torparse.com is (was?) really good. I am currently using parsec for realtime parsing. It has most of the things I need including an easy to read version of the combat log. between a combat log and FRAPS (or what ever you want to use to capture video) you have all the tools you need.

This was my first thought for a response but you beat me to it. <golf clap>

Next you'll be telling me that the second amendment does not guarantee my right to wear short sleeve shirts.

I check forums maybe once every 2 weeks these days. perhaps less. I stay subscribed to this thread for LOLs. The whiners do have a point -- getting stomped 4+ times in a row is not enjoyable for them. This is not surprising. When I played in chess tournaments years ago, they did not pair 1200 rated players with 2000 rated players for obvious reasons -- they don't want those 1200 n00bs (and even terribads) to quit playing. If you want a vibrant community you need to make a welcoming space for n00bs and bads. Other than urging the complainers to form 4-man premades and get in voice there is probably not much left to do. For various reasons BW feels they can not improve match making (e.g. player pool too small to slice further). So, folks who are getting stomped by premades -- get in voice and form 4-man premades. You will still get stomped but not quite so often. And when you do get stomped, you can stop taking the WZ seriously and joke with your buddies in chat. Really, everything goes better with voice chat. Maybe someday BW will add challenge matches, then bad premades can make their own match with another known bad premade and they can have a fun competive match. Ha, who am I kidding ... BW add a quality of life change to PvP? "Nevermore" quoth the raven.

Looking at the Parsec page on codeplex I see that Parsec is open source. I've programmed professionally a while now but never any GUI work much less windows. What is required if I want to compile Parsec myself? Do I need to by some particular Windows SDK? I've written some small combat log parsing programs of my own but no GUI (text report only). I'd love to be able to leverage the Parsec GUI to add more stats that I'm interested in. It would also be nice to add things like sort by column to the DPS window.

Players still in the match could vote on whether to annul a match after a player DCs. If everyone believes the disconnection was not a player exploiting (or is a troll trolling) then no match. This system is not perfect but I'm certain it would be far less noisy than the current system.

As I've said in other posts, I think Elo is fine, we just need to use it properly. Currently the ultimate goal for each season is to get the highest Elo rating possible. This is stupid for reasons you are all familiar with. A better system, similar to what you suggest above, is to use Elo rating as a gate for getting into a post season competition. In the post season competition rating can be used to seed the initial setup but then actual results are used to advance. I'm sure you can think of many post season formats that would reward skill and minimize luck. E.g. you could have a system that allows players to agree on a no-result if a player DCs before the match begins. You could have 8 player pools (2 tanks, 4 dps, 2 heals) and then play all {tank, dps, dps, heal} combinations possible with the best healer, tank and 2 dps advancing. Of course this would require cross faction teams to allow all combinations. Would it make sense to allow only a single toon for a player to advance to the post season? E.g. If I qualify 3 toons perhaps I have to pick which one I want to play in the post season. If the highest rated player and another player 500 Elo points below the highest rated both get into the post season and the best rewards and bragging rights go to the winners of the post season, not the highest rated in the regular season then there would be far less incentive to win trade. What competitive system DOES NOT use a post season playoff to determine the top players? Heck, even the stupid NCAA football system has a matchup between what someone thinks are the top 2 teams. I agree with your ideas for minimizing trolling.

so much this.

That it took 4 seasons of trolling is not encouraging though. Also, given my own experience of being wrongfully convicted of ToS violation and perma-banned by BW (reinstated when I complained and told them they wrong) I believe the claims of folks saying they have been wrongfully accused of win trading. trolling should be so much easier to police and it is a much bigger problem than win trading (IMO) that BW should put more effort on acting quickly against trolls. Also, win trading would not be a problem if solo queue rating were not the end-all-be-all of solo ranked. E.g. if rating merely gated you into a post season. Post season results would become the end-all-be-all of solo ranked competition, not rating. E.g. did you win the final or get to the semi-final or did you not get out of round robin group play? There is so much scope available for making a post season about skill and minimizing random issue (e.g. disconnects). but hey, BW can't even do a PvE speed run competition so why am I expecting them do set up a ranked post season? Well, I can always hope for challenge matches that would allow player run competitions.

It is funny you say this since not one of these applies to the original post. The original post scenario is imperial vs imperial and while being constrained by role it is possible to get the team average Elo difference below 100 instead of above 400 (the highest disparity possible). Everyone agrees that having cross faction solo-ranked would be a big improvement in relaxing constraint on matchmaking but even when faction and role allow for a somewhat competitive match (e.g. scenario in OP) BW doesn't just get it wrong, they get it as most wrong as possible. Maybe BW isn't using average team rating as their criteria. If not, what are they using? How can having the strongest players (for each role) all on one side be sensible in any formula that is being used? You really want to keep the current system? ...you can't be serious... actually I agree with Zoom. That is suppose to be how Elo works. The problem is that BW has set up things so that we are competing by rating and near the top of the rating system the skill difference is small so random factors (how many trolls do you get on your side? How many DCs? Do you keep getting bads like me on your team?) have a bigger impact than skill differential. With that much statistical noise you can not play enough games for the signal to dominate the noise. What would make more sense would be for rating to be a gate into a playoffs post season (this should eliminate trolls). Then, if BW could devote more attention to the playoffs (hah!) there might be some criteria for giving a no-result in the event of a disconnect. This ain't happening though.

I played a solo ranked match last night that was imperial vs imperial with the following line up: team A team B ------------------------------------------------------------------------- tank (me) 1012 [color="lime"] tank 1638[/color] dps 1304 dps 1971 [color="Lime"]dps 1642[/color] dps 1732 heals 1323 heals 1797 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- average 1320.25 1784.5 rating [color="red"]average rating difference: -464.25[/color] (why doesn't the code tag use a fixed width font?) Da***? Other than team A's 1642 rated DPS (who is a mere 4 points higher than team B's tank), their entire team has much higher ratings than our team. My numbers were taken from the leaderboards shortly after the match so the actual ratings were probably a little different but I doubt they are far off. If you simply swap healers then Team B's average rating advantage goes from 464 to 227. Depending on how you swap the DPS and healer you can have an average rating difference of 182.25 (26% chance for team A) or 13.25 (48% chance for team A) The actual lineup BW gave us looks like BW is aiming for the most lopsided teams possible while maintaining {tank, dps, dps, healer} role mix. GG matchmaking.

win trading and trolls are two separate problems. Detecting trolls should be an order of magnitude easier than detecting win trading. The impotent actions and glacial speed of response in dealing with trolls is a joke. If they can not effectively address the trolling issue in a timely fashion I can not see how BW will ever address win trading properly.

After being a subscriber since launch and spending hundreds of dollars on cartel coins over the years, I got permabanned for being a gold-farmer or some such (the accusatory email is rather vague when telling you that you've been permabanned). Needless to say I disputed, they realized their stupid error and reinstated my account. You'd think that when checking for gold farmers you'd cross people off the list who clearly put more money into the game than they could possibly earn by gold farming. You'd be wrong. So, your story, while incredibly infuriating, is not surprising IMO. I recommend you contact BW support and dispute the warning. I think their enforcement department operates on a shoe string and a standard play in their playbook is to cast a wide net for disciplinary action using automated tools (e.g. gold farming) and then reverse themselves (and possibly do real investigation) when a disciplinee complains.

I submit this screencap for your approval. PvE FTL!

Good post! In another thread that analyzed upper 3rd, middle 3rd and lower 3rd of solo ranked players in each class someone in the ensuing discussion suggested "guardian/jugg is being dragged down by bads who naturally gravitate to playing the easiest class". I suggest that an insignificant number of bads persist long enough to get 50 wins in solo ranked and affect the average above. If this is true then the "juggs are really top tier but there rating average is driven down by bads" is bogus. class interaction commentary: with so many hatred assassins running around and sorce being popular for DPS and best for heals, juggs get knockback rooted a lot. Warriors (juggs and maras) are the only class that can't break roots with an ability on short cooldown (force speed, HO, roll) so, against good inquisitors, warrior spend a lot of time rooted. Sure, vengeance juggs have unstoppable but any decent inquisitor knows to not use their knockback root (or stun) while unstoppable is up. Heck, a good inquisitor can even save his force speed and avoid the 3rd tick of ravage with a well timed knockback root. I'm not saying warriors need a root purge on short cooldown (if everyone has it -- why take the root utility), I'm just pointing out the major weakness of the warrior class.

I think the top tanks on Bastion are PT/VG. Hard stun AoE (carbonize) synergizes better with dot spec FOTM DPS (hatred) than Mezz AoE (guardian Awe). With dots (hatred) everywhere, Awe is meh.

No. 2 more charges and 5 more seconds for ED, FD is not going to make jugg better than hatred assassin.

This is why the best solution is to push people towards 4-man ranked. If you queue 2 teams of 4-man you have a modicum of control over matchmaking because you can form 2 kickball-ish teams of approximately similar strength. As I mentioned in a different post -- for something like 4-5 solo ranked arenas I had the same sage healer who had no crystals equipped in their MH and OH (can you say derp?) while the other side had an actual healer. most of the problems of solo ranked go away when you queue 4-man. Pretty much the only problem left for 4-man is getting matched against a team 300+ elo points different from your team but if you get 8 folks to queue 2 x 4-man then you can guarantee there is always a reasonably close opponent in the queue.

Exactly. Not that SWTOR is (or should be) balanced around 1v1. LOLWUT? Leaderboards are not great but they are pretty much the only performance data we players have. Also, if playing in ranked (against the best PvP opposition available) is not real world what, pray tell, is? root, knockback, mezz or hard stun, kite. Roots are best as they add no resolve. I can't tell you how often I get double knockback rooted by a pair of consular/inquisitors who know how to work together. If you time it right, you can even do a casted mezz (force lift / whirlwind) that lands just as the root is ending -- do this from about 9m (if the target is not focus/smash) to prevent them from leaping.

Yes, that is why guardian/juggs dominate the leaderboards, because they are unstoppable. Buff hatred please.

noob friendly is not a problem. Being overpowered in the hands of a competent player is a problem. Compared to PTs and assassins, Juggs are a weaker in solo ranked. I main a guardian/jugg. I don't see that the change is needed for PvP. I agree with the assessment that it was done for PvE.

biggest problem is matchmaking not being cross-faction. I must have had 5-8 matches in a row where I (a bad guardian tank, now rated in the 800s) faced no-russian (#8 shadow/assassin on bastion) as my opposite. Did I mention that for several arenas we kept getting the same sage healer who had no crystals equipped in MH or OH? I'm pretty bad but my rating on imp side is not nearly as bad as pub side despite the fact that I use the same gear and play the same class. Of course the fact that I have not been queue sync-ing nor dodging (e.g. I didn't stop queuing when I kept getting the no crystals healer) is probably has a big impact. If we had cross faction matchmaking then at least no-russian could get our crystalless healer half the time. It is what it is. If I cared more I probably would be queue syncing and dodging.

The Hitler scene artfully subtitled just never gets old. Thank you -- it has been a long fortnight at work and I needed a good laugh! Perhaps you could do one that is a BW meeting about Operation Victory. Maybe Musco rages about having to say it is cancelled.

*** man? Bro, I don't even PvE but I'm shocked that they are cancelling the event rather than postponing it. I don't really care but I find the complete reversal baffling. How bad can it be (i.e. waste of resources) to postpone but at least follow through on a single such competition rather than cancel? Maybe that is their intent but I find the whole "cancelling" and "should we decide to do something like this in the future" a bit off putting.

if we had even below average moderation off topic posts like that could be deleted (or at the very least moved to it's own thread).