I don't believe "This isn't working and we should try something else" is an inherently pessimistic statement. And I'm certain that the person shooting down an idea because it is flawed doesn't get to proclaim themselves an optimist.

Overwhelming support and a handful of vocal detractors who can't seem to understand that the flaws in ranked 8v8s aren't worse than the problems ranked arenas have?

And I'll say the exact same thing I always say: the present system does not work. It has never worked, it will never work, and people hate it. Even if you're 100% right and then some, ranked 8v8 can only be "as broken" as arenas. That's what makes these excuses patently absurd. At the end of the day, I think most people would rather have ranked dead with 8v8s than ranked dead with arenas.

Been away for a while and I'm glad to see there's still someone fighting the good fight. I'm also annoyed to see the exact same excuses missing the point: things can't get any worse than they are right now. Ranked Arenas are a dead end from which there's no improvement. I have yet to see a single reason why 8v8 solo would be worse. I don't give a damn if it's "not better;" at this point I'm willing to try anything that's different. That being said, if we absolutely can't get ranked objective I'd rather see ranked scrapped altogether. Split 8v8s and arenas into separate queues. Victories reward season points at all levels that can be traded in for unique weapons, armor, mounts, etc. released over the course of the year, resetting with each new iteration. Long term focus development on cross-faction game modes and matchmaking that prioritizes pitting teams against one another, then reimplement the leaderboards. If ranked arena is the only form of competitive PvP I can get, I'd rather have nothing.

I picked up Smite, myself. I'm probably not good enough to get Griffondwarf but I'm certainly going to try.

This. Any rewards are a joke as long as arenas are so freaking unbalanced. Throw in the cheating that was reportedly widespread this season and general disinterest in ranked arenas and we should be lucky they didn't just toss out season 7 altogether.

Thanks for the info! It really helped.

Confirmed. Seems to be working now. GAME ON!

On the average they tend to run about fifteen minutes. Less for a lopsided match, more for a stalemate. Seems about right.

500 points for a completed match. That's all you get if you job. 6,000 for completing 10 matches if that one's available. 1,500 for a win. 2,000 for completing your weekly, which takes half as long with wins. I forget how much you get for 100 player kills if it's up but it's significant (3,000 I think). Those are points you're giving to some other guild by jobbing. If I ran that guild's PVP and found out I had people doing that I'd be livid.

Yeah, that gets much worse. I'm pretty sure there's more filler in Bleach than actual plot. If you've heard people complaining about Naruto's filler, Bleach is much worse. No lie, the second to last arc in Bleach cuts to filler at least three times. Most of what I watch is on Toonami, although I do manage to watch something on Netflix now and then. If I had to pick an all-time favorite I'd probably say FLCL, but more recently I really liked Kill La Kill.

The weirdest thing I've heard about hackers is that they don't even really care about winning. In fact, a lot of hackers are on their way out and want to take as many people with them as possible. They know they're going to get banned but they don't really care. They know it'll take a few days or weeks for the mods to verify what they're doing and in the interim a lot of players get fed up and quit. I wouldn't be shocked if there are people sociopathic enough to take the ban, open a new account and start power level a new character: if it takes about a month for them to get caught they break even. Besides, their game is to get as many people to quit as possible, after all. Also, to be fair, there are people who don't know other classes'/disciplines' abilities and are crying foul. Hell, I've made that mistake myself.

Even with cross-server that doesn't fix the issue. You might get backfill but backfill does not filter for role or rating: it just grabs whoever's at the top of the queue. Since tanks and healers tend to be in short demand, that can create radically imbalanced teams. The issue is ranked solo arenas, has always been ranked solo arenas, will always be ranked arenas.

It does seem more like a PvE nerf than a PvP one. It will affect regs a bit since long drawn out fights will require a bit of mana management but, like guardian said, since sorcs can just spam their Force regen it's probably just an illusory change. It seems a better idea would be to put a cool down on that ability, maybe one similar to the roll debuff where if you use it too much too quickly it becomes unavailable for a while.

Sanctuary areas are still unflagged. Areas like the Promenade on NS or Voss-ka where both factions have to share basic utilities (and a few bases as well).

Arenas are nothing like objective war zones, though. Not even remotely. One idiot on your team is not going to be the reason you lost an objective match but one good (or lucky) player can absolutely be the reason you won. But in arena, whoever has the weakest player loses: three good players and one bad one cannot beat three average players and one good one. It might be close but it's still a three on four situation. Will people still trash talk? Of course, but it won't happen as much because as long as one person doesn't royally screw the pooch -- failing to call incoming or trying to force a cross-cap -- they aren't going to draw attention to themselves. And I hate to bring up premades because it's toxic but if people could actually stomach arenas do you really think people would still be complaining about groups in regs? Because if I see a top tier premade queuing on the other side, I don't even consider queuing ranked, I just log. Because nothing, no reward, is worth the misery of putting up with arenas. Even winning feels bad. And that really is the end of it: no matter how bad solo ranked objective might be it can't possibly be worse than solo arenas are. Arenas are at maximum badness. Being simply awful would be a marked improvement.

And as I tried to tell you in that thread, the issue is nowhere near as bad as you are making it out to be. The other team has a stealth defender? Well it's a good thing that cross-capping is a Hail Mary maneuver in regs (and most likely a solo queue) and most games are won or lost by playing well at mid. Honestly it's the stealth sapper that frightens but any smart defender should be able to LoS and hold off long enough for help to arrive. I suppose a stealth defender can rotate mid to support but, let's be honest, it's solo: some "hero" is going to decide that mid is a lost cause and go for the cross-cap. And that idiot will have won the match (which is also why you can't get too worked up about individual rankings). Two Sin tanks versus a Juggernaut and PT in HB? I guess it's a good thing they have those anti-CC cool downs, a 30 speed boost (that cleanses snares), and a teleport to rotate back to mid quickly. Don't get me wrong, they had better bring their A game but it's hardly a lost cause. An over abundance of Mercs and Snipers? Stay high and focus on controlling mid: they have great knockbacks and can put a hurt on anyone in a wide open area. Do classes have an advantage on certain maps? Sure, but it's usually not something a smart player can't overcome. Plus the map variety means nobody has the advantage all the time. You can't really say either of those things about solo arenas.

Exactly: a strong individual performance is much more important in 8v8s. That's what makes it better for solo. In arena, you're only as good as your worst player; in objective, a bad player has to be just a phenomenal waste of space to be the reason you lost. Some people might freak out about the prospect of "bad" players getting carried to higher ratings but I don't see how that can be considered worse than the present situation. Certainly it will reduce the amount of salt people throw around. And, again, every class can participate: you may not get gold tier (nor should everyone) but nobody's stuck with a hopeless cause.

Played six matches of lowbie Pub tonight. Saw OPG pop once and it was my only win. Everything else was lopsided and we were typically short handed. If anything OPG doesn't seem to be popping enough. -_-

I'm sorry I'm not following you: how would shortening capture times make maps more like AHG? Ancient Hypergates is the closest this game has to actual team death match: respawns on death, big team battles, and a secondary objective, the best strategy is to focus on kills while rotating to the pylon on call outs (and focusing on the enemy's pylon is typically the best way to lose a game). ACW and VS are much more objective-oriented: kills are important but only as a means to create a window for a capture. By shortening the window needed you make the game more objective-oriented, not less. Also, I should make it clear that I am only talking about solo ranked objective matches. If grouped players don't want objective ranked then fine; that's really their prerogative. But as a solo player I absolutely want objective ranked matches. It is the solution to so many issues right now and the potential drawbacks seem trivial to problems we are presently experiencing.

I'm going to go off on a tangent a bit here but please stay with me: I started playing Smite recently -- it's a third person MOBA that plays fairly similarly to an MMORPG -- and they have something called a season pass. If you purchase one, you earn points for every win toward rewards: skins, announcer packs, chest rolls, tchotchkes, you get the idea. They also have ranked and ranked does have exclusive rewards attached to it but the lion's share are attached to the season ticket. To be clear, you don't have to play ranked to earn these points: if you prefer to play an unranked mode you are free to. Also, it can be done at all levels: you have to be level 30 to compete in ranked but if you're just starting out and buy the season ticket you're still earning points toward rewards. So why can't something like this work for SWTOR? Why can't subscribers earn season points in the general queue at all levels? I'm sure someone is going to say "Premades will farm" and that is a cause for concern but the same thing is true of Smite and it doesn't really stop me from playing. Keep a few select rewards for ranked and let everything else be purchased with points earned by winning matches? All matches at all levels?

To be fair, there was always fix to ranked stalemates that was never attempted: shortening capture timers. Just for ranked matches, not regs; at least presently stalemates are not remarkably uncommon there. That would make captures easier and stalemates less common. If it doesn't, then odds are survivability is over-tuned and needs to be toned down. "But that would mean nodes flip more frequently?" Yes, and what is the downside to that? How is a tight back and forth match objectively worse than a stalemate? I also wanted to point out that there are more maps with different mechanics but I realize that there are actually only two and that's somewhat depressing. As for certain classes being better on certain maps, yes, of course. I don't deny that for a second. But the key point there is that there are different maps. It doesn't really matter if Tankernauts are damn good at Huttball because it's incredibly unlikely that they'll get that map 14 times in a row and sail to the top of the leaderboards (or Mercs sink to the bottom). Sure, some people might get stuck in a lower tier because a certain game mode pops more frequently than others BUT that's at worst a lateral move from the present situation. I'll take a queue where I'm at a disadvantage some of the time over a queue where I'm at a disadvantage all of the time.

The assumption is that there will also be a bunch of other players in 204s and it's not really that much of a handicap. The reality is that there are maybe a dozen or so people playing ranked at a given time and almost all of them are the hardest of the core: full, fully augmented, min-maxed.

Well … let's have a little chat about that. Simplified, TDM is easier to balance if you assume everyone is the same class: everyone has an assault rifle, maybe there are weapons spread around the map, some more powerful than others but they have less ammo and everyone is going for it so if you get it you really earned it. However, that starts to change when you have different load outs like in more modern games. Map design becomes an issue: open areas benefit sniper rifles; tight corridors benefit shotguns. This requires higher map complexity and/or map variety. This means that map design is just as complicated as objective modes. If it seems odd that I'm talking about FPSs, there's a reason: TDM in mainstream games is really only represented in shooters. In most shooters all "classes" are just DPS (and yes it is a little funny to think of two different guns as different classes but it is true). RTSs and MOBAs are objective based to one degree or another and possess a broad variety of unit functionality. Fighters are a close analog but tend not to be team-based (except for maybe Smash Bros and some wrestling games but even there it's a side feature). Racers and sports games are, of course, designed around objectives. There is, however, one popular FPS that has a wide variety of class types: Team Fortress 2. I bring this up particularly because, when asked if they would ever add a TDM mode, Valve said they never would because it would be too difficult to balance. This is a game where you have healers, ranged DPS, "melee" DPS (Pyros and Scouts), "tanks" (Heavies), and stealth classes, not roles you typically see in Halo or CoD. And it's completely objective based because of course it is: what role would an engineer play in TDM that wouldn't be too week or too powerful? No, engineers are great at securing objectives and choke points, while spies and demo men are good at removing them. The game is designed around area control -- pushing and defending -- a feature shared by SWTOR's objective maps. The only difference is that you can't swap classes in SWTOR if the team balance is not ideal. Which brings us to SWTOR which is completely class-based around the "holy trinity:" tanks, healers, and DPS. The game is also built around PvE mechanics: identifying environmental queues and reacting to them. It's not remarkably different than objective PvP: you have to recognize what's happening, who's playing the objective, who's attacking, who's healing, and react accordingly. Every class has the tools needed to prevent or secure a capture, to fight in or support the scrum, and to defend or steal the off nodes but some classes and builds are better in some areas than others. You say that stealth classes are better defenders and I say "of course:" stealth classes are supposed to be the strongest 1v1 fighters in the game but fall off in big team battles. Marauders are similar: strong 1v1 but lack sapping tools; better in team fights but highly reliant on healers to maximize their effectiveness. Every class, by design, have strengths and weaknesses in different areas. That's how class-based are supposed to work: counter-classes and contextual superiority. In a wide open area, a Sniper is going to dominate a Pyro, but in a small room the Pyro has the advantage. That's contextual superiority. However, a Spy will almost always have an advantage over a Sniper because his tool kit encourages staying in one spot, looking in one direction with a limited field of view which a decent Spy can easily sneak around. That's counter-class. Now, it's obviously not the same thing in SWTOR -- utility and support neutralize counter-class somewhat, contextual superiority includes whatever CDs are available at a given time, range is not as big an issue since melee classes have gap closers (or escapes, going back to context), some classes are designed to endure an assault from two or three people that some other classes would wilt under, and, of course, targeting is automatic and crits are a function of the RNG. However the fundamentals are still there: at any given moment there are several contexts occurring at once. Someone is defending, someone is attempting a cap, someone is trying to break up their cap, someone is trying to cap an off node. Knowing how to respond to a context is important but so is knowing how well your class performs in a given context. Which is why arenas will never work: they are a single context. Going back to how I started, that only works if every character is the same. The minute you introduce variation somebody gains an advantage. Maybe if the classes weren't that different and there weren't any support classes we could achieve some sort of balance but that's just not the case. That is why arenas will never be balanced; it's just not possible.

25-30 hours is the length of a modern RPG, and still a considerable time investment to ask of someone who just finished leveling a character to endgame. So is purchasing a level 60 character which cost $20 at present (and will go up to $40 if and when the sale ever ends); that's the price of a new game. As for the game mostly being played by vets, that doesn't soften the blow: I have hundreds of hours committed to my main and probably a few hundred more spread amongst my alts. Sure, I could invest more time in one of my alts and probably do well with them but, again, I'm committed to my main. And it just seems wrong to say that I have to give up on my main because he's not viable in the one mode they've chosen to make ranked (especially when he's quite viable in other game modes). To be blunt, I don't care if it can be rationalized: it's a legitimate reason for someone to quit. As for solo ranked in general, if you don't like it you are quite welcome to find a group and play in a grouped queue. I always stress if people who are that critical of the solo queue just bothered to try to find a group then group ranked would pop all day.