As much as I find people in PvE gear annoying, you do realise that you need to PvP to get PvP gear. There are some people in PvE gear grinding comms to get their 2018 expertise.

We must be playing different games... I'm on ToFN and play rep side the majority of the time. I see zero difference between the factions in regs. Sure there are some imp premades but funnily enough there are rep ones as well. I keep a win/loss record of all my matches (don't ask why ) and it's very even for me between the factions. If you're talking about solo ranked then I completely agree that it's dominated my imps. No question about it. Regs though? There isn't an issue at all in my eyes.

Any system without (or with very small) penalties for losing is pointless. There may as well not be a rating. Take Star****n (not sure if putting his actual name in counts as calling him out) in Season 2 for example. He finished the season with a rating of 10 but had 518 wins. Clearly he wasn't a top tier player but in your system he would be miles and miles ahead on rating compared to someone who, for arguments sake, played 100 games and won every single one. IMO that is just wrong. People shouldn't be rewarded because they play 24/7 and rack up a huge number of wins despite having way more losses. They should be rewarded because they had an excellent win:loss ratio. Any system that gives people who play the most the highest rating is fatally floored. I agree with you that the current system is bad. But this is not the answer.

Just wanted to say that I think it's a great move making the crystals only available through group ranked for the lowest tier. I might actually be able to persuade some people to get a group together now But I have to echo the concerns of some other people in here about the reward ratings required for tiers. I'm not sure why the rating are increasing tbh especially when this season is balanced so strongly in favour of a very small number of specs. I would love to play my Sent in ranked but I'm not feeling very motivated when I consider the current state of balance and the increasing tier ratings.

Nice. I wonder if they are planning to include both Huttball maps in that, or just the original. I'll try to get a group from Sponsored by Karagga to turn up.

It's great that you're putting this event on. I really hope it takes off. Two things though: Tait just posted that the PTS is closing today. Are you sure the PTS will be up on Saturday? Is it ok to turn up with just a 4-man group if we can't get 8 together? You mentioned it, but just wanted to clarify

This is only true in ranked. In regs the factions are very balanced in my opinion. I record all my matches in case they're good enough for YouTube, so when I go through the day's recordings I keep a record of how wins/losses I get with each character. I actually get a better win rate on rep side in regs (although that'll be partly to do with the classes I play on each faction). I'd say it's very even.

Even if the relics have minimal or no stats it would be good. It's annoying having to queue with empty gear slots because you don't have access to any relics. The expertise loss is quite big.

is the +41 crystal an expertise one? If it isn't that will be what's screwing over your stats. Mixing PvP and non-PvP mods/enhancements etc in the same piece of gear is really bad for bolster.

Equipping the PvP main/offhand weapons shouldn't make your expertise go down. The only explanation I can think of are that you don't have expertise crystals in the weapons. Check the weapons to make sure you actually have a crystal in them. If I remember correctly they now come without the crystals for some reason.

So err it's taking over with all 25 of it's members... I'm in the guild and last night there were under 30 of us and that's including alts.

I rarely do ranked. The vast vast majority of my vids are of regular 8v8 wzs. It just so happens that my latest vid was of a ranked arena because Season 4 just started. Feel free to check out my other videos and ask any questions in the comments. I also take requests so if there's a particular spec you need help with I'll see what I can do.

To be honest he is kind of bad. He gets his rotations wrong a lot of the time, ignores the objectives almost completely in Huttball and just in general isn't that great. Having said that he is great at video editing, his commentary is entertaining to make up for the inaccuracies and I can see why people enjoy his videos. It's fine to watch him if you want to watch a fun video but I would strongly advise against using his videos to learn how to play.

I sort of like your suggestions but I doubt Bioware will ever implement them. For the practice queue, why not keep the rating but just not give rewards. People like trying to improve their rating. They may moan and get frustrated about trolls etc making their rating tank, but the reason they moan is because they care about their rating. I can see that tying rewards etc to the rating is bad as the rating doesn't mean much in solo right now. But what's the harm in keeping the rating but only rewarding group ranked?

Then you should buy cheap PvE gear that gets you very high expertise as is explained in L-Randle's thread on Bolster so that you can give yourself the best chance of doing well.

That's clearly not what I said. People are upset at your lack of gear. You are upset at getting flamed for your lack of gear. The solution is clearly to get the baseline gear so that everyone can enjoy playing ranked PvP.

It's just common courtesy. It seems as if you are only thinking of yourself. Every time you enter a ranked arena with low expertise and cause your team to lose you have wasted the time of 3 other people (your team mates) and made them lose rating. I'm sure you can understand how people find that upsetting/frustrating etc. All you need to do is get 2018 expertise and then everyone is happy. You can do your dailes without being flamed and your team mates don't get annoyed at your lack of gear. It's not a matter of there being a strict rule saying "you must have this gear to enter", it's a matter of having a bit of respect for the other people on your team and not wasting peoples' time.

Nice to see you've responded to the request of showing some of the rewards early. This makes me much more likely to play ranked on Thursday despite the obvious lack of balance.

This is disappointing to say the least. A very poor excuse for a road map. It's nice that we're getting the Togruta race and an outfit designer but tbh I don't give 2 sh*** about what my characters look like if there's no content in the game that I'm interested in. No mention of PvP at all? We had already been told that there would be new seasons and telling us that we're getting Season 4 and 5 is like saying that March and April are coming... I highly doubt that there's zero PvP content coming his year. If there isn't then... lot's of stars are needed to describe my thoughts on that. If there is then why don't you mention it at all? The reaction you're getting from this "roadmap" is pretty clear. I think you should release some actual info pretty sharpish.

Those last 2 sentences are completely unnecessary. If someone is new and doesn't know some basic things then it's a good thing that they are asking about them. It is a big thing to have overlooked, but why you gotta be so rude @OP the ability is called Sneak for Scoundrel/Operative and Blackout for Shadow/Assassin.

Great to see this change. It was sad to pull off a successful fire pull/push/stun etc only to see them live through it. And I love that you are trying this "releasing patch notes early" thing. I really hope it works. Any increase in communication is a good thing.

If your system is so good why don't you just record the games and post videos of people hacking. If it's as prevalent as you're claiming it shouldn't be hard. Why have pointless arguments when you can just show people what you think is happening?

Too technically challenging

There are some good things here but I have a few points to make: This is definitely a positive. It can be a little frustrating watching the stream if it takes you guys like a quarter or half of the stream working out what ability is what etc and then when you've done that the level of play is fairly poor because you might not be familiar with how to play the class. Even if it's a class that you know, when you play on rep side for example and it's the mirror to your normal class, not knowing the ability icons takes up valuable streaming time. So it's great that you are going to concentrate on classes that you guys can play but I think it's important to have keybinds and UI etc set up before hand so that this doesn't eat into streaming time. I totally understand this but it would be nice if you don't completely forget about PvP. PvPers are still a part of your community and it's important to show different types of game play. A couple of ideas: Bring in Alex Modney or some other PvP familiar dev to do a few wzs every once in a while (maybe once every 4-6 streams). Or just change the name of your characters to something other than "Musco" so that people who aren't watching the stream can't identify you so easily. This way you could play a wz every now and then and not be focused so much. Only the people on the stream would know your name. Basically, I understand why you're doing this but please show a bit of PvP every now and then so that you include people interested in PvP in your streams. This sounds good. Please don't forget Europe! Whilst I understand that you will be streaming during US office hours please try to make the times convenient for EU watchers as well (if possible). Staying up to crazy hours isn't ideal and watching the replay means you miss out on all the Twitch chat which imo is a big part of watching a stream. This ties into the servers point you make. If you could play on an EU server occasionally that would be really nice. The delay should be manageable if your PCs/internet are good enough (and I imagine they are at BW). I'm not saying do this all the time or anything silly, just every now and then. This is the most important bit. I like this idea. It's often more frustrating getting a non-answer than not asking in the first place. And it's equally frustrating when people are clearly asking a question, and lots of people show interest in the question, and it's completely ignored. If you are going to do a Q&A it needs to be done properly. If there is something in chat that multiple people are asking that you can't answer, please say so. Just straight up say: "We can see you guys are interested in this but I don't have an answer/I'm not allowed to say/I would need to ask about that." or whatever the reason for being not being able to answer is. Ignoring something is what makes the community feel bitter. Communicate with us Also I think it would be really great if you make some dev posts about questions you answer. Every week make a Q&A post with the most important questions that were answered. People like to here from you to make it feel like BW is actually listening. Every little helps. Keep people in the loop. The more communication the better. One final suggestion that I mentioned earlier. Would it be possible to add Twitch chat to your overlay so that when people watch the replay they can get a better picture of how the stream went? I understand that this could be abused, but with the right settings (filtering profanity, deleting links, banning certain words etc) hopefully this is possible.

Reps really aren't bad on ToFN. My win rate is almost identical when playing rep compared to imp. And I would know because I record all my matches incase they are good enough to upload to my YouTube channel, so I keep track of how many wins and losses I get in a spreadsheet. (Sad, I know, but whatever ) Imps have more people playing ranked but for regs it's very even in my experience.