Well, i am loosing hope for SWTOR. The game is great, but the stance of not punishing exploiters completely ruins competitive environment. If they want expoiters subs/bots over the honest players - they can have them.

People play MMOs for progression - that much is true. Progression does not equal gear though. And speaking about it, there are generaly two types of MMOs : themeparks and sandbox. In themeparks the progression is linear and is the main goal of the game, the endgame is usually quite pathetic and consists of gear/ranks grind. SWTOR is such game. Sanbox offers players freedom and other goals than gear progression - actively shaping the world, fighting real conflicts e.t.c In such game gear is mostly a means to achieve a goal, and not goal itself (expecially if combined with full equipment look on pvp death mechanic). Best examples would be UO, Darkfall and EVE. SWTOR is obviously themepark game, but it doesnt mean all it should be is about getting better gear, it gets old fast and people require some more initiatives for endgame. Having gear progression on itself is not bad - and people dont complain about that, they complaint about huge benefits gear gives and inability to fairly compete against people having major gear advantage. You know, for gear progression its unimportant weather better gear doubles your total HP or adds 0.001% to it. Better is better. People will always strive to get better gear even if it gives miniscule advantage. In SWTOR however, gear is scaled VERY strong - and thats not because its actually indended like that in PvP, but because pvp gear has to compete with PvE gear - and there big scaling is required for the boss encounters. So reaching lvl50 and getting raid/pvp gear people suddenly jump from 12 to 18khp, huge critical/surge/power e.t.c. bonuses e.t.c Only because its PvE mechanic, and pvp follows it. But even so - it by itself is not a huge problem. The problem is huge gap between awailable and best gear. Players just rolling lvl50 and not grinded valor are forced to be in meat grinder for long time. What would fix it is smoothing the gear curve - by adding in between tiers of Gear, that are more easely attained or could be crafted/bought. Ideal would be having separate pvp/pve gear for warzones - but thats impossible, since this game also have openworld PvP and everyone should be competitive in it regardless of gear type. The designers stated they intend as much as possible not separate pvp/pve items/stats - thus we face us with a even great problem: with future added flashpoints and pve gear tiers, the cap of stats/hp/bonuses will rise even higher, and PvP gear will have to follow. So the only logical steps atm are making attaining PvP gear more easy, while also adding additional "non-top" gear tiers, to smooth the curve.

One of the five chars i have is Pyrotech and i have to say its by far the most in your face - damage class and easy to kill enemies or top damage in warzones class. The only reason i play sin atm over powertech (keeping it as backup) is that heat management is a ***** and i prefer sustained ability, over killing someone using all heat/cooldowns and than being useless. For a class with so much survivibility, the damage is way too much. However seeing as they nerf hybrid sins, i expect Powertech to be forced to play in specific tree as well in the future, without cylinder changing in combat or talents from different trees working in wrong cylinder.

How about 90% armor penetration on rail shot? At least know your **** if you gonna post and dont tell us about "rail shot being white damage which is easely penetrated!". And yeah, people talk about Powertech. Mercs have their own issues.

Its amusing how many "always first in damage in warzone, always most medals/kills" people are there on this forums (me being one of them). Its even more amusing how many of them are obviously pretendint to be such with no understanding of game mechanics and their own or other classes. (you being one of them) My point is correct and stands - every class can get massive damage numbers inflated by healers, no class can beat 300k without aoe and enemies not deing in 2 hits. When it comes to damage inflation, aoe always have much bigger potential. With AoE/Dots/Enemy actually healing the team even 700k is not a problem. I pvp extensively on 5 classes, met a lot of people excelling in every class and can say that if you are melee and get top damage there are multiple factors: 1) enemy and you are healed 2) aoe and ranged in your team suck hard 3) you farm enemy pug with premade on their resspoint You think assassin/maradeur can do more damage in WZ than sorc/powertech/even sniper of equal skill? You are deluded.

Read my post. The only way to get such inflated number is if your and enemy teams have good heals and everyone takes a while to kill. I`ve seen just about any class inflated damage numbers to insane in such situations. 400k damage for 15 minutes would be around 450 damage per second from the moment the match starts till it ends. Considering global cooldown is 1.5 second, and half the time you spend running from position to position such numbers come for prolonged single fights where enemy gets heal (otherwise they just dont live long enought to warrant such numbers). Theres not a single class that cant get that amount (Juggernauts included) if not specced full tank/healer in such conditions. Still, good AoE would inflate such situations much more and ranged have more possibilities to consistent sustained DPS than melee. A simple statement, if you have more damage in match than DPS sorc - he sucks. Assassin should never get more total damage than Sorc that knows his bussiness (that said, majority dont - but that applies to sins too)

You can get such numbers on just about any class if you DPS without pause and enemy and your team have good healing. Fighting single healer selfhealing 1on1 contributes more to your total "damage" than running and killing 3 normal enemies. So if you want to inflate numbers, just dont interupt their heals and keep hitting them heh. It does not matter whats your DPS per sec - if most of the time you dont spend hitting a target, you will never get over 200-300k. Simple math. And in such matches AOE still would do double the damage you do. If you top a WZ chart as single target melee - its not because you are so great, but because ranged/aoe classes in your and enemy team suck in comparison (or were busy actually doing objectives).

People should get a simple fact by now: If you get 200-300k on any class, its because your and enemy team gets healing and people take a while to kill. If you get over 300k - its because you AoE crowd of people. No exceptions. Deception sin is single target spec, so he cant usually get the numbers Madness sin or Darkness sin using Wither/Lacerate would in long match, due to being single target, positioning downtime e.t.c. If you are never focused and can dps the enemy team in the back without pause while they are getting healing - you get pretty big damage numbers, but its inflated coz of healing and AoE classes would do more in same situation.

Multiboxing is not a problem. Not at all. On other side - 3rd party and macro tools used to make it available usually is. Atm SWTOR does not allow 3rd party tools at all - be it something simple like Autohotkey or something more complex. Unless they officially add addons support - its not about to change. So if you like multiboxing, you better be ready to explain how you manage to perform the actions you do. However its really not so much of an issue, apart from maybe chinese farmers powerleveling chars. It does not really bring much benefits.

I am sorry to bring you down to earth, but its "subtle but important difference" only for those who benefit/participate for exploit. Theres no gray area here. The only question is how sever the exploit effects the overall game play of server/ other players. I heard this song million times in different games. Its either "but its not an exploit, its clever use of game mechanics!" or "its devs fault for not thinking about it, fixing it fast!", every single time. If its obviously not intended, and can be used for greater personal benefit when the mechanic stands out of the line with the rest of game mechanics/progression - its exploit. In case of Illum in particular, i could let the people who farmed before patch slide, it didnt had such major impact after all (despite most of them coming there in hype knowingly expecting they could exploit it heh). Current kill trading however is an obvious exploit, and caused mass bans in many other games. People doing that know they are exploiting and know the consequences that could follow.

There is such thing as Tatooine Ourlaws Den. People that preach about how they love small scale balanced pvp with friends (totally not for rewards!) for some reason forget about it each time.

I will make a analogy, there is "sport" and there is "war". Arena is much PvP as Golf if art of warfare.

Exploiting is exploiting. Illum farming before patch was, and kill trading now still is. Its just a question what stance Bioware will take on it at last. A simple example - if you find somewhere on Tatooin a chest, that when opened gives you 1.000.000 credits, and instead of reporting it and ignoring loot it 5-10 times : this is exploit and you likely will be punished for it. A little common sense usually help people not cross over the forbidden line and not whine later that they got punished for "mistakes of developers". Some games, like AoC for example - banned all the players involved in same offence. Some - ignored it and ended up with cheat/exploit ridden. I hope Bioware finally takes no tolerance stance and takes action.

Speedhack is fine and easy in every game (along with teleport). Its however just as easy detected and protocolled (if devs have any brains at all). Stat/Cooldowns hack is another myth. Most data is stored/processed serverside, so even if you manage to fix your client, it still will not change anything in reality. You can change your client to show that your ability is off cooldown or you have 99999 Wisdom, but every action is timed checked and calculated on server. Yes sometimes major stat/abilities manipulation happens, but thats usually not "hacking" as modifying a game, but "exploiting" aka using existing loopholes in the game, likes say - buff stacking.

Did not encountered any hackers really. Usually most claims about "hackers" are highly exaggerated (except for speed hacking, thats pretty easy to do in every game but is also usually detectable) There are however many bots atm. If initially it were just people stealthed in the corner and moving once a few seconds so that they wouldn't be booted out - now its often bots running in same or few preloaded path patterns and just spamming attacks. They often get stuck in the way somewhere, and are easely recognizable by the fact that when you attack them they dont react on you specifically (since most bots atm are not injectors, but simply perform basic keyboard/mouse functions). Those things should be easely detectable though. It surprises myself enormously that Bioware still did not take any action of even said official word on that.