Yes please. Plus the rocket boost can be used places where regular mounts can't... but not if it's on cooldown because you just hit it in random rotation on your mount. The UI is the biggest insult here: if you try to click it to remove it from favorites it tells you that you can't favorite that. But it's already favorited.

Some people clearly want this to be optional. What YOU think about that is, frankly, irrelevant. Unless you can show that providing it somehow causes harm to the game or its players--and neither you nor anyone else in this thread has--then your arguments that it shouldn't be implemented are worthless. Actually it's worse than worthless: it's exactly the sort of negativity that some of the people who agree with you have been complaining about. All that you, and others who've voiced the same opinion as you, have done in this thread is to demonstrate that you are incapable of accepting or even listening to any opinion that does not match your own.

Happened to me today, my companion was Doc FWIW. Tried resetting but it didn't help. I reported it via ticket...

Hey, I'm in a more or less similar situation to shelobenb... Founder, played mostly Jedi characters (all of them), my buddies quit after about 10 months or so, I got bored and left a few months later. Star Wars is in my blood though, so couldn't stay away forever... Returned around Christmas, got my guardian tank to lvl 55. Of course everything is better when shared, so I'm looking for some like-minded folk to do all sorts of content with, and advise me on where to go and what to do. As for me, I'm likely to be the aloof old man of the group (as for my age, I saw the original Star Wars at the theater, let's leave it at that). Basically, for you Firefly fans, take Cpt. Malcolm Reynolds and remove the funny, and I'm what's left. ;-) I'm down for whatever when I'm free, but I don't want to take heat from the guild when I'm busy, or when I just want to do my own thing. If that works for your guild, then please invite! I'm usually on as Trinaea, but I do have alts that can be dealt with later (or not, whatever). Cheers

So, when you queue, pick all the maps. So do I, but I've played enough Denova Coast matches to know that I do not like, and will never like, that war zone. I don't like quitting war zones, but frankly, I'm pretty inclined to start leaving this one before the match starts. If I don't get a way to do that in the reasonably near future, I'll probably do that, and plenty of players already do. Agree! Indeed I did! And I did so despite you saying this, for emphasis. You can disagree, but nothing I've said in this thread is provably wrong... Telling someone they're wrong is a great way to put people on the defensive, make them argue with you, and make them angry. You should avoid doing that, if you want to keep things civil. At any rate, if you want to quit, go right ahead! Players will come and go... seriously. You should only play the game as long as it's fun for you. If the change was made, and you tried it out and found that it made things significantly worse for you and wanted to quit, I certainly would not hold that against you. But I doubt that would happen, and I think for the vast majority of players, allowing the selection of war zones could only make things better. Two reasons I disagree: First, people who don't want to play that map already tend to quit, and those that don't quit seem to tend to node camp or just 1v1 against whoever is near them. So you (and your team) probably gain nothing by forcing them to play a war zone they don't like, and in fact probably lose. Second, from chatting with people about this, I don't think it's true that people would only play one zone and specialize in that one zone... It seems to be generally true that players want more and varied war zones. There might be a few who would do that, but I believe the overwhelming majority of players would not. Plus, the war zones are not exactly complicated... people who are good at huttball tend to also be good at voidstar, and all the other war zones. The basic strategies are mostly the same, and the map-specific strategies are quickly discoverable. Control the middle / your bunkers, work together to cap, support your team. That's pretty much it. Most of the variation is in execution, which comes down to individual player skill and coordination. The maps are mostly not interesting from a competition standpoint -- only from a variety standpoint. True! False! Obviously there can be only one winner, but it's not true that all teams need to have some good and some bad players. It's not that hard to rank the players -- plenty of games have been doing this for years -- and you can queue bad players with bad players, and good players with good players. The link I gave in my first post in this thread describes one idea of how to do that. That's only true to a point, and that point varies greatly for each individual. If you walk out of your base, are immediately stunned, and then 3-shot before the stun wears off, and this happens over and over again, there's absolutely nothing interesting about that. At least, not for me.

So a "punishment" of having to play with quitters is such a harsh "punishment" it will cause people to quit? Punishing people for avoiding frustration will encourage them to quit, yes. That's because you apparently did not read the rest of my post. The point is, punishing frustrated players is stupid. They're already frustrated, and you want to make that worse by punishing them. A much better solution -- the part of my post you apparently completely overlooked -- is instead you fix the reasons why people are quitting. Almost all of the legitimate reasons are fixable, and most of them boil down to having a better match maker in the game. If the fights are fair, people have fun, and they don't quit. Letting people choose the war zones they want to play in also helps -- and as a side benefit Bioware also can collect data about what war zones are the most popular, which tells them how TO and how NOT TO build future war zones. If you still can't understand this, then you are a lost cause.

THEN WHY DID YOU DO IT?!?! This isn't a career... it's a game. And in case you missed the point, the purpose of games is to have fun. If it isn't fun, STOP DOING IT!! If you just feel the need to grind on something that isn't fun, then go do some math problems... at least that's useful.

Being able to choose the war zones you want to play in would be really nice too. If I never saw Denova Coast again, I wouldn't miss it...

And then they will unsub from the game. You can say that it's better if they do, but that's never true. MMOs don't work when no one wants to play. We all saw how true this was (or at least most of us did) just before the server transfers hit... Long WZ queues, nothing on the market, no one on the world you're on, hard to get a team for much of anything... You're missing the point. I hate when people quit as much as you do (and I hate getting backfilled even more), but you have to understand that people quit because they aren't having fun. Punishing them for avoiding frustration is only going to make the problem worse. If you want to solve this problem, you need to address the reasons why people quit. LOOK AT YOUR LIST... About half of reasons are completely valid reasons to want to quit! Playing against an opponent by whom you're completely outmatched is nothing but frustrating... If you hate huttball, then when every other match is huttball (as it was for a while on my old server) you're either going to quit when you get it, or you're just going to stop queuing up in the first place. Punish the quitters, and the latter is the guaranteed result. And then we're back where we were before server transfers. Instead, fix the things that make PvP unfun for people. It's mostly about getting fair matches, as far as I've seen. I've suggested a way to fix that in this thread. I sympathize 100% with you, but your solution = fail.

What, do I have to think of everything? Don't the fine folks at Bioware earn a salary to figure this stuff out? I think they do... =8^) I would look at using some kind of point system... every kill, every objective, every heal, every defended turret, etc. is worth some point value. At the end of the match, adjust up or down by some scaling factor based on performance relative to how the team did. Clearly different goals need different weights. Defending a turret no one is attacking is obviously less valuable than defending the guy capping for the win.... Divide by the number of matches played, so that people who play 6000 matches a day don't automatically overtake someone who only plays 6 matches a week. Periodically (every "season") reset the ranks (just like every sports team's record is reset each season), so that people who have improved considerably aren't forever seriously negatively impacted by their previous performance (same deal for those who got worse). The math probably needs to be a bit more complicated than this to keep it fair, but that seems like a good start. It depends on how the ranking works, but really that's not true. I'm sure most of us have run into situations where the bad team we were on dragged us way down. Not necessarily... that's a big benefit of what I'm suggesting. If you queue solos only with other solos, on top of queuing only people in the same bracket, you're making it much harder to get a match, for everyone. But it doesn't matter... as long as the rank of the team is roughly equal, you should be in a pretty fair fight. If you're solo, up against a premade with the same rank as you (or rather your team), either they are bad at coordinating, or just not as good as you (your team), so it balances out. If that weren't true, they'd be ranked higher...

This response is just plain stupid. I'm not saying you are stupid, just this sentiment. This is a game, and games are meant to be fun. Grinding out the same content over and over again to get virtual prizes is not fun, it's a boring, pointless waste of time. Now, PvP is not grinding content, but it is grinding out badly mismatched warzones. Same principle, unless Bioware fixes that problem.... I have suggested a way to do that, in this thread.

I agree too, but it does make some sense: If you're a soloer getting slotted in a PUG team going against a well-coordinated premade team, you're most likely going to find yourself on the losing side. It's not a guarantee but it's by far the most likely outcome. But I don't do rateds cuz I can't queue solo and I don't really have a regular group that I play with. I really enjoyed the PvP experience right up to lvl 50... I felt like the original class balance was really good, the TTK was just about right, and the match-ups were even enough that you won about half your matches or so. Some of the class tweaking that came later actually made the balance worse, IMO; and the TTK has gone way down since 1.2, making many of the fights much less interesting. Still, overall, PvP was good... until lvl 50. At that point it got really harrowing... for a while. There was a sort of a lull for a time, right after ranked WZs were release, where it became good again... matches seemed about even, scores were close, and you felt like you earned your wins. It seemed like that only lasted a few weeks, and now we're back to premades steamrolling PUGs again. The more I think about it, the more I think the only way to make PvP WZs work again is to do the following: - Get rid of "regular" warzones, entirely. - Everyone queues for ranked. Queues are bracketed by ranking. - You can not be matched with people outside of your bracket. - Probably both individual performance and team performance should affect rank, but (relative) Individual performance affects your ranking much more than team performace. This does a couple things. It makes the match-ups about as fair as they could possibly be. It lets people queue solo, and not have to worry about getting matched up on a bad team against an uber-premade. It provides a means of escape for better players who have the bad luck to be slotted on bad teams. It also somewhat removes gear imbalance from the equation -- your performance is your performance regardless of what gear you have. Granted, lower brackets will tend to be filled with under-geared players, and higher brackets will tend to be filled with well-geared players, but it still is performance that ultimately decides what bracket you're in... regardless of whether you perform that way due to skill or gear (or a lack thereof). The combination of bracketing and focus on individual performance is key. Good players who queue solo will typically start out at a lower rank due to getting slotted on bad teams, but as the teams they get slotted on get matched against similarly skilled teams, their individual performance will start to shine relative to the rest of the team. Their rank will bubble up as this occurs, allowing them to move into the next higher bracket, getting slotted on better and better teams until they get to their individual level. Without this, otherwise good players will be brought down inequitably by being slotted on bad teams. And I think it will also make it easier for solo players to find a group of people they want to play with regularly, to enable them to work together and build their team skills with, which again will allow them to continue up the ladder.

The problem is, having damage be your only trick is not a guarantee that you don't have too much of it...

I'm skeptical of reported studies in general, because there always seems to be multiple studies with diametrically opposite conclusions. As you say, the people doing the study, or perhaps the people paying for the study, generally have an agenda, which produces bias. But I wasn't critiquing the study per se, I was specifically critiquing the OP's quote used to defend the thesis of his post. The study may or may not have been good, but regardless his quote and the way he used it were bad. No, I don't think I did... [Emphasis added by me.] That last bit is key, but was not specified by the OP, and that detracted from the strength of his argument... without actually reading the study, it's unclear whose fault that was: his, or the writers of the study. But I think the study is probably flawed, even if it did specify that, and I tried to point that out, though perhaps I did it badly. The thing is, they polled Stanford grad candidates: These people are almost certainly accustomed to being well above average in general -- if they were not, it's not very likely they would be at Stanford. Without visiting the administration to find out exactly what their ranking is, they really have no basis to evaluate where they stand, other than their own personal history: They (in their mind) probably must be better than average, because they have been, for most of their lives, quite possibly in more ways than just academically. This certainly is a bias... but it's a bit different in nature, I think, than what the purveyors of the study intended to prove. If you asked that same question to students at a "bad" school, say, a low-ranked public university, I'd be willing to bet that the results would be very, very different. And I bet that if you instead polled random people off the street, you would get results that correlated reasonably closely to reality. Isn't it though? If Bioware did that research and made it public then people could point to it as evidence that the classes either do or do not need a buff or nerf. But it wasn't exactly my point that Bioware should do that... Yeah, exactly. I think we're actually in violent agreement here: I'm saying that if you want to complain that your class is imbalanced, prove it (or find someone who can), or ST*U. More importantly, what I'm really saying is that neither Bioware nor the community should pay any attention to complaints that don't include some sort of formal analysis which provides evidence of the complaint. Though, ideally Bioware should do their own investigation, and provide the results, so that the player base can respond intelligently or at least accept what they've done. Most players are probably not capable of doing any such analysis, but that's OK... it just proves that they -- quite literally -- do not know what they are talking about,, and hence deserve to be ignored. And I don't think I'm being unduly elitist here -- I certainly put myself in that same camp. Even my comments about snipers -- I am not saying that I know for a fact that there's an inbalance there... the most I'm willing to say is that it seems like that may be the case to me, having done no formal analysis. Thus I would not feel justified in demanding a nerf, and I don't think most other ranters are justified either. But I'm also saying that if the game made a better effort to match people of roughly the same skill level, a lot of the complaints would evaporate, precisely because people would be in fair fights most of the time.

Summary, for the TLDR people: 1. It's not clear that the statemement above is correct, and in fact it seems likely that you're wrong, but it depends on exactly what's being compared, which is woefully underspecified. 2. The point of playing this, or any game, is to have fun -- that should always be remembered. 3. Both pro-nerf and anti-nerf people may well have valid points; you really need math to back it up. 4. The game needs better mechanisms to match people of the same skill level, which may help alleviate some of the ranting. Now, the longer version, for people who care and have an attention span exceeding that of a gnat: It's not only not obviously impossible, it's fairly likely, depending on what average you're comparing against. Better than average at what? Better than average who? Are 87% of Stanford MBA candidates better than the average Stanford MBA candidate (presumably, at studying MBA topics)? No, that is obviously impossible. Are 87% of Stanford MBA candidates better than the average MBA candidate at any school? That's quite possible -- Stanford is an extremely competitive school with a reputation for recruiting the best students in their field. 87% of Stanford MBA candidates better than the average person? Almost certainly. This may still be true, despite what I've said above; however many studies are done imperfectly, and close examination reveals significant bias toward the premise of the study. Anecdotally I tend to doubt it, as I have known probably at least as many people who underestimate their skill, as who overestimate it. If it is true, the average person also thinks they are better at communicating than they are, and that includes you... as proven by your point above. From what you wrote, we don't really know what was being compared, and therefore we can't even guess, never mind make a fair judgement. about how accurate the statement is. Personally, I'd really like to see that study. But regardless. such judgements are generally subjective. This is why, when determining whether game mechanics are balanced or not, one needs to look at the mathematics, and not the psychology. Both the people griping about OP classes and those griping about nerfs may have perfectly valid points. Your individual conclusion is subjective, based on your own experience; but mathematics are precise and verifiable. Though, interpretation of statistics can be subjective also, so even that isn't perfect. Side note: It's interesting, I haven't seen much good detailed mathematical analysis of this game, unlike other games... but maybe I've just missed it. The opposite of what you're suggesting is also true: Those who truly are exceptional also tend to project that onto everyone else, and assume that they are idiots if they can't keep up. But the reality is most people do not have the capacity to be a world class competitor -- at SWTOR PvP, or anything else. And it's probably true that (almost) no one should have that as their goal... there are far more important things to focus on being good at in life. So this is a good thing. The real problem, IMO, is twofold: First, people forget that this is a %$#@! game, and the ultimate point is to have fun. People should be accepted for playing, and indeed encouraged to play however they get enjoyment from the game, provided it does not interfere with other players' enjoyment of the game. Secondly, the game lacks adequate facilities to rank people into tiers, and match them up against opponents of the same tier. And, this is hard to do at any rate, because a good player can very easily be dragged down by a bad team. It really only works 1v1, unless your team is always made up of the same people (or composed of members of the same group of people), such that your team really is one unit. For hardcore players who are in guilds, it's easy to develop such a team unit. For more casual players, who can't or don't want to meet whatever requirements guilds put on their players, or don't play on any sort of regular schedule, it's much harder to achieve that. Rated war zones were supposed to solve this, but they at least partially failed. If you're a casual player queuing solo, you're still very likely to end up on a bad pug against a premade team whose members know each other and play together often, and get yourself steamrolled, even if you yourself are a pretty decent player. I don't have a great solution to this, but a step in the right direction might be to completely elimintate "regular" warzones, Force everyone to play ranked WZs, and match players -- both with teammates, and against opponents -- based on their rank. Better players will, over time, move up in the ranks, and get matched on better teams, allowing them to grow, while the hopelessly bad players will sink to the bottom, and get matched against other bottom feeders. It's kind of like a bubble sort algorithm. =8^) That at least somewhat helps the player skill imbalance problem (though it may make queue popping harder), but I suspect that there still are real "imbalances" in the game. For instance, I noticed that when I play melee classes, I tend to do pretty well, except against certain ranged classes, and snipers in particular. I have to get close and stay close to do my damage, and it seems to me that the snipers have enough tools to make that very hard, and have decent burst damage to kill me while I'm incapacitated (especially when we are not gear-balanced). This may in and of itself not be a problem, because on teams, one may balance the other -- but if you have imbalances like this, then team composition becomes critical. You can't control team composition when you queue solo. But in any case, I think the answers to all these things are not immediately clear. Significant analysis based on fact and on math needs to be done. The one thing I will agree with you on is that most people who cry in forum posts have very little evidence to back up their claims, and often clearly haven't even thought very hard about what they're complaining about -- and may lack the skill and/or knowledge to do so.