No one is denying that they can spare the little bit of money it'll take. I'm saying they WON'T do it. EA is only interested in squeezing money out of you.

Money

No. PvPers don't have the advantage to getting to 248 quicker, they get the advantage IF THEY ALREADY HAVE 242 gear. There's a big difference. For someone who doesn't like PvE, doing PvE to just get acceptable amounts of gear in PvP is absurd. For someone in PvE to be forced to PvP in order to get the highest tier is also equally absurd mind you, the complaints aren't just coming from us PvPers. Loads of PvErs hate that they have to PvP to get 248 gear, and many have chosen to just afk in warzones because of it. Oh please, any time PvPers get ANYTHING that looks better or gears them up faster, PvErs whine like no tomorrow about being forced to PvP. Just go to the roadmap thread and you'll see entire brigades of players who are entirely against the idea of OWPvP being rewarded with something as simple as cosmetic gear or mounts. Why exactly should PvPers be okay with being forced to PvE to be competitive in PvP, when we don't even get the benefit of keeping our own unique mounts for longer than 2 months without PvErs whining about it? Again, every single PvPer is very well aware of the idiotic system and how to speed through it. I am literally gearing up in HM Ops while complaining about it. Knowing how to exploit an illogical system is not mutually exclusive with complaining that the illogical system shouldn't be a thing at all. The 224 wrecking a 242 player happens because of bolster, that becomes a 236 vs 242 fight. And the differences from 242 and 248 gear aren't that dramatic, sure, but you are missing the point. A PvPer who doesn't PvE doesn't HAVE 242 gear unless he no-lifes it for a month straight. He has maybe 230 gear. And the difference between 236-bolster and 248 gear is big enough that it nearly completely takes skill out of the equation. On top of that, previous bolster would be one tier below the lowest PvP gear (so back when I last left the game, bolster was 200, PvP tier 1 was 204, tier 2 was 208). Right now bolster takes us to 236 gear.... And then it's compulsory to obtain 236 gear before obtaining 242. Making almost an entire week and a half's grind completely redundant, because PvPers have to spend time and effort getting gear THAT THEY ALREADY GET BOLSTERED TO. The system is idiotic, it is significantly worse for PvPers than the previous system, it hampers skill vs skill play, and it's designed to be an endless treadmill because the devs are too scared to put any carrots in PvP thanks to the Cartel Market and PvE taking all the cosmetic carrots. Again, there's no point stating how easy it is to get 242 through PvE. We are all well aware of that. We are just questioning why we have to PvE to be competitive in PvP, when even cosmetic rewards to PvPers cause PvErs and CM-lovers to come out in droves complaining that it's unfair they're being "forced" to PvP.

So... your best solution to the PvP gearing mess is to PvE. Right... You're acting like PvPers haven't noticed that the fastest way to gear up is to do HM Ops for 242s and then PvP for 248s. We're just questioning why is it that 1. PvErs who have NEVER PvPed can now suddenly have an easy advantage over PvPers and 2. The gear grind we had in 4.0 got replaced with this mess where we need to PvE to gear up optimally. Seriously, we'd had a perfect grind since patch 3.0. With minimal effort, any PvPer worth their salt would have min-maxed high tier PvP gear in just two weeks, and after that point the only differentiating factors would be class and skill. And this system 1. Ensured PvP gear was below SM Ops tier gear 2. PvE gear got destroyed in PvP against a PvP geared person. The system wasn't perfect but it worked, and it made PvP more about skill and less about gear. PvPers aren't whining because they're incapable of comprehending that HM Ops + PvP is the fastest gearing system, they're complaining that there's a 4-tier difference that requires PvE to be sensibly surmounted, and this idiotic system replaced our previous, much better system.

I miss alive Jung Ma.

Can confirm, back when Jung Ma wasn't a zombie, Outpost Thorazan on Tatooine was the liveliest place to be. Any Imp who dared to gank a lowbie would find the shoe on the other foot, and 25+ Pubs dancing over their corpses. And then 30+ Imps would attack us, then 40+ Pubs would come to help us out, it was a beautiful, beautiful Star War in every sense of that word. During the Gree Event if some guild dared to win-trade, we'd have dozens of players who would troll them by constantly interrupting their caps and killing them, and we'd have massive Pub vs Imp brawls with Pubs trying to protect other Pubs during their caps, and likewise for Imps, which was made all the more fun with friendly fire. And every Imp who dared to use the Coruscant glitch to attack us on our home turf severely regretted it and never came back. They would be so thoroughly camped that they'd genuinely feel sorry for ever daring to gank the Coruscanti lowbies. But all of that changed with the PvP immune instances and 90 CC server transfers.

To be fair they have kind of a point. I don't think this game is in "maintenance mode" but it is pretty understaffed. One single dev's personal situations seem to cause month-long delays in things, and the devs only ever focus on one single game mode in a single quarter, instead of releasing proper content for all game modes. They haven't released a full op for 2.5 years, and when they finally got around to it, it had ONE boss, with the next boss coming months later. And with the rumours of new Star Wars games coming from Bioware, as well as the complete lack of advertisement for this game compared to when two years ago, it may no longer be a flagship title among Star Wars games. Maybe once that other game is out of its development stage and goes live, we'll get more frequent updates here, but as it stands this game is getting far less content updates than an MMO of this size should.

Thing with OWPvP is that you can dynamically change compositions to counter an enemy. If in Ilum we encounter a lot of stealth melees, bring in a sniper or a healer to counterbalance that. For OWPvP you can log onto an alt, pull in mobs from around you, call in support from the rest of the planet, call in guildies, beat them through sheer numbers, and in the case of Iokath, just bring in a gigantic God machine to rain hell on the enemy who's causing you trouble. Use emplaced artillery turrets, instance limits, dynamic allied mob spawning, etc to balance the side that's losing. So class balancing may be harder for OWPvP, but it presents players better opportunities to balance each individual situation as needed.

Well at least one post by Keith says they're "reading all the posts" in this thread. I am willing to believe Keith on that honestly, he can't singlehandedly address every concern of every player, but he has addressed quiet a few questions in this thread, and Charles addressed my OWPvP question earlier. It's just that currently, the answer to a lot of questions is just "We recognize it is a problem, and one of the weekly threads in the future will discuss it". That was the answer for Class Balance (and we got our weekly thread on it), that was the answer for OWPvP and for Ranked rewards (apparently we're getting this weekly thread by "late" Wednesday), and it's certainly the answer for a lot of other things. I do think they're monitoring this thread, they have shown no signs of ignoring this thread, they just seem to respond to the "hotter" topics first, as well as the easy to answer questions ("will the FP have a storymode" or "Explain how 230 gear by command token purchase will work" kind of questions). If you were to increase the volume of posters who agree with your suggestions (which I believe pertain to customization options, right?) by tomorrow noon, then you'd have a good chance of attracting dev attention to your concerns. For whatever its worth, I do agree that they need to make "Sith yellow" eye-colour a thing for every species, because Dark Side corruption looks absurdly ugly.

The issue with GSF is that it's like, ENTIRELY different from EVERYTHING we have in the rest of the game. The combat is different, it has 3D depth instead of 2D movement, it has mouse controlled movement and requires smarter maneuvers, positioning and aiming. The AI for most MMOs is designed in a scripted manner. They set up simple triggers such as health %, timers and positioning, that allow the boss to change its behaviour. GSF AI would be an entirely different beast. They would basically be designing a new space combat game from the ground up, and the investment for that *may* not be worth it. I suggest making separate threads that allow you to consolidate the demand for this feature all in one place, here you're gonna be drowned out by others' demands ( the last several pages have been about OWPvP for example). Use a central thread, do informal surveys, and then draw Keith's attention to that thread. Basically give Bioware some vague metric that says "yes if we invest the money it takes to make a brand new space combat game in this game with a decent AI, we'll satisfy so many of our players' demands that it'll be worth it". You'll also have better luck posting around a time when you saw a recent dev post, otherwise they may not even get around to reading your post in these several pages of demands we have.

..... So you're saying rewarding content is bad? How exactly is rewarding OWPvP any different than rewarding PvE? What does dumbing down NiM have to do with this? If OWPvP shouldn't have rewards because it "baits" casuals into getting ganked, then what exactly is the difference with NiM? NiM has rewards to "bait" casuals into getting ganked by bosses who they have no hope of beating, doesn't it? What is this ridiculous double standard, "It's okay to reward this type of content that I am okay with, but don't dare reward someone else's content"? And yes, we (PvPers) are in fact saying that we (PvPers) need rewards for doing PvP. This game has one of the grindiest PvP endgames in existence. It can take over a month and a half for PvPers to fully gear ONE character if they combine that with PvE. Pure PvPers simply can't even gear up. If they spend ANY time on an unrewarded activity, they suffer a massive penalty for it. This is in fact true for ALL gamemodes. Everyone aside from pure RPers need incentive to stay in their own content. Take away the gear grind and rare platinum drops from NiM, and all of a sudden the NiM community will die. This isn't because NiM is inherently boring, it's because MMOs are inherently grindy, and any activity that doesn't help with the grind gets discarded almost instantly by most endgame players. This is in fact one of the major complaints of PvErs right now. The "best" way to gear up is to do SM and HM Ops, and once you're in full 242s and have saved all the shells, it's easier to get 248 pieces from PvP, rather than PvE, so many raiders do just that. NiM suffers simply because HM + PvP is the faster and easier grind to do. So it's not unprecedented for endgame players to demand incentive for their content, it keeps new players coming in and keeps veterans staying in. This is in fact a historical fact with plenty of research done on this too. Give shiny rewards for succeeding in game -> More players play the game -> More players pay for the game. This has been a fact since the gaming industry started, and is even more absurdly true with the advent of portable gaming. And most of all, if your wildly inaccurate assessment of how "PvP is a niche community" was even remotely true, why is it that Ilum PvP becomes extremely active every time the Gree Event comes around and why did Bioware specifically attempted to implement a PvP world, despite it apparently not being played by anyone? Why does Bioware release new Warzones, Ranked reward, PvP class balance if it's so niche that simply labelling an instance PvP causes it to die? Why is it that we somehow have 25000 Ranked players on the leaderboards, in a game with 200k-500k subscribers? (And Ranked is a small fraction of the PvP community, so the number of PvPers is, in all likelihood, in the 100k-200k range) Maybe the situation is a lot more complicated than the "I don't like PvP = no one likes PvP = PvP dies and deserves it" you'remaking it out to be? Bioware recognizes that OWPvP is simply another gameplay style that will enrich their game with variety, much like Ops, Flashpoints, Uprisings, solo story content, instanced PvP and GSF, Strongholds and RP have done. They may be faltering in how they implement it, but they clearly do see the necessity of it. All you're doing is coming into a thread where a Bioware dev specifically said they're interested in hearing our suggestions about OWPvP, and whining that the content you will never have to touch has somehow personally slighted you. Lay off with the victim complex and the "ME ME ME" attitude, OWPvP rewards ARE NOT about the players like yourself who hate PvP anyways. It's about the players who are iffy about PvP or about PvPers who are forced to go into instanced PvP because OWPvP has no rewards in one of the grindiest games there is. If you have anything to add that actually 1. Contributes solving this apparent ganking problem that you claim exists despite there being PvP-immunity or 2. Contributes to adding on to content that you are actually playing then by all means, continue posting. But if your only point is that you personally dislike PvP and the Devs should listen to you solely despite contradicting evidence, then lay off please, because there is clearly a significant minority of players whose game would be enriched by the addition of OWPvP to the supposed "PvP world" Iokath, and there are ways to do it without involving players who hate the idea of PvP so much that they don't want PvP content added at all.

Well Keith has his own personal, non-work-related account that where he has 4 characters at Command Rank 300 currently. For all we know he may be a raider or a PvPer or both. Charles seems like he's a lot more interested in story and RP, but I'm not sure. Eric, I don't particularly know how much he plays, but he does the live streams so he definitely plays casually at least. I'm sure Keith and Charles themselves would both be happy to answer your question if it's asked a little bit less condescendingly than "they don't seem to have a strong sense of the game". They have answered questions relating to their playstyles in the past.

Let me explain really slowly once again, because you seem to have completely missed the purpose of players' demands. The presence of PvP/E instances has entirely killed ganking. That's a very good thing. Ganking is stupid and just drives new players away from PvP. Less ganking leads to more players who can CHOOSE to PvP when they want to. However it had the uninentional side effect of killing all spontaneous OWPvP, not just ganking. Because historically, ganking has usually led to anti-gank squads forming that cause massive OWPvP fights where both sides CHOSE to PvP. The death of spontaneous OWPvP is a BAD thing because its content that got REMOVED from a game about Star WARS. Everyone who's suggesting "forcing" PvP isn't demanding that you just flag everyone into a PvP instance. We're demanding rewards in those PvP instances, along similar lines to the Gree Event, so that more people actively CHOOSE OWPvP. To draw a comparison to avoid your preexisting biases against PvP, the majority of the game doesn't do HM or NiM raids. The majority of the game doesn't engage in the higher difficulty KotET/FE content. But a significant minority demanded these bits of content, and they were released and players were allowed to CHOOSE these bits of content with the incentive of some fancy gear and mounts and titles and decorations. This is exactly what OWPvPers are demanding. Give us a quest chain or dailies chain that progresses in PvP instances only. Give us a planet that is PvP only with unique PvP-only rewards (considering PvE instances with unique PvE rewards exist EVERYWHERE else, this should not be a problem to anyone reasonable). And players like yourselves, and others on this forum who are vocal about their dislike of PvP, can simply choose to NOT engage in this newly incentivized PvP. We'd be fine with that. Literally everyone except the lowlife "lemme stand in their aoe to flag them" trolls has always been fine with PvErs turning PvP off for themselves, we literally just want additional PvP rewards that aren't Cartel reskins. And that is NOT an unfair demand because there are plenty of non-Cartel PvE rewards, so it's not like we don't have a precedent for "forcing" players to play for rewards. All we're saying is, give the OWPvP community the same respect the PvE community gets. They place unique rewards in NiM Ops and I choose not to queue for them. If I entered the NiM instance or an NiM quest I'd be "forced" to fight PvE mobs to progress so I don't enter them. Likewise, let them place rewards in special PvP areas and quests, anyone who enters those areas or quests MUST PvP to complete those specific quests, and you can choose not to enter them.

Umm isn't that exactly what you and your fellow anti-merge posters are doing? You're dismissing the concerns of people as if it's all about queue times, not even considering that most hardcore raiders don't even use the queue, they want a server with active NiM and HM communities. Same for Ranked, we don't just want queues to pop, we need them to pop and actually work with the matchmaking, which requires a decent population size. What exactly is the difference between them demanding Bioware cater to them by merging, and you demanding they cater to you by not merging? I understand that you have concerns about trolling, griefers, asset loss, etc with merges. But don't complain that others are ignoring your concerns and that's unfair when you do the exact same thing with your assumptions that no one will join the queues after a merge, (which is flat out incorrect if you look at past server mergers) and your assumptions that all we want are faster queue times (when we want larger communities that give us better matchmaking and competition).

Don't even bother with the "before they start" qualifier. Even after starting, we can't kick anyone except AFKers. Dealing one hit of damage cancels the autokick, why?????? It's not like AFKing is the only valid reason to kick players.... like I've tried kicking an idiot on my server who randomly just gives up nodes to the other team because he finds it funny and "wants to see if the other node guard can survive a 2v1". Can't kick him. And Bioware's empty customer service is also incapable of taking any decent action against him. It's infantilizing. "Oh we trust the PvErs to be grownup and use their vote to kick responsibly, but we don't trust you filthy PvPers for it", even though PvErs use it just as irresponsibly as PvPers do sometimes.

Go to Combat Training on Fleet. Pick up Solo Uprising missions from the terminal. Use the teleport they give you to get to the uprising. Profit.

My guess would be that it's cheaper and easier to resolve the technical issues surrounding merges rather than around cross-server. This is purely guesswork mind you, but wouldn't you agree the idea behind both cross server and merge would be similar? In cross server, you'd be "moving" servers to some temporary host in live-game, playing with 3-15 other people who have also moved servers in live-game, each of you will have a temporary inventory that needs to be moved back to your origin server correctly, instantly, in live-game. Since merges also involve the movement of players and player data to a new location, but will be done when the game is offline, not live, wouldn't they be easier to do, even if you introduce the "don't lose any player data" qualifier (because obviously crosserver will need that exact same qualifier too)? Again, purely speculation, but I think it's at least justifiable speculation. Also, while crossserver would be great for PvP and Flashpoints, it wouldn't do much for the Operations crowd (SM, HM or NiM, whichever). Most players make their SM/HM PuG groups using chat LFG because it makes it easier to do a sort of "vetting" before letting the other player into the group if needed, and is just overall more convenient since GF queues take way too long. NiM obviously just can't be pugged at all, anyone who wants to do NiM needs to either be merged into an NiM active server, or transferred to one, and there is no HM PuG option either, so those will need to be moved/merged too. I guess one way to make the GF Op be a bit more reliable, is put a restriction on who can queue up for them. PvP for example doesn't allow players below a certain valor rank to queue for Ranked. Make some similar system for PvE, and it'll make GF significantly more reliable and everyone would use it enough for the Ops community to benefit from crossserver.

@Charles, @Keith, @Eric. I hope you guys are reading all the suggestions for OWPvP in this thread. Whenever the discussion thread gets made, it'd be nice for the starter post to mention which of our ideas were the best (in terms of quality, ease of implementation, returns, etc) in the minds of the devs, so that we can channel more ideas along a similar vein to those in that thread, instead of giving you scattered ideas that sometimes may even seem to disagree with each other.

This distinction between Murder and Brawl type PvP reminded me of something funny that used to happen in Jung Ma (basically it was the only server with OWPvP when it was alive). Any time someone ganked someone else, they'd let it pass. But if it became too much, like a dude ganking ALL lowbies or spawn-camping someone, eventually one of the lowbies would either go to fleet and complain, use a universal channel and complain, or log onto their main and organize a group. The result of this would be, that most persistent ganks would lead to the formation of an anti-gank squad. And the leet level 55 ganker who murdered a level 30 on Tatooine would all of a sudden be murdered by 10 level 55s. He'd then go and complain that HE got ganked by 10 level 55s, and they'd organize a similar squad, and eventually we'd have all-out 20v20 brawls between the players (and once they became that big, we usually had the respectable guilds getting involved, and they'd enforce some basic rules like "don't kill lowbies anymore, you have plenty of level 55s around"). I miss those days. If you complain about ganking now you'll probably be told to switch instances.

I never said the vast majority of the game enjoys PvP.... You are very literally NOT using my words there. I am not saying that the vast majority of the game likes PvP, I am saying a significant enough minority enjoys it that it's fallacious to argue that "most" players want to see PvP dead like the person I was replying to. Most reasonable estimates show that the number of people who regularly PvP in this game is somewhere between 20% and 50%, more likely on the lower end of it, and the number of them who actively enjoy it and aren't just doing it is in all likelihood lower. Read my post again. I was mocking the notion that the vast majority of the game dislike PvP. That's simply not true, and it is very easy to gauge that from just doing a search for every existing warzone, arena, GSF instance at any given time, and it's also very to gauge from looking at the Ranked leaderboards. No one in their right mind would say that the vast majority of the game PvPs, but it is absurd to claim that "not that many people enjoy or engage with PvP" when the simplest search will show you that warzones are far more active than, say, Operations. The reason OWPvP is dead is because it isn't ever rewarded at all, and in an MMO, players will do an activity that rewards them and somewhat aligns with their interest, rather than a fully aligned one with no rewards. Unless you think OWPvPers have a secret cabal where we purposely keep OWPvP dead, while keeping warzones/arenas alive, and then resurrect OWPvP JUST during the Gree Relics Event, and then kill it again... EDIT: Just to back that last bit up, I just logged on from work and did a quick search on Harb. There were concurrently 5 warzones going on, while I couldn't find a single Op in the /who list (I may have missed a couple of Ops). While I agree this isn't a scientific way of checking it at all (and it doesn't account for the fact that Warzones take 15 minutes while Ops taking longer and hence will not be active until evenings when everyone is free) it's similar to the results I have got at almost any time I did the search, on any of the three servers I have played on. So claiming that PvP is liked by only an insignificant minority of the game (which is a claim often heard on these forums) is the same as claiming Operations are liked by an insignificant minority of the game too, and the Devs have already spoken out about the latter not being an insignificant minority.

Or maybe just leave the rewards in PvP and let the complainers continue complaining? They have shown no qualms whatsoever about "forcing" players to PvE (and I use the word very lightly, because no one is forcing anything here). They have dozens and dozens of unique armours, mounts, stronghold decorations, etc. Why is it suddenly a problem if they "force" players to PvP? PvP has nearly nothing unique in it, what exactly is the problem with letting us have one planet in this galaxy full of PvE planets, and letting us have a couple of mounts and armours that no one else can get?

So what you're saying is, you don't have an answer. Good to know. Lay off with the victim complex, most of us acknowledged literally every other concern including RP griefing, money+time investments, and even freaking name changes. But when someone says "every new group content player and every stranded veteran group content player should get no group content because of my respawn timers" that's asinine.

I think you misunderstand me, I am entirely against forcing RPers to merge. I meant the objectively dead servers like the old PvP servers. And maybe even the subjectively dead servers (some say JC and Shadowlands are dead, others say they're thriving). In any of those cases, "I like my server to have a lower population!" is a moot point because it basically just means "my inconvenience at OW loot is more important than the fact that you literally can't play the group content at all!" I would never suggest a merger for RP servers, there's enough harassment of RPers as it is. Until proper policing of chat is done its best to let RPers stay on separate hubs, whether dead or alive.

If Open World objectives being "stolen" is such a big problem, what exactly is Bioware supposed to do about it.... Open World objectives being stolen causes a respawn timer's worth of inconvenience. Group content is literally impossible in every sense of the word if you play on one of the dead servers (like the old PvP servers). In an inconvenience vs game-breaking problem situation, it's pretty clear one of the styles should be getting a lot more catering.

~cries profusely because he misses his (now dead) RP-PvP home server~