Not really true, it entirely depends on how you fit them and your own personal flying style. In my case, for example, it's the exact opposite of what you describe. All my really high kill scoring games have been in the Novadive, and I use the Flashfire as a gunship killer, to fairly spectacular effect. The Flashfire is set up with rocket pods and burst lasers, giving an even moderately inattentive gunship no warning at all until they're already being hammered EXTREMELY hard. An interesting side effect is that it absolutely demolishes turrets, making it absurdly effective as a rapid point capper, especially if it's undefended. The Novadive is set up with laser cannons and rocket pods, and I have a real tendency to just rack up kill after kill with it. It'll still light up gunships fairly well, but the laser cannons don't hit nearly as hard as the burst lasers. They've got a pretty good maximum range though, so I don't have to get quite so close to people to hit them, which makes tracking easier.

I've seen imp gunships that ran back to their spawn the instant they came under any kind of attack, which can make them very hard to kill.

Actually, if you read it, it says Obroan is BIS for everything except MH/OH, although it sounds like the difference isn't all that much.

Because if you're on a PvP server, there's no bolster in the open world, and as such the PvP gear is utterly dominant when some dude decides to jack you on Oricon.

Somesuch, yeah. Ranked is supposed to have that, but ranked has so many other problems it's not funny. One thing I do know though, back after launch, I was friends with most of the really good pvpers on my server. when we got dumped off to Pot5 (and some punk stole my name, too), I tracked most of them down. Since I came back in October, I've seen TWO of them. One of whom was being played by his wife because he was too burned out to play himself, and the other who just came back a couple days ago. The only time I've been able to get decent matches was in the middle of the night. It's really, really depressing.

One thing you missed there, OP. WoW has cross-realm PvP queues, which Bioware has flat-out refused to do (for good reason). Putting premades in a seperate queue would greatly lengthen overall queue times, possibly to the point that at many times of day it might not be possible to get a match at all. Bioware has stated their number 1 goal in pvp queue design is to minimize queue times WITHOUT doing cross-server queues. In short, it's not going to happen. And it probably shouldn't, anyway. The problem isn't the premades, it's the reasons that people want to MAKE premades. For example, that their side is composed largely of idiots, and they lose almost every match badly when they DON'T queue with a premade. I'm seeing a lot of this myself, these days. It's one of the reasons I quit playing WoW, and if anything drives me to quit SWTOR (again), that'll probably be it. If you want to solve the premade problem, you need to solve the problem of uncaring, unskilled, moronic people clogging up the BGs.

I just spent an entire match almost unable to do anything, because a group of gunships were abusing the Ion tap debuffs to leave me stuck dead in space with no weapons and no engines. The gunships themselves were doing very little damage, but given that I was basically stuck dead in space with no weapons and no engines, they still would've picked me apart eventually. As it was they didn't have to, as their friends in scouts were taking care of it. No weapons, no afterburners, no missile evasion. And once I'm locked down they just keep hitting me with it. Any mechanic that keeps a player locked down, with no way to escape it, is a problem.

I've seen some evidence that suggested that GSF's lead reticules have the same problems JTL's did during beta: they don't account for latency. During JTL's beta they had, like GSF, perfectly accurate lead reticules. But because they didn't account for latency at all, the actual point you had to shoot was slightly in FRONT of the reticule. It was only particularly noticeable in close-range, tight turning engagements (in which your target would invariably be rotated up on their wing and turning by pitching up towards you). In that circumstance, it led to the client-side simulated 'lasers' apparently hitting the target, and the client simulating a hit on their shields, visually and aurally, but no damage being dealt. I came to realize after awhile that there was a SECOND 'hit' sound that only played if you actually did damage, and in these tight turning engagements with hits for no damage, that sound wasn't playing. That allowed me to eventually find the actual aim point, just in front of the lead reticule, and start taking out targets in these types of engagements. Evidently I was the ONLY one that figured it out, because I found myself going into situations where a dozen or more people were camping an enemy spawn, and I'd get the kill every time. Eventually they started complaining about ships being invulnerable on top and bottom, and there was a huge thread and a lot of complaining...which I got sick of and explained what was happening. Maybe a week later they changed the lead reticule to merely indicate direction, with you having to find the exact aim point somewhere between it and the ship yourself. I think GSF has a similar problem, only it just looks like misses, and I've yet to find where to aim to score hits in close-range, tight turning engagements. I suppose it could also be that the 500/525m 'close' range on energy weapons is a sort of minimum, and that accuracy decreases rapidly after that...it would explain why I've gotten so many misses when me and my target were both STOPPED at extreme close range.

Honestly, I also find the rocket pods to be more useful than the cluster missiles in quite a few situations, so much so that I'm actually using rocket pods on my flashfire now. Burst Lasers + Rocket Pods is the king of all setups for murdering stationary targets. The rockets have a MUCH higher fire rate than the cluster missiles. And when going after sniping gunships, rockets don't give the target a loud, obvious lock-on tone to warn them they're under attack. Their first warning they get is when they start taking massive damage, which they're sometimes too engrossed to notice. Cutting loose with burst lasers AND rockets at point-blank range will kill a gunship in seconds. So much so that they sometimes don't so much as twitch before they explode. It kills turrets even faster: my flashfire can wipe out all three turrets around a satellite in a single pass that lasts MAYBE 10-15 seconds. But interestingly, I frequently do better in my novadive, especially when I was still using quad lasers and cluster missiles on the flashfire. I've got the novadive fitted with laser cannons (I seem to have a lot more luck with those and quads than I do with rapids or lights). It does seem like it's able to travel longer distances faster than the flashfire, but they way they're set up now the Nova also has a lot longer range on its lasers. I've experimented with sabotage probes and may mess with thermite some later, but for now I'm sticking with the rocket pods. I actually find the cluster missiles more useful on my strike fighters: I have my Star Guard set up with Ion Cannons as its secondary lasers, and I've managed to kill a scout in one pass by using the ions to blow off its shields and then jamming a cluster missile on its hull. My Pike has Clusters and Protons, and is my newest ship so it's not particularly well upgraded yet. It does okay: if they come in close I spam cluster missiles at them, if they try to run they get a proton up the tailpipe. Might need some refinement yet, doesn't seem to work as well as some of my other ships (damage is good, kills are lacking), or maybe it just needs some upgrades.

...What about the Distortion Field upgrade 'Disable Enemy Missile Lock' with the description "Distortion Field disables missile lock of enemies currently targeting you'?

I don't see any link...and didn't when I first came here. just his /5char. If there was one, he removed it.

...Didn't you read the title before you clicked on it? He's just being goofy and not resposting it in his main text (or elaborating). I'm presuming he's asking if we can let the F2Ps in now instead of later. It's either that or he's asking if they're already allowed in, which makes much less sense. Honestly...I wouldn't mind letting them in sooner. I've had two queue pops in an hour and a half, the first into an 818 to 3 loss that I left immediately (Where's the 'New games only' checkbox, FFS.) The second, just now. Exclusive access is worth squat if the queue won't pop.

What people don't seem to get is that the OP, and the others like him, are the entire point of the game having gone "Free" to play. Most F2P games, they're just trying to attract as many players as possible, so that they can get money out of them via the real-money market. A lot of that cash comes indirectly, in the form of people buying things from the real money market to sell for in-game money, essentially a legitimate method of buying the in-game currency with real money. Bioware took a different route, one that makes the whole 'free to play' thing a real misnomer: their goal is to drive you to a subscription, with the Cartel Market just being a bonus income stream instead of the primary one. Many F2P games have a subscription option, but again it's different from SWTOR: On most F2P games, it's framed as 'As a Free player you get all this, as a Subscriber you get all these too!' On SWTOR, it's more like 'As a Free player, you don't get this, this, this, and these things you have repurchase regularly, but you get it all for free if you subscribe!' The general goal of the F2P restrictions is to cause frustration, enough to make it seem more worthwhile to subscribe. But tell me, for every person like the OP who gets frustrated with it and subscribes, how many do you suppose decide to just stop playing? And how many never start in the first place because they heard bad things about how restrictive it is?

By which he means an Android or iOS device, or the Android SDK which I gather lets you run Android apps on a PC... I wouldn't call it a money grab, anyway, since the total cost of an authenticator is all of $7.50. $5 for the little fob, and $2.50 for shipping. Which I'd wager isn't all that much higher than cost. Not to mention that either way, app or physical fob, you get 100 free CC a month for having it. Meaning in about 8-10 months, you've earned the fob's cost in free CC, and start to earn more from it than if you'd spent the cash on CC directly. I Have one of the Fobs, and prefer them to an app version, because I know there's a (very remote) possibility of the device you have the app on getting hacked, which could allow the attacker access to your account if they've also got your password. All that aside, I'd say that for some reason, you're not being recognized as logging in from the same system you used before: generally those things are supposed to remember the thing you just used the one-time password on so you don't have to do it again. If this is happening in your browser, it could be because you have it set up to delete their cookies on a regular basis, which interferes with their ability to recognize your browser as being the same one as before. Edit: I'll also add that I have a Blizzard Authenticator(Same model, different faceplate and settings) I got awhile after they came out (6 months? Maybe? They kept selling out), and five or so years later, it still works. Granted, the battery life is supposed to be 7 if I recall...I looked up the specs once.

Very true. I can say that, as a Veteran of a fair few MMOs, SWTOR has the best storyline and leveling experience I've ever seen. In those two areas, it makes Galaxies look like a Joke, WoW look like it's only halfway there, and STO and CO look like trivial Snoozefests. Problem being, Storyline and Leveling are what you expect from a one-time purchase, single-player game, like KotOR. What you expect out of an ongoing subscription MMO, is that after you've hit max level, there continue to be things to do. Problem being, SWTOR isn't substantially better or different in the endgame department. At launch in particular the endgame was quite thin. So people played through their storylines and...got bored. They basically created eight different versions of KotOR 3, and then slapped a pretty standard endgame on the back, and at first a lot of bits were missing (some STILL are, like true multi-spec, which is NOT the same as a field respec at all.) After all the hype, all the money EA and Bioware spent, all the people talking about how this was finally going to be the WoW killer...they got to level 50 and found nothing special waiting for them. It wasn't a case of it being BAD...it was a case of it not being better enough. People expected to have the bar raised substantially, egged on by the storyline and the leveling experience... and then found it hadn't been raised much at all, other than those two, non-core things. If you could've mined the raw disappointment that resulted, you would've made millions using it to make stuff to sell to Emo kids.

The simple, Honest truth is that SWTOR isn't really F2P at all. Some of the restrictions they've got are the nastiest and greediest I've ever seen, and I'm including Cryptic/PWE in that list, so it's really saying something. Right down to basic features that you can't unlock at all (queue for crafting, full crew deployment, ranked Warzones...) and others that are ongoing expenses (Field Revives, Exceeding your Credit Cap, Flashpoints...) The point of going F2P is, as a general rule, to get people to play who otherwise wouldn't, and get them to generate money for you, directly or indirectly. That isn't what Bioware's really done. What they've done is basically add an extremely extended demo, with partial unlocks and several mini-subscriptions in order to access some of the rest. Thing you have to keep in mind, is that anyone who's buying unlocks or weekly passes is in fact giving Bioware money, even if they're buying them with credits: someone had to buy them with CCs, and even subscribers can only get up to 700 free CC per month. Most of those unlocks on the GTN were bought with real money. My personal experience is a really good example of how the current, false F2P is hurting the game and costing Bioware money: I can't sub. Literally cannot, I don't have the money. I bought the game at Launch, used several Pre-Paid cards I got as gifts to fund my subscription for a total of about five months...of which I played maybe two, because I got depressed(Chronic, recurring thing with me) and stopped playing. The rest of my sub time expired before I broke out of it, and by then I couldn't afford to re-sub. When I heard it was finally going F2P, as many had predicted when the populations went into freefall shortly after launch, I looked into it, thinking I might start playing again. I took one look at the restrictions and decided they were too much, and it'd be better to wait until I could afford to sub. It never happened. I started looking at it again about a month ago, and discovered that you could now unlock most of the restrictions, and decided it *might* be possible to make it work. Subbed to get RotHC, and have been buying and saving Unlocks in the meantime. But it took a year. A full year where I didn't play at all. A year where Bioware got no money at all from me, because the F2P restrictions were too much for me to even consider TRYING to do it. Now I'm trying, but the remaining restrictions being what they are...I'm not sure I won't just get sick of dealing with it and quit again. Inactive players don't generate any money for Bioware. Active players, even the F2P ones, do. Easing up on some of the more odious things could draw in a *lot* more people, and with them a *lot* more money. As it stands right now though, SWTOR has a reputation for having the worst F2P restrictions in the Industry, of the games that have the option at all. A lot of people aren't even trying the game at all because of that reputation. And frankly, the argument that the people complaining about the restrictions are doing so because of a sense of entitlement is a bad joke. It's very deliberately set up to be really bad, in order to try to push people to subscribe. Most of the people complaining about it are people that would never work on: they're not EVER going to subscribe, either because they simply don't like the idea or they simply don't think it's worth the money. How much money could Bioware get out of those people, if they could get them to stick around and play? I'd be happy to subscribe...if I could afford to. I can't, and it's not looking like changing anytime in the foreseeable future. Bioware's already lost all the money they could've gotten out of me, indirectly, had I been playing for the last year. They may stand to lose more if I decide I can't stomach some of the non-unlockable restrictions and leave again. They're throwing money away, basically.

I just got dumped into the middle of two bad losses because someone ragequit and I got their spot. Which is completely dumb, didn't there used to be a 'new matches only' button? They either need to punish ragequitting or put that button back in. All this stuff they say they do because it 'makes the queues faster', well honestly, I'd PREFER a longer queue to getting dumped into a guaranteed loss where half the team has already given up.

This, in spades. As a Vanguard, even if I'm not doing terribly well because of my at-the-moment poor gearing, I can still harpoon the ball carrier into the pit, or into a flame-trap followed by a stun. Or use Hold the Line to run the ball down the ramp and jam it into the goal, immune to most forms of CC (including the ones they're most likely to use in those last, desperate few yards). It's a lot more complex and involves a lot more of a skill factor than the other WZs. Sure, you can still dominate the crap out of it if you massively overpower the other team... but if it's anything less than a steamroll, there's the possibility of pulling something off. Sometimes even when it IS a steamroll. I pulled that Hold the Line trick for a score in a match we otherwise got walked over in, losing 6-1.

More Importantly, how do you suppose Yoda would react if one of his allies used DEATH FIELD? It's a common pattern in any faction based game, though: The 'Good Guy' side has more players, because they have far more of the more common 'casual' type players. The more PvP minded people tend more towards bad-***ness, and thus end up on the more 'evil' side. Other things can play into it too. WoW had this particular disparity particularly badly early on in part because the racials of the Horde side, particularly the Forsaken, were more useful in PvP than the Alliance racials. We haven't got that problem, but we've still got the 'Hardcore Bad***' factor going. One of the prime results of this is that the ONLY servers that are likely to have an even halfway decent Pub side, PvP wise, are the PvP servers. Because the majority of the Hardcore PvP types that were NOT swayed by the Sith bad***ness and thus rolled Republic are mostly going to do so on the PvP servers. Which leaves just the people that either got interested in it later, or rolled PvE because their friends rolled PvE. In a sea of casuals that don't know what they're doing and just dabble. One of the unfortunate side-effects of this is that if Cross-Server WZs are ever implemented, it'll probably have a detrimental effect on win rate for Pub players on the PvP servers.

You realize that the Rep and Imp classes are EXACTLY THE SAME, just with different animations? This is a reflection of the fact that the more 'hardcore' PvP types tend to prefer the more evil, 'cooler' side, while casuals tend to prefer the 'good guys'.

Oh no, that's definetly the case. You can get that message on a particularly long cycle through the spawn, though I haven't seen it as frequently recently as I remember doing a year or so ago (could just be luck, I haven't done that many matches this time yet.) The OP on the other hand most assuredly got kicked by AFK votes. What he needed to do was, the instant he got the message, run straight for the nearest sith and attack them. He says he got the message when he went to hide in the middle from the explosion...which in my experience almost always has members of both teams in it, even during the hide phase. His mistake, it sounds like, was running back to his pylon and continuing to guard it. It sounds like his side was pretty badly steamrolling the sith team and had them bottled up, more or less. He needed to go to wherever the fighting was instead of back to guarding.

AFK Votes/autokick are only cancelled by going into combat. The whole system is in place because there was a real problem in the WZs with people AFKing to get daily credit. At first, there was the whole 'don't get any medals, don't get credit' thing, but it's way too easy to get one medal, even without going into combat or for some classes, even leaving the spawn. So Bioware put in a thing where if you stay in the spawn for too long you get autokicked, so the AFKers would leave the spawn and go hide in a corner. So Bioware put in the vote-to-kick system, that auto-aborts and cancels all votes if the votee enters combat. It's not so much an 'AFK' kick, though that's what it's called, as a 'non participation' kick. Because it's way too easy to just move or something periodically so you don't register as AFK.

Blizzard had a tendency to not do anything about reports for months, and then suddenly mass ban tens or hundreds of thousands of people at once. I suspect mostly because of the sheer impact effect of 'we banned 90000 cheaters today'. In the case of gold sellers, it was pretty explictly spelled out that they were monitoring them, so they could find as much of their 'infrastructure' as possible and ban the whole thing at once. In the case of a hack, waiting a bit to ban them might allow them to study their behavior and try to figure out how to detect/prevent that particular type of hack from working in future. Regardless, when people report someone for using an obvious hack, and then see them out there again a few days or weeks later, it makes people feel like their reports don't matter and aren't being listening to. It can cause a real sense of 'why should I report things if they don't have any effect'. It's exacerbated by the universal policy every game company has of not telling you what steps were taken as a result of you reporting someone. *None* of them seem to feel this is enough of a problem to do anything about.

Of course it won't. All I said was that space combat can be fun if it's done well, with that as an example. I'm honestly not expecting it to be done well, because they already firmly stated early on that they didn't like JTL and didn't wanna go that route with space combat, which almost guarantees that it's going to be something completely different. Which means they're probably going to try to reinvent the wheel and it's probably going to be bad. As for being like battlefront 2...I used my joystick in battlefront 2.

There's a lovely little talent about halfway up tactics that allows you to increase the damage of pulse cannon by up to 60% and add up to a 90% snare to it (yes, NINETY), AND make it immune to interrupts (though not stuns, Physics, or knocks). It makes running out of it a lot harder, if you do it right. You could always use hold the line before dropping it, which would make you immune to physics and knocks, leaving only stuns that would be able to interrupt it.