I don't know about solo ranked, honestly. It probably is less alive than usual. Team ranked is alive and well due to the components RPM-13 for top-tier augments only being obtainable through doing it. Many Solo-ranked regulars are doing TR instead, since they know they'll get their Elo either way and now have monetary stuff to gain as well. Basically, if you want to do ranked, TR is it. Joining a PvP guild is a better way to achieve this than grouping up with randos. Good luck.

"Leaving a PvP Challenge early will no longer apply any PvP deserter penalties." I took this to mean that we would no longer be getting the 15-minute quitter lockout for leaving a match we didn't want to play. I was wrong, because after leaving my 5th huttball in a row, I was hit with a lockout. I was well within the start of the countdown timer, there was a minute 20 left before the match began. So what does it even mean that "Leaving a PvP challenge early will no longer apply any PvP deserter penalties?" That I can decline the queue without penalties? Because unless they patched my game wrong, which is not far from the realm of possibility, they didn't make it so that I could leave a match I had already taken the pop for without getting this debuff. Or did they just write this in the patch notes to punk us out, so someone would quit on huttball spam thinking they could do so free of repercussions, only to get a lockout for the crime of not wanting to play the same map a billionth time in a row?

It's wintrading, and it's unethical, but it's not like the devs didn't incentivize this behavior. They're practically begging for it. Stat-improving gear or the mats thereof should never be obtainable only through elite-level endgame content such as ranked. Flashy, aesthetic, status symbol gear, like ranked-exclusive mounts and weapons? That's fine. Components to craft augments? Bull. And let's not even go into the PvE mat-farming. They could have just done what they did with the Charged Matter Transubstantiators in 5.something where the things had a random chance to drop from command crates (now would be renown caches) and maybe had them drop at a modest rate from conquest rewards if they wanted to make it a slow (but still practically feasible) grind. Do the devs even want people to be able to play with the new augs?

They did not permanently remove them. Their absence from the queue is temporary, for the devs to try to fix de-sync issues people have reported in both matches. I'd like to see them nixed for good though, and maybe classic huttball too while they're at it. Who plays an MMO to play sports? We have 2K and Madden for that.

I may be a couple years late in addressing some of these problems, as most of what this post is about is from the "skill-based matchmaking" implemented in 5.9.2. However, it's the mixture of that with some of the newer addenda to PvP that is making for some real problems. First off, anecdotally, I'm not convinced the matchmaking system is coming anywhere close to fulfilling its stated goal. I started PvPing in 4.0.3. From that point until 5.9.2, it seemed like close, hard-fought matches were the norm and ROFLStomps were anomalies. There were brief times when that maybe was less true, like right after the server merges, but that was the overarching trend. For the past two years, that's basically been flipped, where one-sided matches are a frequent occurrence and close fights stand out. So strike one for this update not even doing what it was advertised to do. Next point is what this post is titled for. Ever since 5.9.2, it seems as though the pool of players that you can possibly get teamed up with or pitted against has drastically shrunk. Now this would make sense if people are grouped based on a skill bracket, but what even goes into determining said skill bracket? Why are decided number-farmers in the same bracket as players who focus almost solely on objectives, and why is either in the same skill bracket as people who AFK whole matches and only do anything to avoid being vote-kicked? Winning or losing, IMHO, it gets stale to play with and/or against the same players in nearly every PvP match that I go into. Variety is the spice of life. You know what everyone's play style is if you've been PvPing for any length of time, and while pvp matches are rarely 100% predictable, the fewer options of who you can play with and against certainly makes it more so than it was before the range of opponents/teammates was limited by 5.9.2 Conversely, as a consequence of this, it's next to impossible to avoid queuing into certain players. There was a time in this game where you could wait a few minutes and leave a rotation if you didn't want to play with or against a certain team. Not anymore. Don't wan't to play with that zerg team again? Too bad. Now, if you wait a few minutes to queue again in hopes of getting out of an unfavorable or boring rotation, you'll actually end up waiting 10-15 minutes for the next most ball-busting or repetitive team comp the game can find based on this narrowly-defined tier it's shoehorned you into. That's ridiculous. As others have emphasized on this forum in different contexts, this is REGS, not RANKED. Queue-dodging doesn't merit any consequences. Related to the previous point, because the game formulates regs matches based on these very specific skill brackets, pop times have been on average much slower since 5.9.2 than they were before it. On its own, this is already not a good thing. People who only have so much time to game aren't able to get in one last match they wanted to play because it took an eternity to pop. Mix that in with the LEGACY-WIDE Deserter lockout and loser-gets-nothing mission rewards (Either one of these things without the other would be justifiable, together they're ridiculous) and you have some not good stuff. Mind you, plenty of people get booted from matches because of shoddy ISP's. I know the game has no real way to distinguish a genuine disconnect from a ragequit, but this is a little draconian. I'm sure at least several of you reading this have at least one night of PvP in a week where you're stuck on the same losing team match after match, you make zero progress on your weekly, your pop times aren't even that quick, and of course, you can't quit the match lest you be locked out so your only choice is to sit there and take the beating. Something has to give. Whether it's the drastically-reduced variety of other players an individual PvPer will get to see on a weekly, nightly basis, the loser-gets-skunked mission rewards, the slow pop times, or the legacy-wide "F*** you" for leaving a match, the current landscape is making a staple of this game a test of patience for many players.

Would it be too much to ask to make each PvP match one (more than one a day) Count towards conquest? And make my stronghold bonus count on it? PvP is my and a lot of other players' mainstay in the game and some of us invested big bucks into those SH's.