is the feeling that this game is the place to be, that it has excitement, energy, constant INTEREST . . . in short, lots of people paying attention to it and devoting a part of their lives to it. Then it grows, and the more it grows the more other people become interested and thus the more it grows and on and on. This is why success for an online game is exponential, why a game like WoW enjoys such a disproportionate share of the market. Everyone thinks WoW is the place to be, and because everyone thinks that they are right! Wow uses a subscription model because that is the way things have always run, but the world is changing. The fact is games need to follow the model of facebook and google, companies that understand energy and attention lead to money, regardless of whether they can figure out a revenue model at the moment. People said Amazon was going to fail because their costs outweighed their revenue. But what they took a larger view than short term gain, and now they are virtually redefining the economics of retail. In 20 years games are going to be so ubiquitous in our lives, from education to entertainment, the idea of paying to play is going to seem bizarre. The pay to play model is just dated. Why should I pay for an average game when an amazing game is being offered for free? That's the place to be!

Hehe. Three years from now when all the MMOs are f2play you'll say . . . "well, he made a lucky guess." You guys who think free2play is a cancer are just old farts.

His point was that it is precisely this kind of impatient, egoistic, instant-gratification attitude that you demonstrated by not even reading his post and then feeling it was your duty to insult him and his opinions (even though you didn't read them) that is endemic throughout the Ritalin generation of gamers that helps explain why the community is so desperately weak and why this sad state of affairs will inevitably lead to the demise of gaming in general . . . or something like that. Nevertheless, I don't really agree with the OP. Forums have always been this way. I'm just thinking back on how ugly posters would get, myself included, over Shadowbane. Sheesh. The fact is forums are the politics of gaming, and how the community communicates with the developers. As much as I enjoy SWTOR, I hoped it would do poorly because I disagree with its philosophy of soloing-online. If it had succeeded I would have been doomed to playing these types of solo-together games for years. But because it didn't do so well there is hope that online games will return to community. I personally think the community is in part a reflection of the game. SWTOR emphasizes soloing -- it really is the ultimate solo mmo -- everyone being the ultimate ego, and discourages team play. Is it really a surprise then that we are all disrespecting one another in these forums?

Games, like everything else, are evolving. The reason the community is so "vile" and torn is precisely because different factions want the world of gaming to move in different directions. Everyone has an opinion because everyone has a deep relationship to gaming. But all the argument are an illusion, because where it is moving is pretty much inevitable. One of those inevitabilities, I think, is free2play. Pay2play is too 20th century in its outlook. And therein lies the problem with SWTOR, it is a new game following old models, most likely because a huge budget creates conservative thinking.