Sorry I thought you're familiar with Sirlin since you quoted from him. Yeah those comments are related to Sirlin. He seems to be like a mini celebrity in gaming and while I don't disagree with what he says in principle, if you know the kinds of stuff he says in general it's just ultra hypocritical because he's likely the first guy to cry about an unfair advantage if he's beaten.

It's easy to talk about some grand truth of the universe if it's not your skin that's on the line. I'm pretty sure he has said raids are totally unfair to soloer because he's a soloer. The concept is sound, sure, but the guy saying this is a total hypocrite. If he plays SWTOR, he's probably going to be someone complaining about premades are overpowered, given he totally fits the profile of a solo queuer. At anyway, premades do offer a considerable advantage because class balance is not something you can easily fix and premades tend to capitalize this, or at least the ones worth remembering certainly know what classes are the strongest. This is a symptom of poor game balance, though lately it's been better just because the balance has been so bad that everyone's rerolled as healers so PUG vs Premade is actually pretty fair from a class composition point of view. If premades have better gear/skill/whatever, then they deserve to win, and with class composition mostly eliminated, that's not even a certainty anymore.

A team with superior killing power can make up for a double cap very fast. This is why if you suspect the other team can easily outkill you, never attempt to double cap them on first round, because it's not enough to win and they're almost certainly not going to fall for the same trick twice. The score 168-0 implies you only have 3 kills in the whole round (6 per kill for having 2 pylons, plus 150 for having 2 pylons), so even though it looks like you've the upper hand, the fact that you're only able to manage 3 kills suggests the other team is way stronger than yours.

Um, this is a guy who would try to cheat and complain when he gets tossed for cheating because it wasn't spelled out precisely. That is in fact his argument why the Chinese badminton team shoudl not have been thrown out for throwing a game, despite the rule clearly gives the referee the power to throw out a team that's deliberately trying to throw a game. Now premades isn't the same thing as what he's talking about because having premades isn't against the rule, but that's a very poor person to quote from. That guy would totally support using hacks and macros to gain an edge in PvP too.

Group composition is very advantageous, but currently the balance is extremely in favor of healers that it is no longer possible to hide this, resulting a relatively even playing field. Even a very casual observer can notice that healing dominates the WZs right now. There are still better group compositions, but you're unlikely to get into a situation where your side has no healers versus 2 on the other side. That was common prior to 2.0 when you faced a premade, but that was because healers weren't as strong back then (though it still sucked when you're on the side with 0 of them).

Only Bioware would know exactly what the numbers are, but I have a hard time believing the average player is anywhere close to enough to be able to beat say HM EV while it was current. Besides, looking at the loot drop ratios it'd take you about 8 clears to outfit a static roster with all the loot from the said operation. So if people are capable of beating the said raids, what do they do after 8 weeks? It's completely unrealistic to expect a new tier of raiding every 2 months, so if you could beat this stuff, what is the motivation to stay? And if you can't beat this stuff, what's the motivation to conitnue playing? We're long past the era where raiding is special enough that people will play a game just for a chance at doing it.

The 1% in a MMORPG is just as hated as they're in real life. A few people might have some success at the personal level but as a whole the 1% is generally viewed as the cause of all the game's problems. Unlike the real 1% in real life, you do not control 50% of the nation's wealth (or in this case, 50% of Bioware's revenue), so there's no real reason to value the 1% over any other 1%. That said I think high end raiding is just something you get for free due to their inherent impossibility to test (I hope nobody thought these encounters are actually internally tested and beaten by 8/16 devs, that'd be utterly insane) so there's no reason to not support it. As long as you're willing to listen to players, which you have to because no dev can possibly beat any high end encounter they designed themselves, it should be a win-win situation.

I doubt people are saying 'can't wait we get to level 55 so we can try EV on Hard'. I mean it might be pretty cool to go back there to see stuff you never did/could, but it's hardly a strong motivation. High end raids have some decent synergy, which is why I'm not going to say they don't matter, but in this era of instant gratification I have a hard time believing anyone honestly thinks the ability to do content 2 or 3 tiers below the current top of the line is going to be a signficant factor. I mean let's say at some point rating 190 gear is easily obtained so you can PUG TFB Nightmare, do you really think these guys will say, "Wow that's an awesome encounter! Thanks for reassuring my faith in humanity Bioware!"?

If hardcore raiding ever mattered to the long term survival of a MMORPG, EQ1 would stil be the top MMORPG. It's hard to beat hardcore in a game where devs basically want people to suffer for doing their raids. WoW vanilla had stats showing a tiny number (less than 1%) of people ever setting foot inside the original Naxxmas to the point the devs openly question whether designing that zone was a waste of time, and WoW obviously did okay despite its top end raid zone is basically unused. Now hardcore raiding isn't a bad idea because it's supposed to be something you get for free. You start with your story mode encounters and then you look at the additional difficulty for hard/nightmare, and for the most part it doesn't take a genius to come up with the additional mechanisms to make it harder. In fact, anyone can do it as an armchair developer, given it is clearly not necessary for the designer of the said encounter to be able to beat it. Let's say I'm paid to design ultra nightmare Soa for level 55. I can update the HP/damage values for what you ought to expect for level 55, and then I can say instead of 2 lightning balls you get 4 of them and they left a lightning trail on the ground. Instead of 1 mind trap we have 2 mindtraps. Instead of platforms collapsing in a fixed way I can make them collapse in a random fashion. Now you might notice one of those mechanism sounds ridiculous for 8 man and one of those mecanism sounds ridiculous period. That's why PTS is there. Assuming I am also open to player feedback I should eventually realize mindtrapping 2 guys on 8 man is dumb, and that making people randomly fall to their doom is dumb too. If not, that's my fault for not listening to players. I notice a lot of devs seem to take their pet ultra-hard encounter too seriously and afraid to dumb it down. Seriously, no matter how much you thought you dumbed something down, you can be assured that 99% of the population will still be too dumb to defeat it.

I'm just saying one should not expect much attention paid to high end raiding because it's a very small part of the population. If they can make it better, they should, but there's a lot of other things they could also be working on too and they obviously don't have enough people to work on everything.

People who are affected by this encounter accounts for at most 1% of the subscribers (and that's probably being extremely generous), and there's no particular reason to believe a Nightmare mode raider is more likely to spend more money on the cash shop. There's a clear trend of ultra casual raiding in MMORPGs which means hardcore raiding is pretty much not important. That doesn't mean your concerns aren't valid. It's just I have a hard time seeing Bioware would have the resources to even bother with such a small % of the playerbase.

The word 'impossible' in MMORPG usually means an encounter is expected to be beatable without: 1. Rerolling class compositiion. 2. Requiring buffs that are clearly not intended (unless you think one random encounter out of 5 is tuned with NP buff in mind). 3. Needing RNG to go exactly a certain way. As soon as you're willing to tell people they shouldn't come to this encounter this greatly changes what is still 'impossible'. If you're willing to do hundreds of attempts without any assurance of repeatability you can also overcome #3 because one of these times the RNG must go your way just due to sheer probability. By RNG, I mean you shouldn't have to worry that you'd lose because a mechanism was targetted on a person due to his role/class, e.g. it's okay if mechanism X targets a DPS twice but if it targets a healer twice then you auto lose.

It's a broken encounter that affects a tiny % of raiding players which is a very small % of the total players, so of course it doesn't get much interest. I remember WoW developers said their stats say like 0.1% of the population has ever stepped in the original Naxxmas (way back in Vanilia), and that it makes them wonder why do they even spend all this time working on this zone. In fact, it's a good question to ask why do MMORPG continues to waste resources on the 0.1% when they apparently can't get anything else right either. .

There's currently a bug where even if the team that goes second already owns the tiebreaker, the game will still continue until they either get the next objective or the round ends. It sounds like the team going second beat your team to the bridge, and the bug prevented the game from ending immediately despite the fact that the team going second already won the game.

The game company does not have as much power as they claim to have. In SWTOR's case it's particularly hard for them to defend a position of '3rd party tools are bad, except the ones we have a deal with'. The only thing that helps SWTOR's case is that if they ever get in a lawsuit, every major online gaming company will probably pitch in because it'd be a very bad precedent for any online gaming company if there's a precedent of a company losing on this issue. It's rarely as clear cut as the game company wants you to think it is, which is why they try to discourage people from suing them. They probably won't lose but it's not as simple as 'EULA says so, no way we'll lose'.

Did the second bomb blew up or did they just plant it? Planting the bomb has no effect on the score. It has to blow up to count. Having a bomb blow up after the round timer ends doesn't count either.

Tooltip in this game is written in English, while the game operates on math. Let's use WoW because it has the most obvious cases. You got: 1. Stuff that does damage. 2. Stuff that supposedly makes you immune to damage (Paladin shield) 3. Stuff that breaks through the said immunity (Chaos Bolt, Mass Dispel and some other stuff) 4. Stuff that stops the aforementioned attacks that breaks through alleged immunity (Ice Block, I think). 5. Stuff that breaks through Ice Block (many raid mechanisms). Now you could special case this but the list just gets bigger and bigger over time and you're bound to make an error somewhere. It's easiest to use math behind the scenes, so we could simply have say 100% chance to hit, 200% chance to resist, 300% chance to hit, 400% chance to resist, and 500% chance to hit behind the scenes to account for those 5 attacks. That way you don't have to hard code anything. If you need somethign that pierces #4 all you need to do is ensure it has at least 500% chance to hit. If you want a new mechanism that stops #5 you need 600% chance to resist. But from an English point of view, it's awkward to say "Ice Block grants 400% resistance to everything" on a tooltip. It doesn't even really tell you anything too useful because you don't know what kind of accuracy various attacks have. So it's easier to say "Ice Block blocks everything (except the stuff it doesn't work on)". Right now it's pretty clear we got a tier of around 100-200% resistance/defense that's supposed to be mostly immune (Force Shroud, Evasion, first 2 second of Saber Ward on a Jugg) and they usually work as advertised, until you run into something (usually a mechanism from a boss) that just flat out pierces it. Force Barrier, with its especially high resistance %, is probably meant to be 'really immune' compared to the other abilities that are just 'sort of immune', at least until devs decided something ought to be able to penetrate Force Barrier.

The other team had an Op healer and your team did not.

If it's 0-0, it's the team with the most kills. Any other tie the win goes to the team that got to the last objective first.

I don't get why people always say 'I don't know of anyone who cheats at the high end'. Usually all that means is you don't actually know anybody. This game has a relatively low skill cap so if you are actually good, you'll know that to really stand out in a game where it's hard to come out significantly ahead by skill you need every little bit of help you can get. I've been in plenty of games where people are blatantly cheating and they all swear they're not cheating, and if you didn't know how the cheats work they sure look like legit players to you. The only thing that balances out cheating is fear/risk, i.e. is it really worth it if you think there's some small chance you'll get banned? In a game of Huttball the team that grabbed the ball more often almost always wins if the two teams are of comparable strength. It's hard to tell the difference between a macro or someone who is just really, really fast. If you make a macro it'd probably just spam click on the middle, which is pretty much what any good player should do whenever the ball is resetting. That's why it's fairly hard to catch these things because you can't always tell the difference between someone who is just extremely fast to someone who is cheating. In games with more powerful scripting language you can do stuff like make usre you always interrupt at the last 0.1s, but a good player can do that most of the time too, so you really have no way of knowing whether that guy is just really good or he's using some kind of tools to help him. Therefore, a well-designed game should do its best to make cheating irrelevent. Disabling field respecs, for example, and you wouldn't have to worry about someone doing that in the middle of a WZ.

Planting the bomb is not part of any scoring criteria. The bomb has to blow up before the round timer runs out to count.

So far as cheating goes, it's generally very hard to detect anything preemptively without intrusive measures (e.g. Blizzard Warden), but it's relatively easy to detect anything after the cheating has occured assuming the game has a robust log system. For example in the respec case, I don't think you can detect that before it happened, but it'd be easy to see via log that soandso field respeced in a span of 5 seconds and conclude that there's no possible way you could do that without using macros. Depends on how extensive (or not) the logging system of SWTOR is it can be very easy or impossible to catch the cheaters. That said I really don't see how Bioware could ban people for using macros while having special deals for people who bought programmable mouses. Even though MMORPG developers generally has never lost over banning people over cheating, it'd appear to me that banning people for using macros while you've deals to sell programmable mouses is a great way to lose a lawsuit.

The TOS is always a rather hazy area, though. SWTOR had some promotion with programmable mouse and it seems to me the macros described here is only a step up from what you can from a programmable mouse. Even if they attempt to try to classify what macros are okay and what macros are not, it'd end up looking like 'cheating is bad unless you used the cheats from the guys we have a deal with', so that's probably why they won't do anything about it.

Due to Bolster, the effect of Conqueror weapon is pretty much the same as a Conqueror upgrade in any other slot, which is not insignificant but since Conqueror weapon costs way more, it's not a good deal unless you've nothing to do with your ranked comms.

Op has higher overall healing output because a class that's never worried about dying usually heals more. Also they can do most of their healing while moving while no other classes can do that. You'd have to stand still at least momentarily for a Sorc and this gives enemy an opportunity to stop or even kill you. Really the reason why Sorc healing even seems powerful is usually because there's an Op somewhere bailing him out while he gets low. Note that the reverse is not necessraily because the Op can almost always bail himself out. Even if the Sorc has higher output (and the heal record threads tend to indicate otherwise), there doesn't seem to be a reason to take someone who can occasionally be shut down as opposed to someone who can never be shut down.