I smell a sawbones nerf coming.

Nothing but (4) is true. I'm saying this from a healer's perspective. In fairness, I'm what was previously BiS augmented EWH, but that doesn't significantly affect my activation times; and the reality is that, right now, people are going down more quickly than I can get a cast off. There're very, very weird things going on with TTK, post-patch. I have no idea what side it's on -- whether I didn't prepare for the changes to bolster effectively, whether other people were twinking out their toons, or whatever -- but I do know that I got a "you just got killed by so-and-so by shadow-strike for 8k" message, and that strikes me as off. I also put up 700k heals / 100k damage in the one Huttball I played, which is quite a bit higher than I'd normally put up; I attribute it to dramatically more damage going out. Contrariwise, my numbers in other warzones are slightly less than normal-ish (probably because people tend to kill-hunt less in HB than other warzones, and because me / everyone else can't stay alive long enough for heals to register). TL;DR: Things are kind of whack right now.

There was a time when my rateds group couldn't get a ranked pop, so we were double-queued in regs. All eight of us only once wound up in the same warzone together, out of maybe the fifteen matches that we played. I think it's probably just a crap-shoot, and largely dependent upon how many people are pvp-ing at the time. Way back when, before the first server merges (when queue-times were dismal), a group of friends and I tried double-queueing, and it worked every time. With respect to the super-queue notion, I think there's probably a good bit of confirmation bias that goes on; with the same premades queueing over and over again, you're bound to see some of them together more than once (and many pvp-focused guilds field several premades at the same time).

I don't understand at least 50% of what you just wrote.

At level 39, you know nothing about (end-game) pvp healing. Totally different ball-game. I promise. Signed, a fairly well-regarded valor 97 sawbones (scoundrel) healer, who leveled as sawbones.

Does anyone actually care about server-firsts, outside of the initial races themselves? I couldn't care less about server first EC-NiM, at this point... bring on SV-HM and TFB-NiM!

This. And scamper

You are even worse than the ranters. And I loathe the ranters.

99% of the time, those are the guys who're at the bottom of the leaderboards.

Welcome!

Welcome!

First, as for hacks.... The nonsense about people using hacks to affect OTHER peoples' connection to the server is just that, nonsense, but lag hacks as such are very much real. Specifically, you can use a client-side network manager to modulate your ping-times in order to induce behavior that looks identical to normal lag, e.g., appearing in one spot, disappearing, and showing up somewhere else five seconds later. IMO, artificially-induced behavior like that is almost impossible to separate from just plain old natural lag -- which is why, even when other people are crying wolf, and I've witnessed the same exact behavior they're describing, I bite my tongue -- there's just no way to tell which is which. I do *feel* that I've seen some strange things happen since I started leveling an alt, in the past week; but feelings are just that, feelings, and only a certain, very flawed sort of person bases their judgments on them. Especially in the context of accusing someone of lacking integrity. Maybe I just haven't spent enough time living life from one side of a computer monitor, but, in the real world as I know it, attacking someone else's integrity, with no real evidence to back up your claim, results in getting your teeth punched down your throat. As for 50s... well, I haven't done warzones at that level since I started with my alt. Prior to that, I've never seen anything that struck me as particularly out of the ordinary, and have yet to see any evidence in support of the notion that hacks are at all prevalent on our server (I say this as someone with a 96 / 84 / 72 / and 51 toons... so I'm no stranger to 50 pvp). I'm well-aware that it's happened on other servers, and been a problem... I just haven't seen it on our server. Second... exploits are a different matter. When I think exploits, I think of things like corner-capping, /stuck'ing, and all of the other shady things that arise in our game, from time to time, when imperfectly tested patches are implemented. I've seen people use these, I see people use these, and I expect that they'll always be present, because there's no formal way of dealing with such things. It just is what it is.

This was pre-50 pvp.

Believe it or not, we're talking about two different warzones. In mine, the player openly admitted to what we were doing, and spent the match cussing us out for being "too stupid to throw the match." I haven't seen things like that, correlated w F2P, at least not at 50. I probably should've clarified, though, that F2P launched AFTER the last time I leveled my previous lowbie.

#racist I'm not even sure how I'd artificially throttle my connection for a single application to test that in the first place. I was just trying to offer a different perspective, as I have several Aussie friends who're fantastic players on my server, who've never mentioned the difference affecting them in any sense besides time-zone differences. But, you're at least right in the sense that it's not my fight, so my apologies for sharing their experiences and attempting to be welcoming.

Why would a third of a second reaction time make a difference in a game w a 1.5 second GCD? Even w 2.0's changes to alacrity taken into account, it still seems like the difference would be inconsequential. Sorry to everyone who feels miffed by it, I was a transfer at one point, too. I'm just playing Devil's advocate, as I'd love to see as many of you guys at BC as possible FTR, we've already got / always had a few Aussies, many of them amazing players, who've never expressed any issues with latency affecting their gameplay.

This is kind of interesting. I was queueing over the weekend, pub-side, had rep-vs-imp for the vast majority, and the team I was on won almost all of them (I was mostly solo-queueing). I think that 2x xp weekend may've skewed things, but it's been a while since I've leveled a toon. I hate that aspect of Civil War, period... but it's fairly rare for me to see people flat-out give up before the point of no return, even when it's very clear that one of the teams is out-gunned. Again, I suspect 2x xp weekend had something to do with it, as I was in a couple warzones with people who clearly had no idea what the rules were (in a Novare: "It's 70-30, we've already lost." Uh, no....). And I was in a Huttball where someone on our team literally tried to throw the game for us, by getting the ball, running it into our own endzone, and waiting to be killed... "because the more warzones we do, the more xp we'll get." IME, this isn't typical of our server. You know, it could also be ISP-related, rather than server distance. I switched from cable to fiber last year, and most of the time, it was great, but I'd experience random lag-spikes, just like what you're descriibing... sometimes enough to d/c me entirely, even though my connection itself hadn't dropped. Turned out I was too far from the phone company hub, so I had to switch back to cable, and everything was peachy-creamy again. Just a thought.

I had an Aussie guildie back before they opened up the APAC servers. IIRC, he said that his average latency was something like 350ms.

Can we have one, just ONE thread in our server forum, without it turning into some stupid drama-fest? Thanks.

Don't forget about "Not Ascension Strikes Back," which is unaffiliated with Ascension Strikes Back in every way.

DL is also up there, with a highly-competitive raiding group, although they've been off-calendar lately.

I think a lot of it depends on whether you're talking lowbies or 50s, and also if you're a solo-queuer or group-queuer. At lowbies, anything's anything. At 50, I feel like I run into a lot more groups consisting of double-imp premades than I find myself in, pub-side, and solo-queueing can be a real pain. That said, I think that, for the time being, the republic has a slight edge over the empire, in terms of elder-game pvp'ers, and if you put together a solid group there's more than a fighting chance. All in all, compared to what I've heard from people on the other servers, I'd say that we're pretty darned balanced. As far as queue times go, I'm not really sure I could give any reasonable estimate... I usually talk to friends, craft, do GTN stuff, whatever, between pops. It's not pre-1.2 long, but it's usually not one after the other, either. Queues (at 50) tend to die somewhere between 1 and 3am PST, but lowbies seem to run all night, most of the time. Ranked is fairly dead, at the moment. There're some great people / guilds working on changing that, but it remains to be seen whether anything will come of it. Cheats / hacks are almost non-existent, at least, in my experience, and the community's been very good about dealing with exploits. I think that's about it, in a nutshell.

I don't mean to get all serverist on anyone, but.... if you fundamentally love the game, and are actually seeing stuff like this, why not just re-roll on a server where it doesn't happen? I mean, I never, ever see 9/10 things that are discussed in the PVP forum happen on my server -- and that's being generous. Our rated teams even got together and made a pact to ban bubblestun , /stuck, and wall-capping, because everyone felt it was making the game less fun. Some of what I hear from people makes me wonder whether everyone else is crazy, or if I just really lucked out with the server that I initially rolled on.

I understand what you're saying, but this does not amount to P2W... unless you're talking about Eternity Vault, or something. As far as the progression instances in this game are concerned, gear is a prerequisite to success, not a determinate factor. My raid group's seen significant turn-over since game launch, and I've been part of every discussion about bringing in new people; the question is never, "are they geared?" -- because we figure we can just carry them through whatever instances in a week or two to bring them up to speed -- rather, the question is, "are they a good player, who'd fit in well with our group?" With that said, there's no way to get PVP gear, except through grinding. So I fail to see how any of this is P2W.

/signed