http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/252/screenshot2012010614575.jpg/ Operatives are completely balanced. By the way, my team consisted of 6 50's and a premade group from my guild that wins 90% or more of our matches and has a reputation as the top PVPers on the server. We regularly win Huttball 6-0 in less than 3 minutes and make other premades quit matches. Unfortunately, we don't have any Operatives so we were only able to score the first 2 goals with teamwork before everyone got instagibbed by the Operatives. What a joke.

The system is pretty lame. I have been pretty lucky myself but I know some people who have just been screwed by RNG. I just inspected a valor rank 59 Mercenary friend of mine and he only had 5 pieces of Champion gear. I got 5 pieces of Champion gear the day I hit level 50. I am currently valor rank 42 and have 8 pieces of Champion gear. I have been a raider before so I am used to this disappointment but I really wish MMO designers would just move past this system into an effort=reward system. They never will though because this is how the Skinner Box works. RNG makes the lab rat keep pressing that lever over and over again and RNG makes us keep running Warzones or raids over and over again. If they took out the RNG people would get bored once they got the gear they wanted and quit the game which would ipact the bottom line.

On my server, there are a few people who hit level 50 before the game even launched. They are now pretty much fully decked out in PVP gear from farming Warzones since then. They are essentially unkillable now. Against an Assassin tank (who is now up to 18k HP in PVP gear) Tracer Missiles are critting for 1200 and hitting for substantially less than that. There is a decked out Operative (about 17k HP in PVP gear) who crits for over 5k regularly. People die from 100% HP before they get out of the initial stun. Even if you catch him out of stealth, he can just kill most people toe to toe because he chains 2-3k crits while you only hit for 800-1200. A decked out Sorcerer can place bubbles on characters that never get broken. At first I thought maybe some classes were imbalanced until I realized that the common factor in all of these players was that they have been 50 for over a week. I thought maybe it was just because they were level 50 and most people weren't, but my guild has 30+ level 50's and none of them hit like that in Warzones. They are more PVE focused so they don't have the same level of Expertise as these other players. I really think that it would be best for the game if Expertise saw a significant reduction in it's effectiveness. If not, it will provide a significant barrier to entry to PVP for players and will significantly reduce the popularity of PVP as a whole. Personally, I have no intention of quitting, but it will be really hard to recruit new people to PVP if this continues and I want to see a highly active PVP community. I have already noticed that I am seeing the same people in Warzones over and over again and very little fresh blood. This may be a problem that takes care of itself as the game evolves but I doubt it. I think that as people start getting into more Champion gear and even Battlemaster gear the problem will only intensify. A bracketing system will help matters for lowbies but it won't help the undergeared fresh 50s who get annihilated just the same as if they were level 10. Feel free to tell me why I am wrong though! TLDR: Expertise geared players destroy people in PVP regardless of skill.

I usually MVP the player I see trying to make an impact on a match. That can either be by healing, defending at a node on Alderaan, scoring in Huttball, or any number of other ways. I think it is important to be observant and vote for the person who is doing their role well while also helping their team accomplish the objective. Besides, I hate voting for Inquisitors and they seem to always be the top healers.

It probably won't take you more than a few days to adjust. When I switched from keyboard turning and clicking to mouse turning and binding it felt horrible for the first few hours. But after sleeping on it overnight I was amazed at how quickly it became natural. If you do it from 1-50 while leveling it will be second nature when you hit max level. Better to do it now in content that isn't competitive than when you are trying to kill raid bosses or win PVP matches.

Huttball was probably my favorite thing from Beta. Good thing too since I will probably be seeing a lot of it since I am rolling Empire.

I will give them a C. I'm not going to give them high marks for server stability just because it is easy to have stable servers when there is hardly anybody on them. This grade could increase if they bring the hammer down on the exploiters and try to show a little more transparency and consideration for their player base. They seem to be taking a page from Blizzard and treating everything like a state secret. Their grade will drop to an F- if there are 50s roaming around when I finally get into EGA. There is no way you should be able to level to 50 in less than a week in a supposedly story driven MMO.

I think stealth is really the only strong counter against cover classes. Generally, if a Sniper or Gunslinger gets the jump on you from cover, you better hope you can run away and LOS them because you aren't going to beat them 1v1. By the same token, if a melee gets the jump on an out-of-cover Sniper or GS then they are in some real trouble.

I think the rated Warzones they are planning to implement are a good idea. I also think an 8v8 Deathmatch style rated Warzone would be good. I don't see a WoW-style 2v2 or 3v3 working very well. In all honesty it doesn't really work all that well in WoW, judging by the general attitude of the majority of the player base to it (including the hardcore Arena players, 90% of the posts on AJ are people complaining about how crappy WoW Arena is). I don't have any data or anything to prove it, but I have a feeling that the PVP in this game is going to be very unbalanced in small-scale situations which would make Arena just brutal and lead to way more headaches for BW than it is worth.