Thanks everyone, the last time I made a suggestion thread it took them about a month after seeing 100+ replies just to put anything in.

That was part of my OP that was moved to the "suggestion box." One problem is that a lot of people don't even vote MVP, whether they just don't know to do so or think MVP votes are irrelevant.

I had a previous thread that was moved to the "suggestion box" about what I'd like to see to make the PVP warzone experience more fun, mainly aimed towards non-rated warzones. It is now closed so this thread is to expand on it a little bit. I've noticed now that we're back to "play" warzones to complete the daily, many players aren't playing to win. They may say they're trying, but realistically they're either not trying or they're trying to make sure they get their 8 medals in before the warzone ends (particularly stealthers that will "capture" a node then afk in stealth to get defender medals). Suggestion #1: Simple, change the daily back to win 3 games. I used to like it because it made people play to win usually forgetting about medals, now even easier because of the dauntless medals. The only reason I don't like it is because my faction (Imperial) on my server (The Bastion) is almost completely full of people that are considered utter trash at PVP. Recruits I don't mind, at least they're putting in the effort and we all have to start somewhere right? Then there's the Battle Masters and War Heroes that earned their gear through grinding but think they're amazing just because of the gear they were handed through grinding. Suggestion #2: Also simple, put the medal cap back at 4 medals. The faster people cap out on medals, the faster they can focus on winning. Suggestion #3: If your attention span is to the point where you "TLDR" anything more than a paragraph, stop wasting your time and move on because this is a laundry list of medal earning that I'm suggesting to add in and why I think they should be added into the game. The names of course are names I didn't think about too hard, the conditions/numbers are to play around with the ideas, and nothing of course is concrete in what I want. They're just simply suggestions. The current attacker/defender points system might need some tweaks, but they'd be minor tweaks if people feel they'd need to tweak at all. To attempt to shorten the explanations, I'll be using Imperial versions of the classes so I don't have to always say assassin/shadow or sorcerer/sage. GENERAL MEDALS: -Curative Medicine: "Cleanse" (cure for mercenaries) 20 negative effects. Unknown to most, but there are quite a number of builds that revolve around curable debuffs to do more damage. Marauder Annihilation spec, Bounty Hunter Pyrotechs, etc. I spend a lot of time cleansing debuffs so I have to heal less. My healing at the end of a game isn't as impressive anymore (~500k avg /flex) but it's for the better because my teammates live longer since there's less for me to heal in the short spans of time they would normally have if I didn't spam Cure. -Curative Medicine 2: cleanse 50 negative effects -Disruptive: Interrupt (kick/jolt/distracting shot/etc.) 10 spells. People say to mark and focus on healers but the unsung hero of this style of play is the marauder and/or assassin that's stopping the heals entirely. A good healer can still make ways to heal when people are attacking him, but what good is a healer that can't cast any heals at all? -Disruptive 2: interrupt 25 spells -Super healer: 450-500k healing medal (yes it's possible to hit those numbers even while spamming Cure) -Super damage: 450-500k damage medal (yes it's possible to hit those numbers even while facing other war heroes) -Steadfast guardian: earn 3k defender points without entering combat. Let's be honest, guard duty is BORING when nobody is coming to your node, but it still needs to be done to stop the would be "ninjas" from just taking it for free. So why not reward the guy that's not playing a warzone but rather watching his teammates have fun because he has to be vigilant when defending? Of course this would have to combine with my suggestion of lowering defense points earned for free based on how many players are "defending." -Steadfast guardian 2: 10k defender points without entering combat. Also possible since I've had games where my stats were 0 healing, 0 damage, 2k attacker points, 12k+ defender points. -Relentless: die 3 times while attacking an enemy/neutral objective. Let's face it, the attacker points system sucks in comparison to the defender point system. How many medals does your average player/class earn while fighting in the meat grinder that is the middle node in Civil War? If nobody owns it, it's not considered attacking even though we're fighting tooth and nail for it? -Underdog: get a killing blow on an enemy that has higher valor and/or expertise than you. Self explanatory. -Inconceivable: Solo kill on an enemy that has higher valor and/or expertise than you. Most likely to happen when that player exits combat with low health and you happen to have a finisher. -Reinforcement: use a "crowd control" effect (ex: concussion missile, knockbacks, whirlwind, etc.) within 30-40 meters of a teammate claiming an objective. Smart players know it only takes one person to cap on civil war or voidstar so if they're not doing it their job is to stop people who would try to stop their capper. -Watchdog: disrupt/stop 10 enemies from finishing their capture (counts when they're at least 50% from finishing the capture). I know I'm not alone when I say that I've had almost my entire team at a node but not one of them is paying attention to the guy that snuck up behind them and said "hey thanks for the free node" quite a number of times. Reward the people that pay attention or save their stun breaks just to stop someone from capturing. -Thief: Capture a node/plant the bomb with 2+ enemies within 10-30 meters. Best example, enemy team tunnel visions, I come from boring guard duty at snow and immediately ninja mid node while their backs are turned. 0 MVP votes even though we won off that ninja since I stayed to help defend for the rest of the game. -Heroic: survive for more than 30 seconds with 2+ enemies attacking you -Unyielding: survive for more than 30 seconds with 2+ enemies attacking you (solo). Just them vs you, no healer on you, no guard, just you, your gear, and your skill. WARZONE SPECIFIC MEDALS: Huttball: -Nabber: grab the ball within 2-3 seconds of a reset. Better you than the enemy team, right? -Ball Hog: grab the ball within 2-3 seconds of a reset 3 times. Sometimes all you do is get the reset and give it to your team. -Swiftfoot: score the ball within 30 seconds (maybe 1 minute is more feasible) of a reset. Don't say it's limited to Juggernauts please. Marauders, Inquisitors, even just plain good passing can get it done. -Interceptor: intercept a pass. Should already be a medal, right? -Quarterback: pass the ball to teammates 5+ times. With some limits of course so people don't pass it back and forth to abuse it and waste time. Good passing wins games. Period. -Touchdown: score the ball -Hat Trick: score the ball 3 times -One-timer/Alley Oop: pass the ball to a teammate who's in the end zone. Currently worth 2500 attacker points for both of you, but could possibly also be a medal in itself. -Death Saving Throw: (DND nerds rejoice!) pass the ball to a teammate within 2-5 seconds of your death. Simply put, you're going to die within 2-5 seconds and you managed to connect a pass instead of handing the ball to the enemy by dying. Civil War: -Patroller: earn 2k defender points per area on at least 2 defensive objective areas. Come to save the day here, come to save the day there, then back over here. Where's that guy's glory? -see steadfast guardian, relentless, watchdog, and reinforcement Novare Coast: -see patroller -see steadfast guardian, relentless, watchdog, and reinforcement Voidstar: -Banana peel: defeat at least 1 enemy by knocking them off the bridge/into the reactor core pit. A lot of us have done it, it's great for offense AND defense. -Isolated: defeat 3 enemies while your team is respawning on the other side of the bridge/laser fields. You have no reinforcements, the attackers' reinforcements are spawning right on top of you. Where's the medal for heroism when you and maybe a couple of teammates hold out in that situation? Maybe we can call it the "Leonidas" medal. -see patroller, steadfast guardian, watchdog, and reinforcement There, my usual long winded, TLDR, tester to developer report style post is done. Constructive criticism is always appreciated and intelligent responses are encouraged. PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF (INSERT YOUR GOD OR LACK THEREOF HERE) DO NOT REPLY WITH RETARDED, UNINTELLIGENT, ONE-LINER FLAMING RESPONSES.

Agreed, sad times we live in when common responses to things are "TLDR" or "LOL n00b!"

It seems that the pvp discussion area is full of people that are "TLDR" so I'm going to try linking to my warzone wishlist thread on the general discussion area. http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=505024

1. Glad we agree 2. Lol no? Are you one of the leavers i'm talking about? Ditch the team as soon as things start to LOOK bad? 3. Sounds like a "take a freebie node and sit for defender medals" let the rest of the team do the work right? 4. See #3 5. Noticing a pattern coming from your short, nondescript responses. Priority target markers can be key to a victory. 6. Pattern is continuing, a team that doesn't know how to play only creates more people spamming "L2PLAY N00B!" which is not constructive and doesn't teach anything to the people that don't know how to play, let alone win. 7. Guessing you took the money and didn't buy a single piece of recruit gear, just grinding out comms for the real "free" gear. 8. If you think it's funny, it's probably why your legacy and title are slowing any heals on you, that's IF healers are willing to heal you. 9. Small request, healers have learned to live with it but having it would make life a lot easier. 10. Knowing who's scoring for you let's you know who's carrying you to victory. "Votes are useless" pretty much confirms my suspicions about your play style.

First of all I’d like to say I’m grateful for the server mergers, being able to finish my dailies at any time of the day again is great but the purpose of this post is to improve the overall warzone experience. I’ve noticed that there are a LOT of bad PVP players out there and my friends have theorized a few things about that issue. One of which is that some of the servers that merged into my new home just didn’t have enough PVP population so the players that came from very low population servers just don’t have as much warzone experience as people from my old server. Another theory is that many people just aren’t theorycrafters/mathhammers/etc. so they don’t understand how important certain aspects of the game can be like the expertise stat or just stats in general. Please bear in mind that this is aimed mostly at non-rated warzones. Now, on to the wishlist! Here are the suggestions (in no particular order) that others may or may not feel might improve warzones: 1) Give a bonus to a player that’s taking a “leaver’s” spot. When a player leaves a game, he/she is abandoning the team. Sure most of the time there are enough people queuing to immediately fill that player’s spot, but there something else to consider: the time it takes that player to accept the queue and load the warzone, the team is down 1 player which is a penalty in itself but quickly becomes cumulative when people are constantly leaving because they think the game is already over. I’m thinking something along the lines of a 5-10% bonus to warzone comms and valor earned for every minute they missed. Ex: a Huttball game has 5 minutes left on the clock and a player leaves. The player filling the spot gets a 50% (@5%) or 100% (@10%) bonus to comms and valor earned because 10 minutes have passed and they only have 5 minutes to make an impact on the game or earn their medals. 2) Following up on “leavers,” create a severe penalty for leaving a warzone in progress. Leaving during the warmup time is fine because it normally has no effect on the game but leaving once the gate has opened can definitely impact the game because a team is now shorthanded in the way I just mentioned above. Maybe something like a 5-10 minute no queuing penalty should be applied to players that just leave warzones in a huff because “their team is just pure garbage.” If a player joined a warzone in progress and then left, that could be perfectly understandable and would make that player immune from the penalty. 3) Give attacker points/medals to those fighting for a neutral territory. In Civil War and Novare Coast, it doesn’t feel fair that players going for the “freebie” nodes can easily earn medals just by capturing the point and doing possibly nothing for the rest of the game because everyone on both teams is fighting for the common node and in the process possibly earning little to no medals. Even giving 50% of the normal values when fighting for a node that has no controller could make it worthwhile because it’s THOSE players that are usually trying to win it for the team. I’ve seen plenty of games of Civil War where both teams take their “freebie” tower with no disruption while 7 players from both teams are battling it out for control of middle, continuing until both ships are at ~400 life (the worst I’ve seen is somewhere around 250 life per ship with middle still uncontrolled). 4) I’ve asked for this before but it went unanswered so I’ll ask for it again. Please put a cumulative penalty per player when it comes to defender points. The more players there are defending a node, the slower the defender point timer should go. In its current state all it does is promote “conceding.” Too many people think, “well we’re not going to win, so I might as well farm defender medals.” Then you end up having 4-6 sometimes all 8 players “defending” the node with at least 1 person being AFK until the game ends. I was misunderstood the first time so I’ll explain ahead of time. If there is one person defending, maybe even two people, the defender point timer runs as normal. If there are 3 players there, each player should now suffer a penalty to their free defender points (I think last time I suggested 5% per player) so that would mean each player is now earning free defender points at 85% of the normal rate. If there are 4, now it’s a 20% decrease making all 4 players earn free defender points at 80% of the normal rate. 5) Have an option somewhere in the preferences that you can check on/off that stops you from reusing a target marker that’s already being used. I loved the change that allowed non-operation leaders to mark targets and also hotkey target markers but it also created some problems. I’ve noticed that some of the newer players or just plain bad players have been putting target markers on people that do not or should not be the target of focus fire. Another thing, which might be rare, is that it happens accidentally. A member of my rated warzone team bought a new keyboard and it turns out he was accidentally cycling through marks. Sometimes everyone is competent and knows that a target should be marked for a reason, but due to lack of communication they’re using a mark already in use, let’s say the purple gear mark. Now the original target is no longer left marked. If the checkbox is not agreeable, then at least have the marks prioritize in a certain order let’s say gear, hilt, fire, etc. This way, if gear and hilt are already being used and someone tries to mark a target with gear or hilt, it will default it to the next mark in line which in this example would be fire. 6) A huge perk to those of us that are highly experience in warzones would be a warzone tutorial for new players. Let’s be honest, the loading screen doesn’t give you even a decent percentage of what you need to know to warzone, it just doesn’t have that capability. Also, without having someone/something to mentor a new player, that player is just going to run around and not have an clue as to what’s going on. It makes for very bad players or just no player at all because they’re not having fun due to the fact they have no idea what to do. My personal preference would be to have a player run through a tutorial mode or a mentor mode before allowing that player into live warzones. It’s bad enough to be under-geared sometimes, but it’s worse when your gear is bad as well as your know how of the game. At the very least showcase the “throw the Huttball” icon in the Huttball loading screen and make the button more pronounced when you have the ball by making it flash or something else noticeable. Huttball in my opinion is the MOST team based warzone and when people just plain don’t know how to pass the ball, it can ruin it for the whole team if that person randomly gets the ball. 7) I like the recruit currency idea (not sure if that was a dev reading one of my older posts or not) but there’s something that makes the change irrelevant. A while back I said, give players free recruit gear upon hitting 50 so they have no excuse to not have expertise at 50. Seems like the devs listened. The problem I have is that they also added an option of the 320k? credit token. Most people do the sensible thing and take the money, buy the pieces of recruit they want to use and not buy the recruit pieces that they can already replace with battlemaster upon hitting 50. Even though most people either get full recruit or do it my way by saving up comms before 50 and buying some battlemaster to mix with my recruit (making that recruit token give me a little bit of profit) there are STILL people that take the money and run in with 0 expertise because their logic is “Well even though they gave me 320k credits, if I have to buy the recruit gear the gear is no longer free.” Does that make sense to anybody? It boggles my mind when I read that in ops chat. So my suggestion is this: Keep giving the free recruit gear BUT make it a package of tokens so the player may decide which pieces from which sets they want (ex: I want 3 pieces of field tech and 2 pieces of field medic instead of being forced into 5 pieces of either). Allowing a character that was high enough valor (let’s say valor 50) before the patch that introduced the tokens to get the free money token could still be acceptable. Giving free money to people that are just expecting to be carried into war hero gear is NOT acceptable. That’s adding fuel to the flame of moochers that may once again run rampant. 8) This one is mostly for me and every other healer out there. Please give us a preferences check box(es) that allows us to suppress another player’s legacy name AND/OR title in warzones. I understand that the legacy system is another thing to add to our individuality and titles are meant to show off what you’ve earned, but as a healer in a warzone seeing something like “Zomglazers Pewpewpew, Grand Champion of the Great Hunt” is not only distracting, it makes it a pain to figure out what their name in the ops window is, thus making it harder to keep our team or even just them alive. 9) This one is another thing for us healers. Can we please change the Ops frame to only light up names that are in line of sight rather than in range? This would probably increase my/our overall healing efficiency greatly because as we all know, there’s tons of ways to LOS a ranged DPS in Huttball but at the same time they accidentally get used to LOS your healer. It’s not just limited to Huttball either. The turret control node in Civil War, the bunker walls and artillery in Novare Coast, the pillars in Voidstar and the list goes on when it comes to LOS’ing your healer. 10) I’d like to know who’s doing what in warzones. This one is aimed mostly at Voidstar and Huttball. I’ve been in premades where my group doesn’t get any MVP votes even though they scored 3 “touchdowns” or planted 2 bombs. Instead of seeing something like “West bomb has been planted” is it too much to ask to have it say “Chowda has planted the West bomb” or “Chowda has scored a touchdown?”

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=455753 The above link is my previous thread, but it can't be said enough. Servers are taking a dive in players and how can we possibly have a community when there are no players? I have a screenshot and If I could post it I would. The screenshot itself is fairly irrelevant but what it illustrates is the Black Vulkars Imperial Fleet at 6pm PDT on a Thursday evening with a fleet population of 13 people, 7 of which were level 50. As I'm writing this, I've been sitting in wz queue for about 30 minutes now. In the last 2 1/2 hours I've gotten 3 wzs and all of them were losses due to the fact that on my server the Republic players already have access to 8 man queueing. It's not official 8 man queueing, it's just that there's pretty much only 8-10 Republic players that wz on my server. So now there are no wz queues, mainly becuase the Imperial players that are queueing have no desire to keep losing to players that actually have teamwork. Here's some suggestions for warzones in the meantime: 1) Let us start a war zone with 8 players. I'm pretty sure nobody will mind if it's a 4 on 4 so long as we get to play. 2) Do away with the deserter debuff because I'm also fairly sure that people that go into a war zone don't intend on leaving, somewhat like a starving man not refusing a meal of any sort. Even if they DO intend on not playing, they just find somewhere to AFK safely until the war zone is complete. This debuff is also a pain in the rear for the bug that "rarely" happens that makes you dead but alive in the respawn area and unable to move, thus leaving you only able to pray that the game finishes before the deserter timer runs out. 3) Turn the deserter debuff into a waiting room type of thing. Let's say we DO get to start a war zone 4 on 4 and a 9th player queues in, allow that player to join in but not participate until a 10th player is found. It doesn't have to work exactly in those numbers, but something along those lines. The waiting room debuff would be more for something along the lines of: A 4 on 4 has already start, but a group of 2 players has queued in, it wouldn't be fair for the 2 players to make it a 4 on 6, so they sit in the waiting room until another player is found so it can at least be a 5 on 6. Anyone having to wait in the waiting room will still receive credit towards their war zone quests, even if they didn't get to participate. 4) Change the way war zone shutdown works AND/OR change the way teams are shuffled. it doesn't seem right to be on a team where we have 6-7 and the war zone shuts down because the other team doesn't have enough and my team takes the loss (or even the win for that matter).

I'd like to see the server mergers ASAP, as is the common consensus on this thread since a lot of us PVP but can't get a wz queue. I do have a couple of suggestions if they can't complete that fast enough: 1) Come up with a new wz that requires less players, similar to a coliseum. I was discussing it with a friend online today and we both thought it could be a lot of fun. It would work something like this: While you queue for regular wzs, you can have an option to queue yourself or your group for 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, or 4v4 deathmatch as well (depending on your premade's group size). Of course these deathmatch games would count towards daily/weekly credit and they also require far less people to start. I can see it being the old infinite Huttball days but it's better than seeing general chat all day saying "Any wz qs going? No? K back to D3 lates." I'll admit that even I pop in and out of SWTOR to see if queues are firing and if not, that's the only time I really play D3 and it feels a lot of players on my server are the same. No Ops? No wz? Time for D3. 2) Give us a reason to fight for Ilum again, one that can also be credited towards our wz daily/weekly. Something along the lines of fighting beside NPCs to push the territory towards our enemy faction's base and reset it every 30 mins or hour or whatever time frame seems fit. It can be a mix of the existing wzs. Controlling artillery batteries to stop enemy vehicles from pushing, controlling anti-air towers to prevent enemy bombers from flying overhead, planting bombs to destroy key enemy buildings such as barracks that produce troops, factories that produce war droids/tanks, etc. We can even add in throwing something at each other. Let's say a satchel of bombs that need to be planted (because bombs for anti-buildings are limited) so instead of running somewhere to get a new bomb or losing the one you're holding, you can pass your bomb if you're about to die instead of losing it. Either way, please please PLEASE do something to keep people playing. I like this game for its PVP, sometimes even its PVE and I know it has a lot of potential, but potential will never be seen if people aren't paying their subscriptions.

Thus the reason for the OP, for all those that are "putting in their 2 creds" that either aren't understanding the OP or are trying to troll him/her because they don't want Imperial side to have the enhancement as well. What's ridiculous now is the rapid decline in active players so your assumption of every 20 minutes or so is nowadays realistically around every hour.

Agreed, but at least we're not paying monthly for D3. BW is making us pay for what is these days essentially a single player game.

Agreed. At this point I'm trying to convince 3 of my friends to work hard on getting to 50 just so my whole play group can attempt to start a wz queue late at night. Even if we have 4 on one team and 4 on the other, as long as we can get a queue to fire off. They might even need to say "screw factions, any 16 players that queue up are getting shuffled and put on teams together." 8 imps vs 4 imps + 4 pubs (or vice versa) shuffled up? Could be funny. In a way, the low server populations are working similar to faction gear/class ability imbalances that are holding back ranked war zones. If we can't get queues to fire off, how can we even earn the commendations needed to buy war hero gear when ranked really does (if ever) come out.

Agreed, I'm only still playing mainly because my friends want to play. Low server population is tolerable so long as there's cross server pvp or grouping. The low population mainly bugs me because of long queue times and it's hard to make credits off a small amount of buyers who probably have the skills or friends with the skill to make what I'm trying to sell.

So I just tried to log on to send out crew skills before maintenance and realized one of the important things I wanted to see changed. I saw a previous thread once that asked why the west coast USA has to suffer the horrid maintenance times. Maintenance was supposed to be 12:00AM PDT, yet at 11:45PM I couldn't log on? A lot of MMOs do maintenance by region, why can't we?

So just to be clear "Fatman" IS a server name and not a person? Still not up to date with all the drama/current events of players, game development, etc.

I agree...but: Play just to play, I think most everyone does that. Play to be social, somewhat hard with low populations right? Play to help others, see above. The game will go off the market soon if people keep leaving for other games because they're slowly getting lonely on this one. I think BW doesn't really want to merge servers because that's he first sign that a game is dying and they don't want to give up or admit it just yet.

Fanboy much? Just kidding. I like the improvements they make also, the ones that work anyways. The problem is that there are people without much patience who aren't willing to wait 1-2 months for improvements that will make them stay instead of playing other "hot" games like Diablo 3. I'll be honest and quote myself when people ask me if I'm going to play Diablo 3. SWTOR dailies will be done, then D3 time, then see how both games go over time. If all of my friends move over to another game, I go too because I hate playing games by myself.

I completely agree. They tried and failed with Ilum, it had a decent idea but lacked followthrough. If there were a couple of flashpoints or even operations that were only available when your faction controlled the planet that would make the game insanely fun. PVE players would have to learn how to PVP and PVP players probably wouldn't have any interest in the planet other than the fact that they can gank each other all day. A problem with that though is the balance of population between factions but that can somehow be fixed with a buff similar to the 10-49 wz buff. Even play times can be ok with that if the planet can change hands every 4-6 hours or so.

So it seems that the most common thing people really crave is SERVER MERGES or some way of getting/maintaining a better community. What seems to be trending on my server is people rolling Republic characters on "Fat Man's" server. Not sure which server that is but apparently he's notorious enough that people call it his server, not even by it's real name. Hopefully the developers understand the importance of players and community. To put things into perspective for them: People on my server are willing to leave everything behind, crew skills, legacy, character levels/gear/credits, etc. to join (and by join I mean completely start over) a server that has 10 second to 1 minute PVP queue times at any given time and probably PVE isn't hard on that server either due to the fact that there are so many people on it.

With a list of new games coming out in the near future, (one in particular: Diablo 3 being available for play as soon as we're on maintenance time) the thread title is the discussion at hand. What will keep you playing SWTOR after all these new guys come out? Post up a rating (out of 10) on how important the change is to you with a short comment on why. Let's please keep it intelligent and civil and hope that it catches the eyes of the development team. Here's a short form that I'm going to use. Copy, paste, and edit as needed to create a reply: A bit about myself I play for: 90% PVP, 5% PVE, 5% story Server: Black Vulkars Server population: Light Rough average of players on my fleet during my peak play time: 70-100 Changes I'd like to see: (8-player wz queue or cross server PVP: 9/10) Queue times on my server are usually horrible and it gets worse when I wait a long time for a queue just to get teamed up with players that don't know what they're doing or just don't care and we lose because of it. (Server merges or character/legacy transfers: 10/10) Plain and simple. People want to play with other people, tons of "Light" population servers are not good when there can be a handful of "Heavy" or even "Full" population servers. Wz queue times are shorter, in-game economy is better, more people are available for Flashpoints/Operations, need I say more? (New content in 1.3: 5/10) New content is usually good, just not when there are other issues hindering a game's progress and a player's willingness to play. (Events similar to the Rakghoul event: 3/10) Events can be fun but for the most part but in the game's current state, they're more of a distraction. The Rakghoul event is a good example, many of my old guild mates quit when they were feeling bored with the game and were planning on coming back in 1.2 mainly for the Rated wz system. They re-subscribed and patched up only to find that there were no rated queues and found an event going on as a consolation prize. (Misc. small bug fixes: 8/10) A huge bug usually isn't a problem because usually it's immediately attended to. A small bug usually isn't a problem because it's small, but when the number of small bugs pile up it becomes a large swarm of a problem. Whenever there's a patch and I'm at my local LAN center, the common saying for SWTOR is "fix one thing, break two more." It's a messed up thing to say about the development team but sometimes it's true. Take the matrix cube bug, a lot of us lost the use of our matrix cube for two days because the development team made a change that may not have even been necessary. Keep in mind two days isn't very long but it's the principle behind why we lost it that's important. There's more changes I'd like to see to make me keep paying my subscription, but they're not coming to mind presently which means they're probably not all that important and these are probably enough to digest for now.

Ways to control whom you queue with would be amazing, even the slightest improvement might make PVP fun again. Right now though, it seems like only the "best" on my server group together and aim to steamroll a group of pugs or are just plain attempting to make sure garbage pugs aren't on their team, making solo queue incredibly hard to obtain wins and sometimes even hit the 8 medal cap. The amount of trash players also ends up leading to a lot of "smack" talking like, "Oh wow we steam rolled your premade with ours! We're better than you LOLOLOLOL." Even though most players tend to forget that there are 4 other people on each team because guess what? We're only allowed to queue as a group of 4 maximum.

If they're really not going to be combined, this would be a good option and I wouldn't feel like an *** for spending 5 million credits on the ship GTN.

Well thank you for that, I'll just have to hope I'm still playing by that time because right now I'm not making any money crafting on my faction due to the fact that there are not one, but TWO players that undercut so bad they're losing money because they're charging less than the cost of the materials. I know it's coming but yes I am too lazy to level a character on the opposing faction to get to fleet and park it near the GTN constantly checking prices on both sides and mailing items/credits back and forth.

What you're saying is essentially Rated warzones, which we were promised in 1.2 or "coming soon" shortly after, but has yet to arrive. This isn't about finding the time to play to gear up, it's about the fact that they pretty much said, "You just hit 50 and want to PVP? Here's a nice set of gear, it's actually better than what a lot of people worked hard to earn pre-1.2." Full recruit armor is cheap, requires no valor rank, requires no commendations, and has a very good stat line for what you're buying. The problem is that even with the cost reduction, players still feel that they can get by with their level 41 green gear and just slowly grind their way to battlemaster gear, no skill or real effort required, just complete the warzone and huzzah free commendations. Some people go as even running wz bots or "dual box" where they just run two computers, two accounts, and afk at least one of the characters.

What I'm asking for is a way to stop the people that only play warzones because they see it as free gear for very little work, removing the fun for people who are actually trying to win. Your "ask yourself" statement is somewhat contradictory as I am also a player, so why can't it be made fun for me as well? Nobody liked the deducted warzone commendations for a loss for two reasons: 1) 1.2 was bugged so that even if you hit your medal cap on a losing team you still got absolutely nothing and 2) there are more moochers looking for free gear than you'd expect so of course they're going to complain about not getting anything for not trying. I don't fully remember my OP, but didn't I say something SIMILAR to a gear score system? Not gear score specific? I know for sure I said it could be based on one stat or multiple stats. Since it's for randomizing the teams, it could even be a hidden stat that players can't use to "oust" eachother. I know which game to which you're referring and that made your gear score inspect-able for all the public to see. If leaving a warzone and immediately finding a queue into another warzone were simple, I WOULD leave and let the bads/moochers to their own devices, but seeing as how my formerly "FULL" population server is now a "LIGHT" population server, that's a very difficult thing to do. I overheard my friend watching some sort of developer interview about 1.3 and supposedly (if you listen between the lines) since people are too cheap to spend 150-300k credits on full recruit gear, they're even going to have chests that spawn in the Outlaw's Den on Tatooine giving a chance at free recruit gear. First they introduce the gear, then they make it cheaper, and now they're offering it for free with a bit of foot work. Seems to me that they recognize my complaint to the point (and others may have complained about it also), but don't feel like doing very much to fix the problem that may be impossible to fix due to the fact that it's about a player's attitude towards any sort of "hard" work. I think I'd settle simply for 8 man queues. It doesn't even have to be rated warzones, just the ability to queue up to 8 players to lessen the odds of getting the "carry me to free gear" players. I'd also settle for cross-server queues, maybe if I can get teammates from another server I might have better luck not getting the players that bane my existence and make me want to quit PVP altogether, which btw is 90% of the reason I play this game.