I agree with @Luciferior. Seeing skilled players (and losing to them) should incentivize players to play better. But because of the current hold-my-hand, everyone is a winner, participation trophy garbage, lose my way through PvP Seasons, reward structure there are currently 0 incentives to improve. PvP Seasons is great as an initial reward for players who might lose 99% of their games but want to dip their toe in PvP. But it is not enough. Otherwise you're going to end up with what we have now - endless complaining and forum threads from players that want the game catered to their skill level with ideas like the removal of premades and a solo only warzone queue. But @wepeel is not entirely wrong. It sucks going against players that are simply light-years ahead in skill. It's like banging your head against the wall; there's simply no way you can learn or improve when you get globalled the second you drop down from spawn. Unfortunately, this again is a result of BroadSword's current participation-based reward structure and the removal of ranked. The skill gap is enormous between the handful of ex-ranked players who are left and the new majority casual population. If there was a competitive reward structure that supported experienced players, you would have experienced players playing against experienced players and casuals playing against casuals. But instead we have the disgusting state of game that we currently have. It's not fun for the casual who gets globalled out of spawn, and it's not fun for the experienced players who haven't had a competitive game since the removal of 7.2 two years ago.

All of my friends are awful. I tell them that on a daily basis. The only reason I group up with them is to grace them with my presence.

New players in PvP is not an issue. This is a good thing. The issue is that there is no incentive for these new players to improve, nor incentives to keep skilled players in the game.

Rage jugg has the most root breaks in the game. Even without mad dash (which I don't take 99% of the time), rage juggs have intercede, enrage, endure pain, obliterate, and breaker to purge roots/slows. Not to mention root/stun immunity on leap and several 10-30m abilities including saber throw, vicious throw, force scream, and force crush if you do find yourself out of melee range and unable to leap. AND even if somehow I do get rooted/slowed, that is actually a buff to rage juggs because of pooled hatred. Rage has literally an ultimate kit to deal with crowd control. If you cannot stay ontop of a sniper as rage jugg, then you are playing the class wrong. And yes, I duel decent players. As you can see from the link in my signature, I am S9, S12, S14 top3 conc op. And many of the people I play against are also retired top3 players. Over the years, I have co-hosted the most successful PvP tournaments on NA along with my friends SWTOR influencers Kogass and Biggs. I know a thing or two about dueling. 🤣

Check link in signature. 🤣

Rage beats oper, sorc, sniper, and merc. Sin is the only thing that beats it.

What? 🤣

No, if all else equal, madness will always beat arsenal. But as I said earlier, 99% of the players in regs are not very skilled.

If you want to get into specifics, I recommend recording your gameplay and uploading it here. That way we can actually help. Just going through a list of scenarios that could happen is extremely speculative, and rather unproductive. As you already stated, the best way to learn how to beat other classes in 1v1s is to play those classes yourself. If you're struggling with madness sorc, play against it to learn its weaknesses. As you've come to realize, madness v arsenal is always going to be a hard matchup for the arsenal merc. But that doesn't mean you need to always lose to them. Oftentimes skill trumps class, especially in reg warzones were the average player is extremely bad. With enough skill and experience you can beat maddness on arsenal merc. Lastly, I wouldn't put a lot of value in lowbie pvp. Lowbie PvP used to be a great place to learn, now it's a waste of time. The skill level in lowbies is very low, many players don't have their full range of abilities, and the type of gameplay is significantly different from lvl 80.

Oh what's your toon name?

Gotta love the forums. Somehow it always comes back to premade QQ. 🤣

You need to be doing a lot more than just ignoring tips to have a 10% winrate. 🤣 I've seen notorious throwers like Moophy come out of solo ranked with a higher winrate than 10%. Do premades on SS que arenas? On SF most of the premades only que warzones, which can get quite boring.

Is no one else going to comment on this? 🤣

There's no point trying to engage with this guy. It's useless. This guy has been obsessively responding to every single one of my comments with "I have too many friends" (as if it somehow a bad thing) in order to ignore and deflect from the actual conversation. It's not worth derailing threads to respond to delusional people.

Putting aside the laughable notion that I'm going to look through thousands of hours of twitch vods to find an anonymous character name... It's completely disingenuous to tell complete lies like "only 20 people played ranked." Perhaps at its worst, at 2am in the morning 8 months into a year long season... sure? But as I've said many times, the population only fell of that much as a result of BioWare neglect in the first place. But then again, all of this is pointless discussion. Most people here on the forums likely have never done ranked. And no amount of truth is going to outweigh the amount of propaganda other people, who supposedly have done lots of ranked but at the same time don't want people to know their character name, have told.

Tell us you never played ranked, without telling us you never played ranked.

The typical BioWare double down, even after the whole community tells you this is a bad idea.

I have no bone in this fight. And really don't care about Eternal Championship. But I will say more generally, I don't think content should be balanced for disabled people. I am sympathetic to the challenges of being disabled; it would be great if game modes have various levels of difficulty. But when that's not possible, game developers should create content for the average player (or higher to give the average player a goal to work towards). And I think we can both agree that although there may be "many" people with disabilities, they are not the average.

If you're talking about the ranked community, it died in 7.2. If you're talking about the regs community, it was gutted in 7.2. Most of the veteran reg players left in 7.2 when they realized that BroadSword wanted to turn their game mode into a battlepass for casuals. And that's all regs are these days, frequent pops of 8v8 storymode casuals. These players are not PvPers; I doubt even 5% of them would self-identify as part of the PvP community. Just because people play regs doesn't mean they are a PvPers or part of the PvP community. And that's exactly why you see no one care about objs anymore, or any guilds teaching new players, or any established streamers, or any PvP tournaments...

It's crazy that they haven't deleted this entire thread yet. Don't get me wrong, I'm grateful that they haven't. It's honestly been refreshing to actually be able to talk about their moderation practices. And I don't mean discussions about specific acts of moderation, which several posters here have done and I understand why BroadSword must eventually moderate if nothing else but for consistency. But more generally it's been nice to have the ability to have a discussion about BroadSword's tendency to over-censor posters and the ridiculousness of some of their justifications for censorship. One of the (intended?) effects of BroadSword's rule against "posting about moderation" is that you literally cannot have a conversation about anything if BroadSword deems it "otherwise objectionable." You often see this with posts that are critical of BroadSword, subsequently censored for being less than positive, and as a result bar the conversation entirely. BroadSword will inevitably delete this thread, but before they do I hope this thread spurs thoughtful discussions among the Forum Moderation Team about fighting the urge to be trigger happy with the censor button and allowing respectful dialogue that might not necessarily be completely positive.

One question I do have for @Screaming_Ziva (anyone can answer): Are the stronghold hooks symmetrical in the Copero Stronghold? In recent strongholds including the Alderaan and Rishi the devs have started becoming very sloppy job with hook placement. The hooks themselves are sometimes asymmetrical and there is sometimes no way to correct for this in the X or Y axis slider. It makes mirror arraignments of decorations impossible. It really pisses me off sometimes.

When it comes to decorating, @Screaming_Ziva is one of the best. I was going to get it to test it out, but you confirm my fears. It's too bad because it initially the stronghold seemed like a very neat idea that we haven't really seen before. It's too bad they didn't let us PTS test the stronghold. Strongholds are the one actual form of "content" that is worth PTS testing because players typically have a better sense of best functionality than the devs. But then again... not like they ever listen to our feedback on PTS.

This is actually a great point that is revealing of a much larger issue... that many people on these forums are not going to like. The current SWTOR development path is in an endless descent into maintenance mode. The devs need to make content to make money, but they have no money to make content in the first place. And so they make the bare minimum content that will get them the most bang-for-their-buck: content tailored to the solo casual. Cartel Market cosmetics, Galactic Seasons, PvP Seasons, Daily Areas, Date Night. But as they make this content, more players from other parts of the community quit and unsubscribe. PvP Seasons resulted in the death of the PvP community. Daily Areas and no NiM R4 resulted in the death of the PvE community. All of these actions further solidifies the devs dependence on solo casuals and necessity to create content tailored to them. Hence the never ending decline in the game's population, and the slow descent to maintenance mode. BroadSword's reputation nerf is just the latest progression in this inevitable demise, one that solo casuals are themselves feeling because almost all other players of the community have quit, and the devs are still strapped for cash. BroadSword made a calculation that they need more money and the best way to do it is to get the only substantive community that is left, solo casuals, to grind more. I'm in no way saying all of this to demean solo casual players. But the reality of game is that BroadSword has become indebted to solo casuals by slashing content from every other part of the game and catering content to them. And, unfortunately, solo casuals by themselves, cannot keep this game afloat. The devs are stuck between a rock and a hard place: the former being their lack of resources, and the later being their dependence to the solo casual player. I'm honestly not sure if there is any way out of the situation BroadSword is in now. And it's sad to say. This game could have been great. As I said before, the devs need money to make content, but need content to make money. I would say that maybe BroadSword could risk it all, make content at a loss, and hope that it attracts players back. But even then... I'm not sure players would return. There is just so much bad blood between the devs and players that the devs have alienated. Sure, I say all of this as an aforementioned disgruntled player. But it doesn't change the fact that everything I said was true and the current reality that the game is in.

The removal of rewards that players earn in this game through sometimes years of effort should never EVER happen. Ever. In any game. Period. End of discussion. It doesn't matter if you feel like flags are toxic or any other reason. Players invested hundreds of dollars worth of subscriptions and hours to earn those rewards. They were part of the game for years. All the while players played that content expecting that reward, and BioWare said nothing about such rewards. If you want to have a discussion about nerfing flags, or removing the sound. Then sure. But the retrospective removal of hard fought rewards is the worst slap in the face to players that earned them. This is the fastest way to get a loyal community of players to quit... that and removing ranked all together, which of course BioWare also did. Just look at the tantrum that PvErs are throwing at having their PvE rewards removed. And they can regain those rewards. PvPers can never regain the flags that they earned.

You need to understand.... the devs do not care. They have consistently screwed over the endgame community because it would require too many resources to fix their mistakes the right way. This is literally not even the first time they took rewards away from people that earned them legitimately.