So this really annoyed me to see as well, so I’ve gone out of my way to farm a certain perma 75 guy on a token 70 until he started quitting matches whenever he saw me. Don’t know if he ever grasped the reason why he was the only person I’ve ever gone out of my way to explicitly farm, but it was fun to instil a bit of terror in him. The most interesting part is that he had a level 80 on another account.

I have to disagree with you about “some”. All is more accurate because I’ve played with deathmatchers who I convinced to play objectives with me before. Every single one of them knows how the game works (when farming bots who run to objectives it becomes obvious what those objectives are) Maybe you are talking about the very worst deathmatchers who are brand new and simply trying to get a kill achievement? In that case you might be right, but I’ve honestly never met one of those.

The pvp queue used to be very active and full of good players who could do objectives and deathmatch. Like AocaVII was saying earlier in this thread, people used to learn how to pvp. Tbh, the bar in pvp is so low that I’ve quit playing since it feels like I’m fighting bots or have bots on my team. (No exaggeration whatsoever)

As an objective only player, how confident are you about your ability to battle the ranked 8v8 and 4v4 players of the past? Do you feel like the way you play objectives now days could compete with them? What about if the 4v4 ranked players started playing more objectives now that 8v8 was ranked? Do you think you could still beat them? How confident are you that what you’re doing while “playing objectives” now days actually contributes to winning a war zone if both sides are actively trying to win? Could it be you’re just trying to avoid being farmed? If you're uncertain about the answer to any of these questions, I suggest looking up some class guides and skilling up. There’s a reason even PvE has dps checks and why tanking requires a complete understanding of the boss / opponents mechanics in PvE. PvP is the same way. You should learn your class.

It’s because most people don’t know how to play objectives properly anymore. The old way was to fight at mid and send one stealth to cap the off node if we were losing the attritional battle at mid. Now days it’s run everywhere like a headless chicken and never fight anywhere, just run, hide, cower at your off node and refuse to PvP. For old pvpers, that’s not fun. We want to fight, not run.

You need bad players to queue otherwise they'll never learn the game and replace people who quit playing for a period of time.

100%. It's very strange people with low gear (320s etc) seem to deliberately get matched vs these premades specifically. Sometimes there'll be two groups against each other, but the smaller group always gets the 320 geared players, while the voice premade with 6-7 and a meta comp with mitigation PT tank, two healers, ap pt, snipers etc gets the better solo q players. Matchmaking is beyond broken right now. And then, when you make an equal sized group with skilled players to get placed against the other group, you don't actually get placed vs them. Instead you get placed against random solo queuers in low gear. I wonder if it's because low gear players are trying their very best to win warzones, so it artificially inflates their current matchmaking ELO making the game think they're skilled enough to be placed against that kind of premade. (meanwhile "winning" a warzone doesn't really indicate whether the match is going to be balanced in terms of K/D ratios)

He's probably talking about when he has a skill advantage vs the players, on a map with tons of pillars. It's quite tricky fighting good ranged 1v1 in the open. In fact, I think the best ranged class to kill jugg may be a truly good merc.

Swtor needs to track damage, healing, protection and kills percentiles of players. That's the most likely predictor of whether the match will be balanced or unbalanced. Plus you should be restricted from stacking people in the 90%+ percentile within the same group. For swtor devs: Imagine two PvE groups are doing timed runs. One group has a bunch of nooby pug randoms. The other group has NiM hardcore raiders who have done the operation thousands of times. Who's going to be faster at it? That's why elite players shouldn't be in groups bigger than 4. Even 4 players of the best in the game kind of breaks things. Why not balance it more? Two tanks are already prevented from queueing together in arena. Those same two tanks could be complete noob players who are trash at PvP. If they got matched vs a veteran 4 man group, I guarentee those veterans would crush them completely. So why aren't the best players in the game prevented from stacking their team? You already know they're the best if you track their playstats in their accounts and look for anomalies. I see swtor willfully allowing veteran players to ruin PvP midbies by stacking perma 75s in a group and stack meta comps with the best players in the game while not allowing two noob tanks to queue together and limiting the number of healers. Why wouldn't you build on the restrictions to account for something far more unbalanced? Matchmaking certainly fails in accounting for this imbalance already, so you may as well just add those new restrictions.

In a wz? Who is going to wait 3 minutes for you to heal up after you camo out? Also camo does nothing to truly help you win vs a good player. I fought a duel with the supposed best 1v1 Mara on my server in 6.0 and he couldn't kill me. I didn't feel like hunting him down in his tatooine stronghold though. So it just ended in a stalemate.

If this is as cringe a comment as I think it is, I play Mara maybe once every 3 months now. There's other classes that are a legitimate threat when not playing in a premade. A solo Mara is pretty weak.

Generally I think it's perfectly possible for matchmaker to place truly skilled players against each other (solo or not), it just refuses to do so. Sometimes I *know* there's another premade in q if I make a counter premade. And yet we never get matched vs them. So why is that? Matchmaker being incompetent? The people who get matched onto the team are usually complete randoms who add no value to the match against a premade. In fact, I have no firm idea why the matchmaker even takes the amount of time it does to matchmake. I do notice lately if I play tank, sometimes it will insta pop for me spawning a new match against another decent tank. (But the other tank is queueing with a healer + premade while I'm solo). So it does attempt some role based Matchmaking still. Just seems like it's so mediocre of an attempt to matchmake compared to what used to happen once in a while years ago. Maybe we can write it off as solo players being less skilled but I feel like it's a catch 22. The real problem is that matchmaker might be attempting to place the highest rated ELO in a premade group against the highest rated ELO of a solo player (this happened even back in 2018 according to patch notes back then iirc). That would be very dumb, because you need the ELO's on each team to all be roughly equal. Not just in median skill, but within a bracket for each player. You can notice if a premade group faces off against another one (7vs7), then you queue solo and one noob queues solo, your team will win because you were the massively differentiating factor.

It's funny you mention this. Just last night I was innocently playing, then my team gets the top 7 players in queue (in fact all of us could have gotten gold or top 3 during a competitive ranked season back in the day, in fact some did) vs absolute noobs on the other team. We only had one new player on our team. So we crushed the opposition completely. I really dont know what's going on with it.

There was also a skill that reduced damage by 99% which Marauder had. Did any of that make Mara op? Nah. I never felt op while playing it, in fact, it was always difficult to 1v1 anybody on it even with the camo.

Tbf, the counterplay was pretty straight forward. You simply hit them with yellow damage, dot them up, or let other people hit them with white damage instead of you.

When I tell them that, they yell at me saying they're playing objectives. So they think (unfortunately) that they know how to play.

IMO obfuscate was ironically one of the higher skill ceiling abilities in the game, since it was a 90% single target white damage accuracy debuff. You could augment it for some extra burst from a vicious throw + yellow damage defensive utility, but knowing when to use it added a lot of fun "flow" to mara. Taking that away makes it into a bot-like clown fiesta that bores me with its 3-4 damage abilities and lack of thought. Plus you gotta remember, for lore reasons marauder should have some force abilities -- obfuscate was one of its only ones (it has maybe 2 at most on each spec now that obfuscate is gone).

I was playing with some of the weirdest "objective" players the other day. To start 4 went our side node (who knows why, because none of the enemy players went there), and 2 went to the enemy side node (???). So I went mid with one other guy and fought all 8 of the opposing players at mid. Ok great. Then we lost the game. (because our team had "objective" players) We only had 2 pvp players.

There's not enough pop to split the q. It's better to limit groups to 2-4.

Mara can do adequetely meh / ok-ish damage when not focused. Nothing special or super consistent though. The biggest and most massive nerf that occurred in 7.0 was the mara obfuscate removal. It'd be like removing snipers stun and leap immunities by removing cover.

I disagree. I myself have purposely started to lose on some of my characters since coming back, to lessen the times I'm put solo against a full ops group.

Yes there's an elo system. Years ago 8v8 unranked and ranked was entertaining but dps monkeys from solo ranked who get angst over a tank being able to guard swap are all you see now days. "Nerf healers they too stronk", "nerf tanks I'm bad, I can't manage to dps". Why? Because player skill in general is that much worse. Objectives can be fun to base the pvp around, but conversely if someone's so bad at playing the game the only thing they can do is objectives it is not fun. But it's also not fun to kill someone who thinks they're good because they play in a carebear ops group or full premade huddling together with other people in fear of being exposed. I already know they're a bad player. Playing objectives as you said spreads people out in a marathon. It makes them vulnerable, you can kill your prey more easily when they're caught out away from the herd. Although ops groups these days are extra careful to protect their stragglers unfortunately since 8v8 is unranked and they don't care about the objective. I understand people like to huddle together for protection, but I genuinely want to see more 1v1 or 1v2 action again. Those situations can be really entertaining, plus the group fights at mid. When people genuinely are encouraged to play objectives you see much more of that, plus real fights at mid. Some form of ranked would be nice in 8v8, since it'd force people to play better and create stragglers.

You're supposed to have a 50% win rate so matchmaker tries its absolute best to get you around there. The main thing it uses are wins. You also always get more medals for winning. If you're trying not to win all the time it puts you against very bad players who can't win. Effectively it sinks your ELO. Warzones have always had an internal elo, it's used to help people have higher win rates (get them to 50%).

SWTOR's matchmaker is ****, it's **** because it's based off wins internally for warzone ELO. So now you put a premade that doesn't give a **** about wins in a warzone together with a **** matchmaker based on wins, what do you get? **** matchmaking. Why don't ex solo arena players care about wins in warzones? Because they only cared about wins in arenas. Thanks for coming to my tedtalk.

Their simplistic MM based on wins giving elo works for arena, but not warzones. You'd need to make warzones ranked and arenas unranked to see people start to improve in play again.