Healers in this game do substantially less healing than healers in other popular mmos.

wow if my completely ridiculous and fabricated statement on the future of swtor pvp wasnt just made up then this would be a surprisingly accurate depiction of an upcoming game mode.

Sorry I just had an aneurysm and accidentally posted this, I have no idea if anything like this is in the pipeline and probably just made it up.

All you're doing by not talking about this is annoying your paying customers who are PvP fans.

Decided to turn my 1 liner into an essay: There's a reason why the vast majority of the game's hardcore players, both in pve and pvp, left years ago. Time and time again, the devs have proven themselves either unable or unwilling to consistently deliver quality, non-buggy content. They've also shown that they are more than willing to take their sweet time to fix bugs, even if they are arguably game breaking. Frankly, I think even the most dedicated players would agree that had this game not had the Star Wars license, it would have almost certainly been dead for a long time by now. I think in the last 7 months especially, its been very easy to get discouraged as a hardcore player in this game. Now that we know about the upcoming expansion, its pretty easy to see that the vast majority of Bioware's time this year has been spent making the expansion content and as a result, the live game has been in maintenance mode. 3.1 was literally like 2 hard mode flashpoints. 3.2 was only Ziost, which could be beaten in like an hour or so. And while I'm very happy about the changes coming in 3.3, the reality is that virtually all of those changes were not only long overdue, and lets be real, probably took like 15 minutes to actually implement. So, with all that being said, I don't think anyone would blame you for getting frustrated with the game. I am too, and as a result, I haven't really played much lately. However, I do think is important to look at the big picture and see that in all likelihood, things are gonna get better. For one, while I still don't think they are doing as good as they could be, Bioware has undoubtedly gotten better at communicating with their playerbase. I feel pretty confident in saying that if this were the BW from a year or two ago, that the AOE change would have just gone up on live based purely on their metrics and internal testing. Instead, we not only got a chance to test out the change, but we were rewarded for doing so. Secondly, the game is undergoing a pretty major overhaul, and by October its going to look very different. I haven't seen a lot of people compare it to the FF14 relaunch, but personally I think its a pretty good comparison. Of course, at no point was SWTOR even close to the trainwreck FF14 was on launch, but by taking the game in such a radically different direction as BW has in KotFE, they are basically saying "Hey guys, we screwed up, but we still believe in the game and want to make it better." Yes, the lack of new end game content is definitely concerning and BW deserves to be called out for it, but honestly, if you take an objective look at the most recent endgame content, its been pretty awful. Queshball is considered by pretty much everyone to be the worst warzone by far and imo there has been a steady decline in the quality of PvE content since S&V. Personally, if I had to choose, I'd much rather have Bioware address the structural foundation of the endgame as opposed to them just making another garbage WZ or raid. I completely agree with you that in its current state, the game is simply not worth playing for most longtime subscribers, particularly if your primary interest is PvP. I've barely played in the past few months and don't see that changing any time in the immediate future. PvP has never been Bioware's #1 priority and I don't think most people expect it to be, but frankly I think there's more reason to be optimistic now, with the info we have on 3.3 and 4.0 than there has been in a long time.

There's a reason why the vast majority of the game's hardcore players, both in pve and pvp, left years ago.

imo this seems likely #bioflategate

I don't see how it could ever be logical, incoming megaservers or not, to disable character transfers, especially at a time when you have players returning to your game. As for the ranting customers point, I agree that its a big factor and I believe one of the key reasons why they are making it so cheap to transfer. If they did nothing for a few months, kept the price at 1800 cc, and then announced megaservers as a part of 4.0, you alienate anyone who transferred from June to October. I suppose that this could still be a factor even at the new 95% reduced cost, but lets be real here, the vast majority of people are not going to care that they spent a few bucks, or more likely, their monthly cartel coin allowance to transfer over a few characters. To have the same financial impact of one pre discount character transfer, you'd need to move over an entire legacy of 20 people. Very few people are going to do that, and the ones who do are clearly pretty committed to the game. Again, I agree that returning players definitely benefit from cheaper character transfers. I'd imagine thats why a free character transfer is one of the key reasons why someone would want to use a player's referral link. And again, I don't see how temporarily discounting character transfers argues against an eventual move to megaservers. I'll admit that it doesn't necessarily suggest the opposite either, and if the discount was 50%, 75%, or even 95% off with a set end date on the release of the new expansion, I'd probably agree with this line of reasoning. However, the combination of the ridiculous 95% price cut, the indefinite length of the sale, and the various obvious (Musco's post in which he says they plan to "rethink how we approach server separation") and not so obvious (Alex Tremblay discussing how to improve ranked pvp) hints suggests to me that this is a precursor to something and not just a temporary sale. This is only true in an imaginary world in which the returning players are equally proportioned to like solo questing, endgame PvE, and PvP and are divided up among the servers in such a way that each server, is at or near capacity and is able to get consistent q pops for ops, flashpoints, ranked pvp, etc. Suffice to say, I don't see this happening. I think at the very least, theres enough evidence to pretty much conclude that at some point there was a plan to do megaservers. Musco's post in December strongly implied it, especially so when considering how tight lipped they are about this kind of stuff. Granted, we haven't heard anything about it in a while, so maybe things changed, but with the release of a major expansion incoming, if they were planning on switching to megaservers, this would be the time to do it. Good news is that we don't have to wait all that long to find out.

Honestly I feel like the ranked population is so low that if the PvP community is gonna try to get together and designate another "official" server, they should do it without regard to east/west. I voted for Shadowlands, purely because any European players interested in rolling on the "official ranked pvp server" would have better pings than on Shadowlands. However, for the record im in the 100% convinced megaservers are coming camp, so I suspect that only Season 6 is really gonna be affected by this.

I don't really see how having a massive discount on server transfers is evidence against mega servers eventually being implemented. In fact, I see it as evidence for it. At the moment, server transfers are needed to make sure that returning players can play with their friends. Massively discounting them not only makes it less of a hassle for people who want to transfer now, but also softens the blow for when mega servers do go live. Imagine if you came back to the game in August, paid 1800 cartel coins to get to the server your friends are on, and then mega servers are announced in September? I think one reason for this indefinite promotion is to avoid situations like this as much as possible.

At this point I'm almost positive that BW is gonna go ahead with megaservers, but for whatever reason, they don't want to officially announce it yet. I think its very telling that this new promotion they are running doesn't have a set end date. So far, we've been told that the promotion will last "a while" and that we'll have at least a few weeks warning before it goes down, suggesting that the 90% off transfers are going to last for at least a few months. And if you think about it, it doesn't really make any sense for them to end it any time before the expansion, seeing as how the KotFE hype train isn't going to be stopping any time soon. When combined with the interview with the Bioware analytics guy in which he states that high population servers would be "a good start" to improving ranked PvP (http://www.swtornetwork.com/news/interview-with-bioware-stats-and-game-design-decisions/), and Eric Musco's post on server populations from back in December (http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?p=7879116), I feel like we have enough evidence to say that megaservers are probably gonna happen. In all likelihood, this promotion will run through the summer and provide a nice buffer time in which people can transfer for dirt cheap, and when megaservers are finally announced, nobody will feel bad that they paid 90 cartel coins to move a character in the interim So on that note, what would you guys like to see from megaservers? Would you prefer one giant server which combines everyone with swappable instances for the different playstyles or three servers per region, one for each of the major playstyles (the RiP Jung Ma option)? Also, how do you think Bioware is going to be handling characters names on the megaservers? The Musco post from December makes it a point to mention that they will remain sensitive to character identity, and I'm sure that Bioware would like to avoid a repeat of the naming debacle which happened during the last merges. And speaking of names, what do you guys think the name(s) of the new server(s) should be? Personally, I'd like to see The Fatman, the mega server before the mega servers, make a comeback. Unfortunately, the legacy of this once great server is rotting in the corpse of POT5, and I would love to see what was unquestionably the game's greatest server make a triumphant return.

I propose that all PvPers transfer to the roleplaying servers, Ebon Hawk in NA and Progenitor in the EU. My reasoning for this is that frankly, PvP is pretty awful on every server, including the so called good ones such as Harbinger, TOFN, and Shadowlands. However, on the RP servers, PvPers would have the added benefit of spectating some intense roleplaying sessions on the fleet while waiting for ranked to pop. Perhaps they will even find themselves so enthralled by this epic, player generated content, that they will join in themselves! At the very least, adding all of the PvPers to the RP servers will create a unique and cancerous environment that would be a joy to watch!

To be fair, I don't know every ranked player in the game, particularly the top solo ranked pt's, who i am almost completely unfamiliar with. However, I can tell you that the #1 operative was playing concealment the last time I saw him in solo ranked and White, the #3 op/scoud, almost exclusively plays ruffian. Again, I'm not saying that assassins aren't good. All I'm saying is that I think that they are among the best classes for solo ranked but not by far the best as some people believe. However, even if we accept the idea that assassins are ridiculously overpowered, it doesn't really change my opinion about hatred death field. Death field was 30 meters for assassins since 1.0 and nobody really had an issue with it. Even when the nerf did happen, many people criticized it for not really addressing the actual issues the spec has which make it so strong. I can understand wanting to clearly establish hatred as a melee class, but even classes that are unquestionably full melee classes such as juggernauts and marauders have at least one u ability that can consistently be used at 30 meters, so I don't see why assassins should be excluded from that because capabilities completely unrelated to death field made them so good.

I'm fully in favor of giving 30m death field back to assassins, getting rid of it in the first place was pretty dumb imo. On another note, I don't really understand why some people are under the impression that hatred assassin is ridiculously overpowered. It's really not, and both the solo and group ranked leaderboards back this up. Its certainly among the better classes, but theres way more pt's, sorcs and operatives over 2k than assassins.

Lethality is a weird spec in that its actually pretty good in arenas, particularly solo ranked, due to its offhealing ability. However, in warzones the class is pretty middle of the road, bordering on bad, mostly because of the long set up time before you can actually start doing damage and the need to be practically in melee range to use cull. I wouldn't want to see the class get any massive buffs, but one thing I would like to see would be for carbine burst, which is just a terrible ability, completely removed from the spec, and have either the AOE dot or frag grenade spread your dots. It would also be nice if the +25% damage to carbine burst utility was replaced with something similar to frag grenade. This would give operatives a decent attack with 30 meter range, something they've been lacking since they lost explosive probe in 3.0.