Err, pretty sure I was able to hand credits to another person via the trade screen. You can't mail credits as preferred. In the worst case you can always agree on an item to buy via GTN, like say Silica for 500K. You lose the GTN cut of course.

You can't mail credit as preferred either, and you can only mail item one at a time. You can just trade the credits directly if you've a way of getting both characters on at the same time. That said I assume the reason to get the credit is because there's something expensive you want to buy, so you could always just buy the said item on that account and send it over by mail.

Well you have to have enough Credit Escrow amounts equal to whatever he has in escrow, whether you get that from GTN or cartel shop depends greatly on what your server's GTN looks like. It's 240 CC for 600K transfer so you can buy 6 of them and transfer 3.6M that way. I looked up my server's GTN and there's a 600K escrow for 100K, then 200K, and 300K, so you'd be paying 600K to get 1.8M and net with only 1.2M, and then there are no more escrow 600Ks for sale. If you wait long enough there's bound to be good deals from GTN but not sure if that's worth the effort. In terms of best CC spent compared to credits, ship GTN and rocket boots are the best. In terms of gameplay, it'd probably be Artifact Equipment Authorization (account), though since you can buy that usually around 1M it'd be cheaper to buy the escrow credit transfer to get 1M and then buy it with credits.

Assuming spyware is out (e.g. WoW Warden), the ability to detect cheating generally depends on extensive logging. For example when you respec, the server clearly has to know when it happened. If you kept track of how long it took, you can say 'soandso respeced today in a span of 5 seconds, that seems pretty impossible' and make a note of it, and if it happens multiple times it might warrant investigating. Likewise, I assume a huttball grabbing macro is just spam clicking the middle. Obviously the server has to know that you're trying to click on the middle, so again if your logging is extensive you can say, "Soandso attempted to click on a certain spot for 100 times in the span of 3 seconds, that does not seem humanely possible". Again it takes more than one such example to make a case of someone is cheating, but if you routinely see someone clicking 100 times in 3 seconds it's probably sufficient. Of course I have no idea how extensive logging is in SWTOR. While these are events the server certainly should know about, there's no way to know if the server is making a log of these events or not.

Let's say your friend has 10 million, and we'll just say there's an infinite supply of 600K escrow transfers for 100K on GTN. So your friend starts with 350K and 9.65M in escrow. Someone buys 16 of the 600K escrow transfers, and you end up getting 9.95M out of his account (50K still in escrow) minus the 1.6M you spent for the escrow transfers, so you'd get 8.25M out of his 10M. Alternatively you could buy the escrow transfer with CC and save the credits. Whether this is a good idea depends on the pricing and availability of escrow transfers on your server via GTN. Generally you should expect to lose a pretty significant amount of credit from buying the escrow credit transfers unless your server has very generous pricing on them in the GTN.

Beyond the difficulty of catching macros, this situation is never as clearcut as people want you to believe. Nobody wants to be the first gaming company to lose a lawsuit and end up having to pay a few million dollars to a bunch of exploiters. Right now Bioware could just ban everyone and take your money and ran, and in theory that's perfectly fine because I'm sure somewhere in the EULA it says they can terminate your account for any reason, including no reason. But if they actually pulled something like that they'll probably lose in a court of law very badly. You can make a legitmate case that since Bioware is promoting people to use programmed mouse with in game incentives that other scripts/macros are fair game too, or is the point that only guys who paid money to Bioware to promote their macros gets an okay?

Some form of matchmaking is needed because you can only lose so many people before you hit a threshold where the remaining guys quit due to having too few players. Everything else is secondary to that. Yes people cry about class being overpowered but as can be easily observed in WZ, if something is really overpowered, like healers are right now, it doesn't take very long for people to just reroll to the powerhouse classes.

The pixel sampling stuff is usually more useful for PvE botting, like you check the pixel color on the target lifebar at the 0% mark, if it's not red then the target is dead then you loot, otherwise you continue doing whatever you were doing to damage it. Or you check if the pixel at 30% is red, and if not then they're in execute range. At least at a first glance I can't think of too many interesting thing you can possibly do that'd give you a significant advantage in PvP with pixel sampling.

Sure, and then you found out the other side sucks just as much as your side.

Here's what the weekly pass for warzone says: Grants your character full access to Warzones for 7 days. Subscribers have full access to Warzones. Here's what the weekly pass for operation says: Grants your character full access to Operations for 7 days. Subscribers have full access to Operations. It's funny people are always talking about how companies are taking all our rights with EULA or whatever. It wouldn't be so easy if people aren't trying to get bent over on every opportunity. This is clearly a mistake on Bioware's part as there is absolutely no way you can infer based on the item you're buying that 'full access to Warzone' means 'does not include ranked Warzones". Even if you're running a scam you'd have to put a fine print somewhere to try to weasel your way out of it later. You can't sell something that claims for 'unlimited access' and then say 'actually it's not according to this site that you'd have no reason to ever look at before purchasing'. If you look at an infomercial they at least try to motormouth whatever restrictions that may apply at the very end hoping you wouldn't notice it. The warzone pass needs to be reworded as: "Grants your character full access to regular Warzones for 7 days. You still need to subscribe to play in ranked WZ."

I realize this thread probably has all 5 guys who cared enough about ranked WZ but not enough about the game to sub so that they buy WZ passes instead, which is why it took so long for this question to even be brought up, but just because this is a very small part of the population doesn't give Bioware the right to lie. It's not even about fairness. I don't really care if PvE is favored over PvP, but the item absolutely must tell you what its limitations are.

The intention is irrelevent. If they don't want F2P people do ranked WZ that's within their right but that does not give them the right to have false advertising. I swear people are so eager to sign away their rights. If you bought a cartel pack and it only comes with 2 items instead of 6 advertised I bet a lot of people will just say you need to look harder on the a page somewhere that says people with more than 3 vowels in their name gets only 2 items instead of the standard amount. The fact that a rarely referenced FAQ page say something (I can't even find the page easily from the stie's navigation) is irrelevent. The weekly pass does not say, "Special restriction apply, check website for details". If it did you can make a case for that. As is right now this is just flat out false advertising. It most definitely do not offer unlimited access to WZ as it claims, and nowhere within the item itself does it tell you why this is the case. If you go to the PvP queue screen, it says something along the lines of 'subscribe now or buy a pass to have unlimited access', implying those two are equivalent. Again, this is false advertising as now we know they are not.

The weekly pass does not say: "Allows access to WZ but not RWZ." It says "Allows unlimited access to WZ". The intention of Bioware is completely irrelevent here, because there's no way anyone can possibly get 'only regular WZ' from an item that claims to give 'unlimited access'. That's blatant false advertising and there isn't even a fine print to save them there.

I saw the F2P page and I guess that explains it, but I think it still has to be an oversight. We're not talking the fine print here. There is no way you can look at the WZ pass that they clearly want you to buy and figure out 'preferred/f2p still can't do ranked WZ with a pass.' There is just no information available at all that'd possibly tell you this based on the game itself. If this is intended then it's blatant false advertisement, and that makes no sense since we probably have all 5 people that ever attempted such a thing on this thread so it's not like Bioware stands to make mega money from the thousands of people who bought a pass thinking they can do ranked WZ. The only explanation I can think of is that ranked WZ is just so rarely done that Bioware didn't even think people would be concerned over this issue.

They didn't as of a month ago. I suspect this problem just happens so rarely that it took this long for anyone to bring it up, since you're basically taking the intersection of people who do WZ regularly but do not sub (which is why they have passes) with people who do ranked WZ, and the result has to be a very small number of people.

I really can't see any reason other than 'we forgot' because otherwise the description on the weekly pass is downright false advertisement. I have no problem if they want to restrict access but then the pass should definitely have said: "This only allows you to play unranked WZ". I can't imagine it's a bait and switch tactic, because given the near nonexistence of ranked WZ that'd be an awfully strange thing to bet on.

This problem goes both ways. Just as you have no reason to believe your group knows what they're doing, your group also have no reason to believe you know what you're doing. Generally speaking if what the group suggests doesn't sound outright ridiculous I'll go with the plan. If it's something I'm sure it won't work I'll tell them. This game is easy enough that you should have plenty of margin of error to work with. I don't like the random 'tricks' people do but usually I figure if people want to use their tricks it's because they're not good enough to beat it normally so might as well do it the way they're comfortable with. Usually I opt for the "There will be no survivors" strategy but not every random group you get into can pull it off. Ironically, it takes a lot of skill to pull off the brute force strategy.

I'm not running a charity when I play a MMORPG. If the game is not financially viable, that's the game's problem not mine. At any rate anyone who bought a weekly pass supported the game in some way because some real money had to have changed hand, whether it's from a direct CC purchase or the result of a monthlly stipend which involves a sub.

Don't give them new ideas! I think all this talk about luxury/entitlement is silly. I'm sure if you ask Bioware they'd likely say, "People buy these things for ranked WZ?" or better yet "People do ranked WZ still?" I'm pretty sure even Bioware knows ranked WZ is pretty much a failure and didn't have any grand plan to make even more money from a failure.

The origin of this can be traced back to EQ1, where you have extremely expensive vendor bought chain/plate armor that have no stats on it but halfway decent AC, but in EQ1 having any kind of stats on your items was originally a big deal so the fact that vendor bought stuff had no stats other than AC is at least reasonable and it's not necessarily a bad alternative compared to farming something with stats on it for a hundred hours. Of course ever since WoW it's pretty hard to find an armor that doesn't have other stats on it but WoW kept the same scheme as EQ1, and everyone else stole from WoW so we have this nonsense continuing today.

The weekly pass costs money to buy, at least in theory. I'd assume it's more likely that Bioware just didn't care about ranked WZ so that they forgot to put this in as opposed to any malice, because otherwise that'd be false advertising. The weekly pass even says you have full access to WZs. It didn't say 'full access to regular WZs only'.

From my estimation someone wearing high end PvE gear versus Conqueror, assuming equal augments, the PvE character suffers a handicap that is less than fighting someone with identical stats but the PvE character missing BH/SW/SI buff. Can someone beat you with such handicap? Sure. He doesn't even have to be better than you. A bad class matchup is more than enough. Having him crit his big hit while you don't is enough. Being outplayed will also do it. Now of course people will inevitably ask 'then what good is PvP gear?" Well, just because I can potentially beat you without 3 out of 4 buffs, doesn't mean that's something I do. Or, to put it in reverse, if I could have a way to magically remove 3 out of 4 buffs on you, I'd definitely do it even if I don't think it's necessary. One of the irony is that the more high end PvE gear the other guy have, the worse off he is because Expertise basically works like a healing received modifier. That is, 5000 HP healed on a guy with 2018 expertise is worth considerably more than the same heal on a guy with 1000 expertise, because the damage reduction from expertise is applied to the whole 5000 HP, and heals are generally static.

I found nothing out of ordinary with these numbers especially if you've some assurance that your healers are good. What people don't get is bad (or good) healers deflate/inflate the rest of your team's numbers, because if your healers suck you sure won't be getting much protection or damage as you'd be dead. The reverse is also true. Sometimes you might see a guy do 200K damage and died 15 times and you say that guy sucks, but you really don't know if his DPS low because he's bad or because he died 15 times. And no, not dying is never an option from a DPS point of view unless you're just hiding way in the back. Now of course having no healers makes life very tough, but due to healing being overpowered, everyone and their brother is playing a healer now and it's really not that hard to play a healer especially if you're an Op.

You can talk about how to overcome double sides in theory but it's just not a position that's reasonably recoverable unless you're way stronger than the opposing team. But yeah, if premades are hellbent on destroying pugs there's no way they'd ever make such a silly mistake because that'd be really embarassing to have this pulled on you.

I don't think premades have as much advantage as people claim. From the position it seems like the premade didn't take you seriously and let you get a position (double side) they cannot possibly retake, showing that stupidity trumps everything.