Same issue here. I've gone back to sh, relogged, every time i try to clear the debris the ui fades like the cut scene is about to start, and then... im just sitting here staring at this log. No cut scene, cannot advance.

What you're describing sounds like you are playing in the 30-54 bracket, not the 55 bracket. Leanr all you can now, because it will be tougher when you are playing against other 55s. First, the levels don't matter much in WZs. There is a mechanic called Bolster that evens things out, so the fact that you are 20 levels higher than your opponents is not very important. Most players would lose going against 2 opponents, especially 2 opponents that have played together. In a WZ, no one is fodder. Your best bet to start off with is maybe follow someone of your class around at first, and see what they do. This will let you learn the maps and get a handle on the faster pace of PvP. Another suggestion would be to accept that is a totally new facet of the game, that you will be learning from scratch, while playing against people who have been doing it for years.

The best part is, it was necro'd for the specific purpose of somebody saying they acted like a jerk towards small children.

These two things are not even remotely equal. Let's say you are starting from scratch, with no prior history. I'm also assuming we are RE'ing blues to purples, with a 10% chance of success. You start to RE. Your chance of failing 60 times in a row, before you begin, is about 0.18%. Not very likely, but with all the players in the game we can safely assume that this happens multiple times a day. To the person is it happening to, it feels incredibly frustrating. I don't know that I have ever failed 60 times, but I know for sure I failed 50, and it was painful. The counterpart to failing 60 times in a row is succeeding 3 times in a row, which is almost half as likely at 0.10%. I don't think I've ever had this happen, but it is again likely that every day, a few lucky souls out there hit this. Even if you are doing RE's with a 20% success rate, it is ten times more likely that you will fail 60 times in a row than succeed 10 times in a row. The odds of these are very low (1 in a million for 60 failures, one in 10 million for 10 successes), but the failure is on the order of something that might be happening once a month or every few months.

Holly?

There is a gap at 410 where it is hard to find things that will actually increase your Artifice level. My advice: try Dye Modules. Make 10 Dyes, and then you will be at 420, where you can switch back to Enhancements.

That sounds like a good idea. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=727496

You might need to go to yur crafting trainer and buy some higher level recipes.

The set bonus is on the weaponmaster armoring, not the generic 72 armoring. So even if the stats on the mod are the same, only the weaponmaster piece has the set bonus. You can buy the weaponmaster piece, swap out your 72 might armoring with the Weaponmaster armoring, and that will get you the set bonuses.

While this might make the MM better, one artifact of the current system-the same players playing each other repeatedly, in a lot of different combinations- is that it makes the ratings very accurate within that group.

I think this is exactly what Ilum was supposed to evolve into. But it turned out the graphics engine couldn't handle large battles, and on top of that, even a slight faction imbalance at the server level led to a massive effective imbalance in ability to control the planet. It's just really difficult to make this kind of thing of fun, without putting so many restrictions on it that it becomes more like PvE.

The skill levels usually increase based on the mission itself, and not on whether it is a success or failure. Try getting a harder mission and running that.

I played this game a lot for a few months after launch. I played a lot of PvP then. Just in the last couple weeks, I started playing again, and when I come on the forums, I see a lot of people complaining about "having to grind a new set of gear", with a lot of other complaining about bolster. Shouldn't these complaints cancel out? I mean, either bolster makes the best gear pointless or not. It can't be both. And even more importantly-what is the difference between grinding out gear and playing the game? If you play the game a lot, don't just automatically get the new gear within a few weeks? At launch, getting new gear was insane. You would open the bags, and just hope you got the piece you wanted. And when you didn't, you outfitted your companion with another piece of PvP gear that 90% of the server couldn't get, but you had to get rid of before they filled up your whole cargo hold. People complained, and they changed the system, which obviously works way better now. But people now still complain, and even worse just viciously slam the devs, who have obviously worked very hard to fix the launch issues. Of course these things can't be fixed overnight, but as someone who saw the beginning, and the current state-trust me, it is way better now, and almost all of the issues that were bad in the beginning are totally gone now.

Wait I thought the definition of ganking was "getting beat by someone better than me". Is that wrong?

The OP is written from the perspective of a high end trader with extensive resources, but not everyone is in that position. The OP probably does not do very much actual crafting-and almost all the crafting done is probably very high end, with some additional continuous R&D to generate new purples for sale. The OP is trying to cover every potential market, and is familiar with prices across the board. The OP is in a position similar to Amazon-lots of money to manipulate markets, lots of knowledge of those markets. A lot of the producct sold is bought from others who have made it, because it is faster to by it at a good price than make it. In exchange, the OP is taking on some risk here-the market could shift or collapse, and the OP can be stuck with unsaleable inventory that must be released at fire sale prices. Not all players can support that risk. Instead, they are struggling to stay above water. They are out there running quests and picking up mats, and then knocking out whatever they can so they can afford repairs and skillz and whatnot. For these people, maximizing profit is not nearly so important as reducing risk-the cost of not being able to buy a skillz upgrade is much higher than a few thousand credits. Basically, there are two markets: the primary market, where the producers sell to the OP and other rich individuals, and the secondary market, where the OP sells to consumers. While the profit margins are higher in the secondary market, so is the risk and the capital requirements. Selling in the primary market is not necessarily a mistake, if the seller does not have the knowledge to evaluate risk, or the capital to support it. Selling far below the second-lowest price encourages speculative buying-in other words, the OP is more likely to buy it. And this happens even if there is no demand in the secondary market.

If the Resolve bar is white and decreasing...they are immune to Dirty Kick. You have to wait until the bar disappears before it will work.

I can sort of agree with your point. It seems strange that you can take out the defenders at a point and still not be able to take it. I try to look at ACW with a bit different perspective: the idea is not to blow the enemy up, but to attack the weakly defended point. Then the respawn rate doesn't matter-they are alive, just in the wrong place to help. I see this happen with well-coordinated teams, where rather than attack the same point until wiping out the defenders (as you point out, this is very difficult)-on your own respawn, you go where you were NOT fighting at last. This can create distraction on the defenders-you can find them afk, or overreponding. Once their main army is defending the wrong point, capping is easy. Also, calling enemy troop movements through the tunnel between left and right can make this even easier.

Sometimes the faction imbalance on Ilum becomes excessive. Most of us know this, but all the methods to even out seem to have serious problems. What if the underpopulated faction was allowed to send people under lvl 50 to Ilum? They could have the bolster buff applied, and receive Valor for fighting. In addition, you could add some reward system (mercenary commendations?) to encourage under-50s to go serve as cannon fodder to the opposing faction's Battlemasters...I mean, to go fight. Any opinions on this? This seems to me to potentially address the pop imbalance concerns, without bending game rules (Republic as miniboss) or denying player choice (zone limits, forced faction selection, etc). I think this would be even better coupled with a faction bonus associated with some medium-term accomplishment on Ilum. I am thinking something like "Hold these 4 points 55% of this week, and all players on the faction receive +5% Cr when they receive Cr next week". This creates a good incentive to compete on Ilum, and Cr are useful to draw the under-50 crowd. TL;DR: Let under-50s come to Ilum for Republic to make up pop imbalance.

I picked mostly dark side options.

This is the first MMO I ever played. I rolled Republic because I figured they would be the underdogs, just like in the Star Wars movies I loved as a kid. I _wanted_ it to be hard. I started doing PvP around level 20. It was insane at first-it was incredibly fast-paced compared to PvE, random, chaotic...I loved it. While at work, I would read the forums to learn how to get better. I saw interesting ideas on how to spec my character, strategy, tactics, terminology, techniques for how to play better... Then with patch 1.1, they created the 50s bracket. I was so sad I was 49 and missed seeing what happened on Day One at Ilum at my server...but I knew from the pictures of that event that this game had the capacity to create an absolutely epic war, if they could address the performance issues. Then last night I hit 50...and I was a bit nervous. I had read so many posts here about how WZs were going to be hopeless for fresh lvl 50s. I had prepared as best I could, using Artifice (which I had also read here many times was completely useless) to get myself a purple lightsaber hilt and purple enhancements, and queued for my first WZ as a 50. It was an absolute blast. Everyone knew the maps, so there was learning curve. I knew I was weaker than everyone, so I took point to draw fire away from better geared toons and tried to cap objectives and peel the enemy (I am playing a Guardian, so I can still take quite a bit of damaage, even-undergeared). BEst moment was in 3-3 Huttball match, with the clock ticking down, standing in the middle of six of the other team, not even able to see the ball-carrier but knowing I had him targeted, killing him with 3 sec on the clock for the win. So after getting my 3 WZ wins, I headed out to Ilum. Again, I was nervous, but I had to see for myself if this was actually bad. When I got there, the reps were badly out-numbered. I immediately started forming a group and wandering the map. We killed a few imps, got killed a few times. More people showed up. Soon several groups had dissolved into a 16-man Ops group, and we were slaughtering imps everywhere. Then a giant pack of Imps came at us-and we wiped them. They came back stronger, and wiped us. We made one more attack, but by then everyone had completed their daily, and we were hopelessly outnumbered, so I headed back to the fleet to turn in missions. TL;DR: PvP from the Republic perspective is awesome at 50, at least on Kinrath Spider. If you thought it would be easy, go fight algorithms in PvE (which I also think is a lot of fun, btw). In a couple hours, with just a pick-up Ops group, a large group of us was easily able to put together some awesome huge battles with imps, and win some.

I liie the idea, but why not approach it directly? Just increase the xp, credit, commendation and valor rewards based on a sliding scale for how fast the match was won. They must have extensive data on how long these matches last now, so they could set up a mechnaic so that as the match is won faster and faster, the team rewards for winning the match increase. So much better than being farmed by premade for 6 minutes in a 5-0 Huttball match...

I really just want a restraining bolt for C2-N2. To shut him up. I have never been so sympathetic to Han Solo dealing with 3PO as I am when that idiot starts talking about seat cushions.

First, this is my first MMO, so I have no experience with the genre in general. But I see this problem in maybe slightly different terms. Almost every possible "solution" I see to this problem seems to be based on directly nerfing the overpopulated faction or buffing the underpopulated faction. Or using server tricks to create a "fair" fight through instancing. I have not quite finished leveling to 50, but it seems pretty clear to me that the only real issue here is the imbalance at Ilum, and the only real reason even that is an issue is it is not fun for either side. So instead of lame mechanics like turning the underpopulated faction into minibosses, what if a faction-wide mechanic was added that encouraged the undepropluated faction to go to Ilum, and encouraged the underpopulated faction to do something else? I'm thinking something like this: The ratio of Empire:Republic is sampled every 10 sec. The average ratio is then calculated for the trailing 24 hours. Based on this T24H ratio, if it it varies by more than say 2:1 or 1.5:1 or whatever, the high pop faction gets increased XP (only helps non-level 50 characters, encouraging people to play alts) and decreased valor rewards on Ilum. Maybe even increased WZ valor rewards. Meanwhile, the low pop faction gets increased valor rewards on Ilum, and decreased valor rewards in WZ, to drive action.

Why start counting from the first line of code? The game starts with the design; the code is just the implementation of it. I could imagine the concept for this game in 2003 while playong KOTOR. In fact, the people who designed KOTOR probably already conceived it. So we could just say this game is already well over 10 years old, and they _still_ haven't fixed any of the *********** bugs. Or we could pick some other date...perhaps the date it went on sale to the general public? On Decemeber 20th, 2011? Maybe start counting that as the day it started... It sure is simpler. I bet you werre happy with the latest Duke Nukem project schedule. In the film indutry, they call what you want "development hell." It's where my Reservoir Dogs sequel is.