You get pug tanks that use guard? Lucky…

You merge servers for improved endgame play. Endgame content is what keeps the game alive, not merging servers so people can have a slightly easier time farming low level mobs is just incredibly stupid.

Are you sure the other servers are better? Is SF substantially better or has everyone there quit too?

Sure or I’ll just quit and go play a game where I can solo que and still have fun? Which means fewer people in que, longer que times, more people quitting, etc. I’m continually amazed that the “git ur own premade or accept consequences!1!1” crew can’t wrap their head around this logic.

You’re asking people to be organized in what has become one of the most casual of casual MMO’s? What? There’a been no new content in a year, no new NiM content in way longer than that, no more ranked pvp. This game is just extraordinarily casual now. And yet you expect people to care enough about reg pvp to form teams in discord in order to have fun? It just entirely goes against the core player base of this game currently. As you will see, many people would prefer to just not play if they can’t pvp casually. So sure, you and the 8 other tryhards left can form a team in discord and make call outs but ultimately there’s gonna be no one left to play against.

The issue is what if you have a 4 man premade of good players and a 4 man premade of awful players. It could be the case that it’s a more balanced match to put the premades together. Honestly, ELO/premades in same que it’s just completely untenable in a game with such low population. Add on to that that many good pvpers don’t try in wzs so their ELO is invariably low…and you’ve got an absolutely broken system. Premades in the same q as solo players “sort of” is ok when you have sufficiently many people and teams in que. But with the ridiculously low pop we have right now, they just absolutely ruin the que for hours on end for everyone else. Nothing will be done, I’m sure it’s caused lots to unsub (mine runs out in a few weeks so you’ll get one less person complaining haha) but it is what it is!

Arena que today: trinity premade against my 4 dps solo que team, 3 uncarryable bots on my team, H+2D premade against my solo que team, lucky win because I drew the H+2D premade on my team, 3 uncarryable bots, 1 guy who stucks instantly. What a fun time. And today was not really unusual for the offseason. The pvp population is just so low even during prime time that it’s basically just unplayable. Probably time to cancel sub anyway if this is indicative of maintenance mode to come…

You do not have to avoid the small rectangle aoes. I got hit with 1 and still got the achievement.

This…is faulty logic. It is definitely harder to be at say 70% WR in warzones than arenas because you obviously have a bigger impact in arenas as there are fewer players. But you still win more if you’re better. I think my WZ WR rate hovers around 60% on most toons with 100+ matches played. There’s no way to get to 80% playing solo for sure because you just don’t have a big enough impact. But you can definitely be better than 50% just by carrying your team in marginal matches (ie matches where the teams are roughly evenly balanced). Thus, a really good (solo) player in arenas might have a WR of 75% whereas a really good (solo) player might have a WR of 65% in warzones. The distribution still exists it just has a smaller variance.

Ya I’d say 70-75% is doable exclusively solo queing atm in arenas over a large sample although it depends on role as well. I think easiest to carry is dps>heals>tank. As a healer it really doesn’t matter how good you are if your team has awful dps because you’re gonna lose in acid. In other words, even if I keep my team alive for five minutes, if our dps is worse than the other team we’re gonna lose acid. Tanking is even tougher because you get 3D+H vs 3D+T matches which as we know isn’t even. DPS is probably easiest to carry - use a big burst window to global someone and you’ve turned the tide. Or win a 1v2 by killing one person, stealthing out to heal, and then killing second, etc. I think it’d probably be easiest though just to base any skill based rewards on rank within a distribution for your spec. I.e., grade on a curve: be in the top X% of players based on winrate for your class/spec. That seems like the fairest skill-based reward….

80% win-rate solo queing is just not really possible on a large enough sample size. At least not on my server. I’d say I have AT LEAST 20% of games that are not winnable by anyone (3v4, or trinity comp vs 4D, or me and 3 undergeared bots vs 4 competent players, or going against a coordinated premade with idiot pug teammates). I’m by no means the best pvper out there but I have played with and know the best and they could not carry at least 20% of matches queing solo over a large sample size. Especially if they que at non-primetime hours because you have a higher likelihood of getting imbalanced matches at this time…

They have separate battles records per character lol they could easily do that for ranked as well it’s extraordinarily simple…

Perhaps when we had separate queues that was try. But in the game’s current incarnation, though, it is inarguably easier in a mixed que to win games in a group than it is solo. That’s…blatantly obvious. So statement stands - a high W/L ratio is infinitely easier to obtain playing in premades than solo at the moment.

This isn’t really a fair argument. A game like Valorant can mix a solo/group que because of the population. You can always find a similarly skilled (based on ELO or whatever rating system the game uses) team to pair up against a premade. As I and other have said many times, the problem in this game isn’t premades per se it’s premades that are demonstrably more skilled being put in matches against vastly inferior players due to the low population. I don’t think anyone would care about premades of skilled players at all if we had queues with thousands of players such that a trinity premade of skilled players was put against a trinity premade of similarly skilled solo players. The problem is when you put 4 skilled players in a premade up against 2 skilled players and 2 bots. Other games with larger populations can avoid this but this game cannot due to low population.

I like it but I think it needs to be augmented with achievements/separate W/L for solo and group que. I have many toons that have never lost an arena match in a group que but like that doesn’t really mean much haha. Having a 70%+ W/L on toons that almost exclusively solo que is much more difficult and impressive imo. Rewarding people with more tokens who take the hard path of solo que and still have a solid WR seems eminently sensible to me.

Yup. You start pvping on a new toon, do pretty well, and your reward is you get to carry bots for eternity. It’s pretty infuriating…

I think this would be a great idea if we had the population for it. But SS at least has nowhere near the pvp population to support this unless you’re going to completely get rid of the “matchmaking delta” concept Bioware uses which forces a pop after set amount of time no matter the ELO difference. And if you do that, you’re just literally never going to get pops at certain times. During off-peak hours, there might only be 10-12 people queing arenas - and one might be a premade. Now you either have to give them an unbalanced match after a certain amount of time or literally they never get a pop because the ELO gap is too big. I think Bioware seems to think that the latter is unacceptable. In a game like CS:GO you can do this sort of stuff because you can always find a similarly skilled composition (based on ELO) to basically any team because there are thousands and thousands of players. We just don’t have that luxury in SWTOR. My unpopular opinion remains that we should simply split groups up in matchmaking unless it’s possible to form a balanced match. So if the people in que are 4 new players in 320 gear at 1000 ELO and 4 veterans at 1800 ELO in a premade, just split the 4 man premade into two groups of two for that match, each getting two new players. Then if later on there are four solo players at 1800 ELO, you could keep the premade together and play them against the similarly skilled solo team. This way everyone gets to “play with their friends” if it’s possible to do so in a balanced way.

I mean presumably you are not a bot (I assume most bots aren’t really capable of understanding pvp enough to post about it on forums), so it’s not 8 bots…

I’d say 10-20% of arena matches are ruined by premades and probably another 25% are ruined by awful matchmaking such that the match outcome is blatantly obvious before it starts because the teams/roles are so unbalanced. Warzone matches are a complete sh*tshow on the other hand. I have no idea how any sort of matchmaking works here but seemingly every match is either one side kill farming and ignoring objects or one team completely steamrolling the other because they’ve put 6 bots with 2 decent players against 8 decent players.

Wait…what? You actually listened to players for once? Holy sh*tballs Batman it’s a miracle! Way to go.

Kills near nodes count as 2 points each I believe.

Please explain how what I am saying is wrong. Would love to see what’s wrong with my math.

One purple augment is like 40m. That’s 2/3 of the price of an OEM. So you farm df SM for one hour you can buy 3 augments assuming a df SM run takes 15 minutes. You need 14 augs so that’s 5 hours to be fully auged ignoring any frags you get from conquest or other activities. It’s therefore really not much to expect that people have purple augments when they go into pvp…

I think the stuck issue is way more nuanced. Often times if I get paired with 3 bots against a decent team I’ll stuck the second round to get it done with faster if we get obliterated in the first. Or in a trinity match, if you lose a dps first and the other team stabilizes, the match is over 99% of the time. Sure you could maybe drag this out to acid guarding your healer but like what’s the point? Just stuck and move on. Like getting into match and after match and just stucking is super annoying behavior and I agree it would be great to get rid of these people but I don’t see a way to do this without harming the (in my view) totally legitimate reasons for stucking discussed above.

Honestly, all more experienced players are asking is that people come in with some semblance of an idea how to play. I don’t expect them to be good and know the finer points of pvp. But knowing that guard swapping is your biggest priority as a tank? Knowing how to do more than 3k dps freecasting? Knowing how to do more than 5-6k hps freecasting? Having a tactical appropriate for your spec and some augmented (even blue augments) gear? Like this stuff is really not that hard. Read a guide for like an hour. Practice on a dummy for 2 hours. Spend like 2 hours doing DF SM for frags and you’re basically there. Like 5 total hours of time required to not be a total sandbag? That’s all I’m asking for.