Online forums are a haven for people with big egos, but no courage or conviction. I'm sure it wouldn't surprise you to know that, from actual evidence of forum-goer activity in various other games (mostly F2P online games that often have to make the switch to a so-called 'pay-2-win' system in order to stay afloat financially), people that complain the most on the forums and threaten to quit, very, very rarely do. In fact, in almost all cases, the same individuals that scream and threaten to quit prior to a game switching to 'pay-2-win' systems, end up being some of the game's highest paying customers. Social games and F2P games tend to work with metrics called Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and ARPPU (Average Revenue Per Paying User). When companies take a look at another metric, Average Revenue Per Paying Forum User (ARPPFU), it can be anywhere from 2 to 10 times as much as ARPPU. People that use the forums tend to be heavily invested (whether in time, or emotionally - and this translates into financially-invested) in the game they are posting about; hence the over-blown levels of emotion you tend to witness in forum discussions. Just look at how emotional people got on the Forums on Wednesday when they thought that other players were getting a game-breaking Valor gain benefit over them. Most players wouldn't give a ****. Only the ones that take this stuff seriously would even care enough to launch into a tirade on the forums about how disappointed they are and threaten to get their way by threatening to quit. I was one of them. Corporations know this. So, they will always, always keep pushing knowing that the overwhelming majority of us will bend, rather than break.

How childish. You mean you IMAGINE a direct correlation, because you have no way of knowing any of that. Running around with a group of 8-16 Repubs, stomping the small little satellite groups of 1-3 Imperials running around is fun...for a while. Then you run into the zerg, because they get a nice big alert siren when you approach any of the points, and get soundly crushed and have to waste a bunch of time regrouping because you lost a fight you couldn't have possibly won. Its fun now. Give it a week.

It won't happen soon. Transfers from Empire to Republic equivalents seem simple on paper; just turn an Operative into a Scoundrel! Boom! Done! Except that you've got all of the gear, the questlines, the datacrons and all manner of other obscure flags and faction-related problems that you absolutely HAVE to make sure are covered and tested properly before you throw it on the Live servers. So, if you're waiting for Bioware to fix it 'soon', don't expect faction transfers. The only way to fix it soon, is for people to reroll. It's simple, and it can happen overnight. But, we all know that almost nobody is willing to do that.

Rerolling means losing a month's worth of hard work hitting 50, grinding valor, opening Champion/Battlemaster bags and throwing all of that away to get stomped by people who are a month ahead, for the next whole month. Very few people are going to be altruistic enough to do that. Not to mention, cognitive dissonance creeps in and people pretend like the Republic side is somehow bland and boring relative to the Empire (because I'm sure everyone that mentions such a thing has played through all of the main class quests to the end...), in order to justify to themselves not having to reroll. Plus the whole ability lag thing, which is just icing on the cognitive dissonance cake. Its so utterly minor, but people exacerbate it as an excuse not to roll Republic. It's a problem, and the only people that can do anything about it are either too selfish, lazy or apathetic to do anything about it. So, we continue to wait for Bioware to do something about it, while they continue to complain about having too many Huttballs against each-other, or nobody to fight in Ilum like its somehow Bioware's/The Republic's fault.

So, your assertion is that population imbalance makes your class suck? Logic fail.

And here is the fundamental problem with any competitive game that rewards you with more power when you kill other players. This is not new, and it is not exclusive to SWTOR. Those of you pretending like it is, need to grow the heck up.

Why the hell are you people wasting your time suggesting 'perfect' fixes that cannot, and will not, even with full resources pushed into them, come along for YEARS? Faction transfers? Third faction? Are you people dense? If you want a solution NOW, just suck it up and reroll.

The pre-game hype thing is utter nonsense. The utterly overwhelming majority of gamers today don't follow a game's development prior to its release. They get sucked in by the immediate advertising and word of mouth spreading close to and after its initial release. There's certainly some truth to people getting lured towards the Empire by their bad-*****ery vs the Republics 'seen it all before' good-guy motif as depicted in the opening cutscenes and during the first few levels of playing a character on either faction. But, hey, given that population imbalance isn't a problem except in PvP, it makes no sense to penalize PvErs for these problems. Placing a population cap on Ilum is the first, best initial step to getting people to switch. I'm sure constant Huttballs against other Empire is also starting to take its toll. Transfers will take a lot of time. I certainly don't want the job of the guy that has to deal with all of the flag switching between the different stories by flipping faction. Empire players need to see, and accept the fact, that if they want a balanced population NOW, they need to just bite the damn bullet and reroll.

If they remove Expertise, or gear mattering in PvP altogether, then you've just got an old-school competitive PvP game, that will get very boring, very quickly. This is not conducive to keeping you paying a subscription. The only reason people put up with only three different warzones and one open world PvP area is because they preoccupy themselves with the pursuit of gear, not the devouring of content. Same reason why modern FPS games also hand out advantages to players that play more. Despite only a small smattering of different maps and general content to consume, it turns out that people play much, much longer, if they have these mini-achievable goals and carrot-on-a-stick mechanisms put in front of them. This is the reality of an MMO, and modern gaming in general, folks. If you don't like it, there's the door.

A population cap, huh? I'm sure this time tomorrow we won't be hearing a whole new swathe of complaining about how Imperials can never get into ilum to complete their Daily/Weekly, because one big group (which is still a small fraction of the total Imp population on any given server) just sits in there all day. Well hey, at least its an incentive to get off their asses and reroll already.

You realize that most of the people complaining would be the ones getting steamrolled, right? You know, the ones that have to sit and WAIT for guys like YOU to decide to be altruistic and switch factions. That doesn't do a whole lot to satisfy us, given that most people that are doing the steamrolling, have no reason to complain. They're crushing their enemies, farming Valor like the dickens, and get to run around bragging over a big pile of corpses (despite being heavily outnumbered and no chance of fighting back, but since when did good old-fashioned sportsmanship stop people bragging?). They're having the time of their lives right now. The same situations have happened in other MMOs and its quite a rare thing for half of an entire faction on a server to reroll because they either A) Felt bad B) Got bored of farming people who had no chance of fighting back Let ALONE that this kind of thing needs to happen on 9 out of every 10 servers out there in order to finally solve the problem. Your 'just wait' attitude is not sufficient to fix this problem, particularly when you're talking about a reasonably significant number of people that ONLY play for PvP, and they've basically been shut out of a large amount of content because Bioware didn't see this coming. People are justifiably pissed off, and they're going to get angrier by the unpreventable death&respawn, until Bioware does something about it.

You have some serious, serious problems with reading comprehension. Take a deep breath, and actually READ what I'm saying. At no point during my argument with Caelix did I say WoW has done it perfectly. In fact, WoW completely abandoned World PvP in favour of Arenas, Battlegrounds and Wintergrasp-esque battles, so I'm glad that SWTOR is making the attempt. However, they are not learning from the mistakes of their forebears. That, in my mind, is a HUGE deal. It would be one thing if they were creating NEW mistakes here, but they're not. They're REPEATING THEM. They're wasting their time, our time, and throwing in changes without proper planning either to satisfy their corporate overlords, or they're not skilled enough to understand the ramifications of their own changes. I'm merely expressing my disappointment, and I'll be waiting to see their response to this catastrophic mistake. If its less than satisfactory, then yes, I probably will be leaving. I hope they learn their lessons quickly, or I expect you'll be right behind me when you finally come to realize that a company that randomly throws in changes because forum-goers suggested it (as you so-claimed was what happened earlier - personally I think its a lack of ability, research and foresight), is not conducive to building a stable and enjoyable MMO.

Okay, super. You're a solid customer for the next...well, forever I guess. Now, moving on to the other tens if not hundreds of thousands of players irritated by this poorly-thought-out and reckless change.

Yes, because these people screaming about Ilum are going to be hanging around for that day to come. WoW has been around for 7 years, has full server, faction even race changes implemented... ...and it still has these problems. Are you really so stubborn that you can't see how just...plain...WRONG you are?

No, you're amateur because you think that somehow, magically, because Blizzard invented Halaa, population balance was fixed across all servers. You're either so stubborn, or just plain stupid, to believe that population balance on WoW PvP servers went from December 2006 70% Horde, 30% Alliance to January 2007 50% Horde, 50% Alliance Overnight, it just magically fixed itself, and EVEN MORE continued on through to the current day, did it? How much money are you willing to bet I can look up statistics of WoW servers over the last 4 years and see proof of exactly that happening? Oh what, nothing? Because it wasn't a global fix to a global problem, because a handful of people swapping faction is insignificant in the grand scheme, and that despite server/faction transfers implemented into the game, it STILL has population problems on a lot of servers, that Blizzard completely gave up on World PvP and instead went for Battleground and Arena games where they can control the number of people in the match, and open up battleground queues to more than a single server? Oh, well. Fantastic.

You're still (I can only assume for some inane, childish, or downright ignorant reason) that we wanted THIS change. People said they wanted incentive to PvP. Throwing in ANY old incentive to PvP is not enough, because look at Ilum now. You call that PvP? Now that's just childish and straight-up fanboyism. You don't go completely ignoring and REPEATING the mistakes that others have made because you think you can do it exactly the same, but it'll be better. How egomaniacal is that? Yeah, and those people were WRONG, because the people around here are the 'shoot-from-the-hip' type that don't follow their ideas through to the end. It's BIOWARE'S responsibilty to do that. They should have been smart enough to ask themselves "hold on a second...let's think this through...if we open up an open-world pvp system where one faction greatly outnumbers the other, what will the outcome be?'. Or, do you feel COMFORTABLE knowing that Bioware can and will implement anything that some idiot on the forums suggests? Hey, Bioware, let's just remove gear from the game. It's stupid that PvP revolves around gearing. Also I think Jedi's should be able to one-shot anyone with heavy armour - I can break through doors with them, why not heavy armour? Also, I should get a cannon that shoots lightsabers. I expect these changes in by the 1.2 patch.

These things don't magically balance themselves. Only a handful of people are hardcore enough to throw away a month's work to start over. Not everyone is going to go with you, so you'd either have to be a complete loner, or very convincing to bring your entire group of friends with you. Horde dominated Halaa for the ENTIRE life of Halaa, being 2 years. There might be a very, very small handful of cases where people switched, but it certainly didn't fix the GLOBAL problem for all servers. Not to mention, Halaa was a miniscule, meaningless PvP area anyway. There were no significant incentives other than a chance at some honour and a handful of items that were completely obsolete a couple of months in once the next tier of gear came along. They never revisited Halaa and offered grander rewards. Ilum is COMPLETELY different. It's where you can now grind Valor, which you need for Battlemaster gear, which is currently the best thing out there for PvP. The incentives are absolutely staggering compared to what Halaa offered and it will last for the lifespan of this game so long as its just generic PvP and has Daily/Weekly quests attached to it. See, that kind of amateurish decision making and critical thinking you're displaying is suggesting that somehow YOU are the kind of person they've got working at Bioware's PvP team. And that's sad.

I hope you're being intentionally ironic. Or, do you genuinely think this problem is a bigger incentive for Imps to roll Repubs, than Repubs to roll Imp? I hope you're bringing a lot of friends with you. Like say, half of your entire faction.

I guess I'll jump into throwing capital letters back at you, since I guess its the only way to get the message across at this point. This is not a BUG. I can deal with those. This is a DESIGN DECISION THAT FAILED AND YOU COULD SEE IT FAILING FROM A MILE AWAY. Yes, thankyou for mentioning Halaa (I forgot the name). This was a mistake Blizzard, as one of the first MMOs to even TRY such a thing, failed at. But, hey, they were treading new ground. I'm an amicable guy, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Now, it begs the question, why didn't Bioware learn from a mistake Blizzard made...what 5 years ago? Edit: 5 years is probably a lot closer to TBC release date than 6-7..

Don't start with the fail analogies. This is not tin-foil hat stuff. This is a decision THEY MADE and THEY screwed up. The only thing the players influenced was that Ilum had to change. The exact change itself was completely in their court. Their decision was to replay the same mistakes other MMOs have done by allowing one high pop faction to steam roll the other, because there are no checks-and-balances put in to combat it. This is their fault. This is a decision they made without forethought, created and implemented by their own team members. I've been a fan of Bioware for a long time, and at any other time over the last 6 years, I might be playing damage control like you are, but this is a genuine problem I can't look past. Like I said, I kept thinking they just needed more time. That's now been proven false to me. They've proven to me they need a more capable team in both skill and research.

You're making one absolutely huge assumption that the players wanted THIS change. We wanted change. We wanted better incentive to PvP in Ilum. HOW that got done was completely up to Bioware. They put it on the Public Test Forum, people posted pretty often that this was going to be a bad idea for reasons X, Y and Z, but they went ahead with it anyway. Either it shows their team is completely out of touch with their customers, or are utterly reckless and incompetent to implement a change like this without proper testing, forethought and acknowledging the feedback. I'm not saying that if I make a customer support ticket asking to have a full battlemaster set they should stop everything they're doing to give it to me. I'm merely saying that they need to come up with solutions to problems that actually work. This was a quick fix, that they obviously didn't think through for more than a minute, and could have easily avoided if they actually had some experience with other MMOs like DAoC, WoW, WAR or Aion, learning from the mistakes they have made. This is a much bigger problem than 'you told us to do it, so suck it'. This is ultimately about the absolutely reckless and/or amateurish decision-making made by Bioware's so-called 'PvP team'. I've been telling myself that they just need more time to work out the kinks. But, after a change like this getting thrown in without covering all of the bases, it just tells me these guys don't understand that you can't just do that in an MMO. One big mistake like this and you've just set a huge precedent; that you haven't got the skill to pull this off.

It's their responsibility to foresee and deal with issues like this. You don't go intentionally pissing of your customers and hope they deal with it. I hope you try to open a business some day and learn this lesson at great personal expense. I mean, if the Republic login screen said "You've picked a lower population faction. You are going to have to man up when you get farmed like a ***** one month from now when we make a HUGE mistake in our PvP changes", then you might have a case, but you don't. Nobody could see this coming from faction choice alone. You didn't know if it was going to be like WoW where everybody rolled horde, or if everyone saw what happened in WoW and intentionally rolled Repub to avoid that, thus making Repub the higher pop faction.

Faction transfers can't solve a problem like this. They're very technical and risky to do (all of the PvE story elements, flags etc. would be a frigging nightmare to deal with - I don't want that guy's job), will take a long time to create as a result, and it won't fix the problem quickly even when it does get implemented. There needs to be an incentive for the steamroller faction players to risk joining the steamrollee faction. What, you're just going to hope that the other half of the entire faction follow you over? Server transfers in WoW never worked for that exact same reason. People were too invested in one side to switch over, so they never got the population switching they wanted until people were fed up with years of having lag/login/high pop issues. Its a problem that is cascading quickly. The fact that Imps are hitting valor 60 long before they 'should' is going to start affecting warzone matches very quickly. On top of that, frustrated Repub players are going to start leaving, making the population imbalance worse. This problem needs quick action and some immediate core redesign, not faction transfers.

I assume there's a discount if I purchase the tower/bridge combo pack?

I'll be waiting to see their response. If its anything less than a complete rollback and disabling of the zone until they fix the amateur design decisions, I'll be visiting that page.