6 people on the republic fleet at 9:30am est in the morning on a friday morning on my est server...wz's don't even pop till after 10am or later most days. pretty pathetic and sad. the worst of it is that my server is one of the heavier populated ones, i feel for the guys on the servers with lower pops. last night i checked and over 30 servers (even the est ones) had light pops at 9:30pm est. there were only 2-3 heavy pops and 1 full.

gear imbalance should never be a problem in mmo's imho, simply becuase once the majority of a population starts clammoring for "advancement", they should create a new tier (something WAR failed to do), not creating better gear and/or levels for those already in the top tier. there was nothing more pathetic than having a sub rr 70 player try to take on an rr 90 in full DF. as for pop imbalance, that's a little more tricky. no one likes being the lead star in a bukkake style zerg beat down, but pop balance isn't easy to control in mmo's either. what needs to happen is for the underdog to have MAJOR incentives to play against terrible odds. the aao system in war was nice, but didn't go far enough. rather than just give added xp/rr for kills, they should have had a stackable stat boost that scaled with the ratio. another incentive would be to earn underdog coins that can be used to purchase rare items that further enhance your character. that being said, the imperative in all of this is that there must not be huge gear imbalance, or you get aao farming, which is what happened in war as well. you'd have a small band of highly geared players marauding through a zone with a bunch of low rr players and having their way with them (sometimes whole wb's couldn't take down a 6man). so, first things first, don't create a massive gear gap, then add MAJOR incentives to playing the underdog. open world pvp balanced and bob's your uncle...problem solved.

how was using the collision detection at a choke point to hold a keep an "exploit"? as a tank, i loved that part of the game play. it was really nice when (per usual) we had massive aao due to the pop imbalance on badlands during primetime for some of the pacific tz players (aluba shrimp anyone?) without cd, they would have just walked right on through with their superior numbers and wiped the floor with us. granted, they usually ended up doing that anyway, but for the most part we'd hold them off long enough that the renown we got was at least worth it.

i get that feeling quite often, but sadly, i sold my toon to prevent that notion from taking hold and getting me to waste more money on a dead game. on the flip side of that coin, i was able to get $200 for a rr 92 sm in full df w/ sc weapon just before they consolidated to just one server.

warhammer's pvp was better than any other mmo i've played. if you really want to make a bold statement by comparing this game's bad pvp to another mmo, go with...lotro's pvp was 1000 times better than the open world pvp this game offers. if they want to make this game's open world pvp better they HAVE to include real objectives/defensible positions and for the love of god include collision detection. there was nothing better (in WAR) than standing in a keep door with a handful of guys while a horde of enemy players did all they could to get inside.

war's biggest downfall (after they fixed the initial launch stuff) was the fact that if you joined late or stopped playing for a time (say after patch 1.36) you had a miserable month or two (maybe more depending on class/playtime/RR before 1.36) before you could even be competitive in SC's and RVR. i can remember hitting turtles like anomandar for single digits as a rr ~40 and thinking how broke the game was. they eventually came up with a solution (not capping RR in the lower tiers) but by then the game was finished and everyone knew it. it's a shame, i hit rr 92 before i sold my toon and was having fun, but the server pop had gone to **** and it wasn't worth logging in most of the time. warhammer had great potential, but too many bad ideas/implimentations to survive.

do you REALLY get a sense of accomplishment from playing a video game? for me, basic training gave me a sense of accomplishment, finishing college gave me a sense of accomplishment, raising my 2 kids gives me a sense of accomplishment. getting bm in a video game? not so much. i play the game for enjoyment, not to feel better about myself and/or feel disdain for others that don't have the time/inclination to grind out the inevitable before everyone else has.

i see a whole lot of stupid in this post...someone actually took the time to write paragraph after paragraph of text to explain why he deserves bm more than the rest of us? i don't know whether to lol or feel sorry for you. either way, your last paragraph sums it up (kinda skipped the stuff in the mid, sorry, wasn't worth my time) if your not having fun, or as seems to be the case for you, if the game isn't making you feel better about yourself, maybe you shouldn't log on. there are many other games for you to choose from, hopefully one of them has that special something you've been looking for.

really? you SUFFERED while playing the game? are you a masochist or just stupid? if you are suffering, might i offer some advice? stop playing, if the game is causing you physical or mental anguish, maybe you should find something else to do. if, on the other hand, you are speaking in hyperbole, may i offer to you some more advice...get out more or read a paper, then you'll see that suffering is not something one should in any circumstance use to describe playing a video game.

so, what you're saying is...you feel stupid cuz you spent so much time in a video game grinding some virtual items that have no intrinsic value and now that said items are easier to get, you NOW feel like you wasted your time? Was there some incentive program i missed at launch that stated ifyou got to such and such valour rank before march, you'd win an all expense paid trip to far far away land or something? i think the real question you need to ask yourself is...do you play the game cuz you're having fun, or do you play it cuz it makes you feel better about yourself? another thing, have you given any thought as to WHY bw might have done this? I can tell you, as a rep player on a badly imbalanced server (3x imp pop nightly), something needed to be done to keep the imps from turning this game into Warhammer 2.0. as it was, ilum was completely off limits to rep players. any time we even sniffed the center the imps (through guild/region/social media chat) would swarm over us within 5 minutes. loads of valour for them and nothing for us (even if we happened to kill one of them, since they controlled the whole map, we got a whopping 20v for it) by doing this, they completely cut in half the avenues the rep side had to earn pvp gear and gain valour. how fun do you think i find it that at valour 56 (been playing since launch mind you) and i still don't have my champ gloves, pants or boots? all because the imps have turned illum into their own giant valour/gear lake due to poor population balance from the start. so how does that equate to "earning" your valour and/or gear?

yeah, then i guess the fact that he easily averages 400-500k healing in each wz (not even bm mind you) not to mention the sizeable dps he outputs means all we ever do is fight terrible players. but yeah, like i said, if you don't like the healing from that particular class, maybe it's time to reroll. he seems to be doing just fine with the class...just sayin'

couple of things: 1. judging a class's effectiveness by the number of players playing it is almost as retarded as saying pop music is the greatest, most ingenious music ever because lots of people listen to it. i played a hunter in lotro, by far the most populous class in the game at one point and also one of most gimped classes, if not THE most gimped class (capt's may have argued with me on this point ). there are many reasons people chose one class over another, and some of those reasons have nothing whatsoever to do with the class being op or gimped. 2. a scoundrel and myself (hybrid tank/dps guardian) fought off 4 imps the other night and not only did the scoundrel keep both of us healed so well that even with all 4 focusing one, then the other of us, that neither of us dropped below 3/4 health, but we killed all 4 with very little problem (neither of us is in BM, or even full chmp for that matter). so, as much as i'd hate to say it, becuase it always rubbed me the wrong way when it was said on the warhammer forums, i'm think this is a clear case of l2p. if you're having a rough time with the scoundrel, maybe try the sage or the bh, not all classes are going to be easy to roflstomp with.

i'm only 41 on my shadow, but i've lead almost every wz i've run in damage (and most times it's not even close). hell, when civil war wz's get out of hand and one side is dominating, i usually find myself going to one of the enemy held turrets and picking out a squishy to see if i can burst them down before their friends can kill me/out heal my dps. most times i'm successful, even out dps'ing several healers from time to time. so ya, shadow damage is fine imho. my advice would be to either tweak your build and/or skill rotation or reroll if shadow isn't as fun as you expected.

Open world pvp ended the moment they allowed one side to zerg. Ilum is a non-starter on my server due to the fact that at all times during the day, imps can zerg the center with at least double the pubs numbers. regardless of whether you believe this is inherent in all open world pvp, the fact is, all forms of open world pvp are doomed to failure if there is no incentive for the underdog to venture out into it.

i hit bm having never finished off my champ set, never got the legs, chest or gloves. broke system is broke.