The game is in maintenance mode, almost no one cares at this point and definitely no one important cares. Also a lot of the ranked rewards received reskins in CM starting with the original rancor. But they're not, so what are you complaining about? Sounds good to me. Most people didn't really earn the tank, mount or the wings in 1.X/2.X anyway, they got it in 3.X when op levels weren't synced to the new levels/gear introduced. Lol, I remember when we tried EC NiM in 3.X. At first I was worried but when I was dodging the mortars against the tanks I realized it was a joke.

They will get right on that as soon as they fix phantom stride/holotraverse. It's been 9 years so ... any day now.

The orbs are there as pretty much an anti-turtling device. If your enemy just sits all 8 people on their node, it is disadvantageous to attack them because you will be fighting 7v8 (unless you want to risk a stray stealther taking your node). The orbs are pretty much there to prevent that by forcing people to go into mid and getting involved in the fight itself. The only other use for them is if you are very close to 600 and are losing on kills, you can try to sneak in some orbs to get to 600 before the round ends, since orbs count for immediate points while kills are only counted when the pylon explodes. Other than those 2 things, orbs are pretty worthless since kills stack over rounds and end up giving a lot more points. I know people like to take them after clearing out mid, but that is a mistake since the enemy will come back and you are leaving your team to fight with less people while you are taking it back to your pylon.

Ranked has nothing to do with it. Even at the height of ranked there were still people screaming "ORBS ORBS ORBS" in that warzone. When you explain to them how orbs work, they just don't want to accept it. In fact we had one of them post here and when everyone explained to him how orbs work, he still didn't want to accept it.

Omg this again? The ranked community was tiny and constantly shrinking, not growing. I went to a stream of a popular european ranked player and asked him "how many people do you think care about ranked? like 30?". His response was "30? That is way too many, it is more like 20." I remember I kept seeing amazing assassins over and over, whom I had many fun 1v1 fights with in ranked, only to later find out they were the same person (some guy in mirage had over 20 assassins). Every time I queued, I would see the same players over and over, no matter what time it was that I queued. Ranked was shrinking and not going anywhere. While I understand the need of some kind of skill based destination in any pvp, a certain number of players in the total player base is a prerequisite for it to work. Right now the player base is small, the PvP base is even smaller and the ranked community is minuscule. This game just doesn't have enough people to make ranked work. It is that simple. Ranked will not work in this game and will just cost resources. INB4 just make a "turn ranked on" switch in all pvp? This will make the situation even worse than it is now. The only thing that will happen is the few good players will only turn the switch on when they play in oppressive premade groups, they will queue dodge each other and just grab easy rating by farming pugs. You think 8 man premades are bad now when people are doing it just for fun? Imagine how bad it will be when they actually have incentive do do it. INB4 "but just limit it to 4". While I agree that premades with more than 4 people are just ugh, a 4 person premade will farm the pugs just as easily as an 8 person. Me and 2 other people were destroying everyone in warzones easily when we were just playing around, I doubt a 4 person premade actually trying will do much worse than us. TLDR: This game doesn't have the population to support any type of truly competitive PvP. Any suggestions offered until now will not work and only make things worse.

What exactly did they do to drive out the endgame pvp community specifically? 99.9% of the suggestions the PvP community gave were terrible and would do nothing the help the community or pvp. Even now all of the suggestions I see on the forum are laughable and will do nothing to help the issues. The issues have nothing to do with warzones, or class balance or ranked removal. They started a long time ago when BW decided to concentrate on single player story instead of group content, and continuously believed that the star wars movies would always bring in new people every single time. When the last jedi bombed and new players didn't come in, they doubled down on no group content and introduced galactic command as the only gearing source in 5.0. Literally every single beta tester (and I confirmed it with at least 10 of them) said not to do it, they didn't listen and BW lost more subscribers in 5.0 than ever before. Ben irving was reassigned and keith took over to try to salvage what was remaining in the playerbase. It was too late then. The downward spiral already began and it was not going to stop. The game was going to get to this point regardless of what they did after 5.0. The game is in maintenance mode and honestly has been for a long time. Enjoy it for what it has left before the servers get shut down.

I actually do talk about skill here in the very post you quoted. As for how to get player skill up, it is unfortunately not going to happen at this rate. Player skill degrading has been an issue for a long time ever since they made leveling up easier after 3.X. It took years to get to this point and it will not be fixed overnight. I could write a whole essay on this, but it will not matter. This is an issue that will take an overhaul of the leveling system, fps, rewards and player attitudes and the investment for that is not worth the reward it will bring.

No one actually wants true class balance, and the truth is, true class balance would be boring. Most of the people complaining are just terrible players who want an "I win" button, or players who just want their class to be on top. To me, class balance involves 2 things. One is that the difference between the top classes and the classes underneath them is not a chasm like it was in early 5.0 for example. The other is that every class has a chance to be on top. When it comes to the first, I think in every expansion different classes had opportunities to be at the top. 5.X was the time of mercs and snipers, with PTs being on the bottom. 6.X was lightning sorcs, PTs, maras and concealment ops. 7.0-7.2 (at least in solo ranked) deception, lethality, PT and madness sorc. And currently, it is sniper, PT, madness sorc and jugg. Overall, the rotations over the expansions have been ok. Right now, the difference between the classes at the top and those beneath them is not that much imo. Other than the PT accuracy debuff, nothing is really out of order. While some specs like concealment and marksman are clearly suffering, the class does have an alternative dps spec they can play. The only classes that seem to suffer in all their specs are assassin due the deception being absolutely shut down by tanks and hatred being made of wet paper and requiring time to build up its dps in melee range, op heals because it is terrible and there is no healing alternative for that class, and to some extent mercs due to their mobility issues which were overnerfed to account for their absolutely ridiculous defenses. Overall the balance is honestly not that bad right now. I've seen worse. But it would be nice to have them change up who is at the top more frequently. The biggest issue is lag and player skill.

First off, no one takes dummy parses seriously. If you look at the top boss parses, which is what actually matters, you will see it is not number 1 in any of the harder ops. Second and more important, even in the dummy parses no one is 5k below hatred. Not even arsenal. So once again: If you are 5k ahead of your team then the problem is your team.

while hatred is really good in parsing, especially against groups. If you are 5k ahead of your team then the problem is your team. Also, pvpers will never stop complaining. If BS gave them all 10M dollars for free, they would still complain.

I had an issue where I got the karma buff FROM THE KINGPIN MACHINE and a feeling lucky buff and got a miss on the emperor machine. I can't remember correctly, but I believe the feeling lucky buff came from the drinking station and not from the smuggler machines.

Do you understand the difference between a ranged spec and a melee spec? If you are able to properly keep your range, you should easily out damage him. If he gets in on you and you can't re-establish range that is on you.

The pulls on the machines are much worse than before. While before it might have taken a bit longer to get something from the kingpin machines, at least I knew there was a decent chance to get something. Now it is a waste of time and kingpin coins. I spent a lot of time doing this event in the past, but after doing it yesterday, I don't want to take part in it anymore. This was a horrible change.

I have some time, I just don't want to. Your posts are long and boring and you clearly are not reading anything I write either. I just admit it. Let me explain this one last time, and I will put it in bold and caps for you. I KNOW THAT THE STAT DISTRIBUTION FAVORED SOME CLASSES OVER OTHERS. I AM NOT DENYING THIS. YOU DON'T HAVE TO POST 1000000000 WORDS TELLING ME. I KNOW THAT THE INHERENT CRIT CLASSES BENEFITTED MORE THAN OTHERS. I KNOW THAT THERE WAS A CLASS INBALANCE. THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A CLASS INBALANCE. Whether it is due to inherent crit, or DCDs or walk speed or self heals, or burst. Something will favor some classes over others in a given meta. You don't have to post 1000000 word essays about how the inherent crit% some classes have, benefitted them. There will never be a full variety of classes, augments or no augments. There will always be a meta and people will flock to the meta. Stop pretending like nothing other than assassin was playable. With a few exceptions all classes were fully playable, saying they weren't is just lying. And as for those few classes, well that is how the game always was. There were always classes all the way at the bottom since this game's beginning, and there were always 2 or 3 specs that were almost unplayable. As for my personal class, I am a healer main. I played op healer a lot in 6.X because sorc was too boring, and am mostly playing sorc heals now because op heals is terrible and merc heals is so easy I fall asleep playing it. The video I showed you had me playing assassin because it was the only one I know of that exists with me in it. I probably played leth op a lot more than assassin, and healed SR a lot in the beginning. The only class I don't play is sniper. I did midbies with it a while ago and just hated it. Incidentally I stopped healing in SR after augments came out because damage became too oppressive and I was never able to get healer pops. And once again, I know that deception assassins were one of the classes that benefitted from the stat distribution, just like you know that when a tank/tank+heal joined an arena/wz deception was one of the classes most affected negatively by it. Different meta favors different specs. At one point burst specs are favored, at another DoT specs are favored, at another specs with the best DCDs are favored. That's just how it is. The most important thing is whether the difference between the top meta specs and the others was very big like in early 5.X. In 7.0, it wasn't.

Ok, last time. You admit that the augments gap is a huge problem. But you wanted it back anyway. Why? So far, the reasons are: 1. muh bug fix 2. muh thirtiary stats I don't believe that either of those things was a bigger issue than the augments gap. Sure they were issues, I admit that, but they weren't even close to the issue of the stats gap gold augments present. So, just stop pretending already. You wanted the gap. I like making silly little videos of you destroying pugs to fill your ego. Just admit already, it will make you feel better. It's also the first step to recovery.