I'm suggesting that you would like PvE better, because you seem to have the PvE mindset of "I only play for gear". I'm still wearing Champion gear. I have no incentive to hit Battlemaster. The gear isn't that much better, I already match or outperform people in Battlemaster, and I enjoy the warzones just for the sake of PvP, win or lose. So not everybody is playing just to get gear. That's not fun for me. I only got the gear that I needed to compete at a reasonable level, and now I can enjoy the actual PvP. I rarely - if ever - do PvE. I get on for hours and PvP on my main and on my alts. It's all I do. I don't need gear for it. It's just fun. This is what I'm talking about. WoW has ruined PvP by suggesting that gear is a necessary reward. It used to be that the satisfaction of coordinating with and fighting against other players was the reward. I guess that's not good enough anymore.

This made me sad because of how true it is.

On my server, which is PvP, the only place I routinely had any good battles was near the Pilgrim Retreat on Voss. Unfortunately if you're on PvE, many people may simply not participate. They usually began for us with a gank or two and escalated. I find myself wishing I could just level on Voss non-stop. Why couldn't the rest of the planets be like that?

If they've read the forums at all in the past few days, they'll know they need to add a physical AFK check either on its own, or in conjunction with the vote. They should not and will likely not allow entitled elitists such as the OP and his arrogant friends to harass other players and abuse a system intended to remove AFK'ers. If they do a simple vote kick with no additional checks, basically it will go from AFK'ers abusing a system and ruining the game for others, to elite *****s abusing the kick system and ruining the game for others. They will then be dealt with in a future patch once Bioware realizes its mistake. Assuming the system goes in favoring the elitists, I will make sure myself and my guildmates report for harassment anybody who abuses this to kick "weak link" players.

This is what I don't understand. If you're sick of it, what's the point of even gearing up anymore? I imagine once your Battlemaster set is complete, you'll enjoy it for a very brief time and then just stop all together. It's probably better to just cut your losses now and find another source of entertainment. And I'm not trying to be rude, FYI. This is just my perspective.

Your problem is that you're PvP'ing for the sole purpose of getting Battlemaster gear and then (presumably) using that to roll over people. If the situation is not preferable (I.E. you aren't getting your gear, or you aren't rolling over people), you quit. This leads me to believe that you don't actually like PvP, but rather you like the gear chasing, carrot-on-a-stick mentality so prevalent in recent MMO's. It's likely that you would enjoy PvE more so than PvP, as you do not appear to have the proper mindset for it. Once you have Battlemaster gear, what will you do? No longer PvP? What if you do PvP and you're losing then? You have nothing more to work towards, will you still leave? Or will you not PvP at all? If not, why bother getting the gear in the first place? I imagine you're not going to work towards other ranks and titles since you mentioned that pride isn't an issue for you, it's all about the gear.

Not bad... a simple fix that could be implemented in the already existing zone. I doubt we'll see anything like it though.

You're missing the point. Bioware is putting this system is in the game to give us a way to remove players who are abusing the system. They're calling it an "AFK vote kick". This is what it's supposed to be. They didn't call it an "Underachiever vote kick". This is not what it's supposed to be. This example is extreme. I've never seen a level 50 in level 30 gear, but even if someone did manage to make it that far, using a system designed to remove AFK'ers to prevent them from playing is just as bad as AFK'ing in the first place. You now just have a different breed of players abusing a different system and ruining the fun of other people.

No, it's not the same. There's no "your book" and "their book" here. If they have crap gear and are playing the game, fighting opponents, stopping caps, and dying non-stop, they're still playing the way it's intended to be played. They're breaking no rules and should not be removed by other players. Period. This is not the intent of an AFK removal system. Its purpose is to help remove players who are abusing the system by not participating. Inevitably, as with everything else, players will abuse this system for their own personal gain or satisfaction. Not intended, sorry.

Quote of the day.

This is exactly the problem. Regardless of how you feel about having an undergeared player in your warzone, the purpose is not to kick underperformers, it's to kick people who are not participating at all, who are passively sitting in the warzone doing literally zero - intentionally - in order to gain rank without doing work. Just because someone has crap gear and isn't going to do a whole lot in combat doesn't mean they should be put on the same level as an AFK'er. They're doing nothing wrong by having lousy gear. They pay their monthly fee and deserve to stay.

We had a thread about this earlier. It depends on how many votes it takes to kick somebody, but frankly a vote kick system is the worst possible implementation for the purposes of removing AFK players. It will be abused. I can guarantee it. Look at the elitist attitudes of some of the people on these forums and tell me they wouldn't immediately vote someone out if their health was too low, or if they simply wanted to fish for more of their guildmates to join the warzone. If it takes 4 votes, premades will vote out anybody they don't like. If it takes 5 or 6 votes, they will easily be able to get two more by pestering people or simply based on the fact that people are lazy and will inevitably just click "yes" without checking. If it takes 7 votes, it will be rare for enough people to actually participate to vote someone out. Verification is of course another problem. How do you know if you're in the middle of something somewhere else on the map if a guy is really AFK or if people are just voting him out because they're elite *****s? You don't. It's a terrible idea and should never have been considered. An actual in-game check for movement + interaction would have been a far better idea. The only way a vote kick system will work is if the player being voted out has to pass an additional check to verify his AFK status, and in that case, why use the votes at all? It's a bad, bad system.

No, you actually don't get credit at all for killing players anywhere outside of Ilum. The guy above me is right, it is still fun, but apparently it's less fun for 99% of the player base than farming for new gear - which isn't really what PvP should be about - so they're all on Ilum or in warzones. It's rare to have a good fight outside of those instances.

Prior to level 50, your valor level is capped at your current level. A level 20, for instance, can't be higher than valor rank 20.

Because the game doesn't really encourage open PvP. It encourages the unbalanced zerg-fest pseudo-warzone that is Ilum. Don't ask me where that logic came from. They created PvP servers but chose to incentivize players to avoid open PvP and funnel into their designated areas.

This seems to have been fixed in the most recent patch. All of my wins have counted since then. Yes, this is still a problem. It also promotes medal farming over actually attempting to win the warzone. It's probably not priority one on the list of changes, though. I really don't even want to get started on the **** show that is Ilum. Suffice to stay it's still a miraculous disaster. It should be priority number one. Seems like this one would have been an easy fix to throw into one of the smaller patches, but it's more of a slight annoyance than a gamebreaking problem. This is supposedly being addressed in the next patch, so hopefully that problem will calm down or seize all together.

I think his post was pretty clear, and I've had this happen as well on several occasions, even when the target has no resolve (if that even affects it). If you're going to respond to a post that was fairly easy to understand with "what?", why respond at all? I've experienced this enough to know that there may be a problem with the ability in certain circumstances. It's not really gamebreaking (at least not for me) because it doesn't happen terribly often, but it does happen.

Well, I'd say 16v16 would make more sense since then it has the possibility of filling up with 4 individual full groups, and it would also match the operation size for raids (8/16). They would need to design a warzone properly though; one that encourages good play and not just zerging with your full 16 man team. It would also need to be larger and have more to do. Don't want 16 people on a team and 10 of them sitting at points "defending" and doing nothing.

Come roll Republic then. We have a nice balance of all three.

My server was fighting on the bridge too before I stopped going a few weeks back. I imagine they're still doing that. Do you actually have good fights there on your server? On mine, it's basically just two groups standing at opposite ends of the bridge and periodically pulling one person in to kill them. The Imps never cross the bridge or attack. It's just ranged classes spamming useless AOE's in front of the opposing group and hoping to do a bit of damage. If a melee wants to fight he's out of luck; I've found it near impossible to convince anyone to ever go in to attack with me, so it just becomes instant death. Not to mention the fact that if I do leap into 70 people, my FPS drops to somewhere around 0.5 and I'm dead before I can even cast a single Force Sweep (and no, my computer doesn't suck, it's quite good). Sometimes a suicidal Sage/Shadow would run in and knockback the Imp zerg, so a bunch of them would fall off of the bridge and we could have a few people down there waiting to pick them off, but generally this didn't work in our favor because they would already have more people than us waiting under the bridge to overpower what small numbers we could send. If we sent too many under the bridge their zerg would just migrate down the ramp and wipe us. Of course, it doesn't help that actually attempting to fight in this situation usually resulted in 20 or so cries of "My FPS tanked" or "My game crashed", and people dying without even being able to get a skill off. When the framerate is this bad, there's very little to no strategy involved, the win just goes to whichever team happens to have more players. I just don't see any reason to go back there. At this point it's not even the faction imbalance that bothers me the most. If there were more useful things to do and dynamic objectives on Ilum that could break up the zergs, it wouldn't be as bad; and smaller, organized groups can sometimes do a lot of damage. One of the biggest problems is players penchant for taking the easiest/laziest route, namely standing in a zerg in one place. This is Bioware's fault as much as the players, because they gave us nothing entertaining to do on this planet and no more efficient way of completing the objectives. The first fixes Ilum needs are updates to its objective system, such that it is encouraged to break up into smaller groups and move around the map rather than standing idly in one place spamming AOE and pull. Unfortunately, players need to actually be able to play their characters and not be locked up in a lagfest when these big fights do happen. The optimization here is just so, so bad that even when a big fight starts to happen, there is zero fun involved. It's just 100 players on screen, slideshowing about until the battle somehow resolves. Sorry, I'll stop ************ now. I've complained enough about Ilum. It's just so tiring at this point, and they've done absolutely nothing about the performance optimization, nor have they done anything about the actual objective of the zone. I really wanted Ilum to be fun. I tried and tried, but it's just a useless joke right now.

Yes, when they implement a bad feature that we know will be abused, people are going to complain. Imagine if I complained that my Microwave wasn't giving me a warning when the timer went off, and the company "fixed" it by having it send me an e-mail. Just because they implemented a solution doesn't mean that it doesn't still suck.

You're not the problem then. The problem is the countless elitists who will vote somebody out for lack of equipment or skill, or simply because they don't like the person. Unless there is an actual check after the vote is completed to make sure the person is indeed AFK, I assure you this will be abused.

Dear OP, You've done nothing wrong. That is a good way to start a fun open PvP encounter. If your opponents (or anyone in this thread) would like to argue otherwise, they need to go to a PvE server. On a PvP server, denying your enemies access to a boss via PvP is one of the most satisfying things to do in an open PvP environment. That's why people roll on them, to do things like that. If you rolled on a PvP server and complain about a group repeatedly attacking you while you're trying to kill a boss, then you've made a huge mistake.

People will absolutely abuse it. There are probably much better ways to deal with AFK'ers. Some kind of check to see if there has been movement/skill use/interaction with other players with an auto-kick if the check is failed would have been preferable. I have no doubt that people will abuse the hell out of this just as they do with everything else.

There could be some issues with the medals. For instance, I know that there are a few annoyances with certain medals not triggering. I'm not sure if it's a bug or working as intended. It could be an issue of player health. If the target has less than 2500 HP remaining when you hit them, even if it displays 2500+, you will not get the medal because you didn't deal that amount of damage to them on the back-end. I've also noticed that several medals will not trigger simultaneously with other medals. If I get a killing blow and a solo kill at the same time and did not have the killing blow medal, it will only give me the killing blow medal and I won't get the solo kill. I've noticed that this sometimes happens when trying to earn the 2.5k medal on a killshot as well, but that could also be related to the first problem I mentioned. It sounds to me though like you are hitting for 2500+ regularly and not seeing the medal at all. That sounds like a particular issue with your character. I usually find the 2.5k and 5k medals to be the most reliable (that is, they trigger when they should) compared to some of the other ones.