So a whole new gear grind? How does that do anything for the present pvp community but present an inflection point for walking away? I have not seen one request for another round of gear grinding. Sorry, but I’m not feeling it given the recent matches I’ve had. Maybe if they just get rid of gearing and make mid ftp. But as of now this game’s pvp is really out of step with where online competitive gaming is going.

In one breath it’s about how everyone sucks, in the next it’s about how there are no pops. Coming back from a few months off I am gobsmaked by two things: how awesome pvp in this game can be; and how utterly awful and uninviting the established pvp community can be. A lot of people in these forums are really cool. But man, so many in game are just so terrible. I can see no way for a new player to ever advance and compete to the satisfaction of the established pvp old guard. There really has to be a better on ramp for new players. I think about playing often because I spent so much time studying the game mechanics and I love it. But all it takes is one angry group to neg me out and I just leave. Since Elo is broken I wish they would let us select a league for ranked, say expert or novice. That way if I select novice I would never have to deal with the elite players and their bad attitude. I bet there are a lot of solid C+ to B+ players who would play a lot more and get better but for the negativity of the serious players. It’s a real shame and a missed opportunity. I really don’t think the elite players realize just how much their negativity drives players away.

Yeah, that dude was one of the group that started with me. Just checked in and he says he’s had enough. Oh well.

I get the feeling that the original post was a farewell post. He's saying it is just too much of a slog to get to the point where you can competently join in the fun. In any case, I agree nerfing better players is not going to happen in swtor, but I like the game concept: the better you get the more handicapped you get. Just see how low you can go and still win. But that is not this game and too many people have invested too much time trying to get the edge. But the poster is right: swtor pvp makes it very hard for a new interested player. Comments like: "I got an idea, learn to play" are totally unhelpful and miss the real message the guy is sending, which was basically just a nice kiss off. The guy was looking for a fun game and he walked into the swtor pvp buzz saw. There are probably a lot of guys like him.

You have to be in complete denial to think solo ranked is a competitive environment. It is not. And how can anyone who plays this game begin to pretend that it is? It is a total crapshoot who you will end up teamed with and for the ten millionth time since we don't have a player base large enough to support elo, there is no matchmaking. Get it? Your ranking means almost nothing. There is no competitive game here. The only reason to play this game is to roll the dice and have fun. Playing for some sort of larger ranking or season reward is a complete joke. I mean for heaven's sake look at all the crazy queue shenanigans and other horse trading that goes on. I honestly don't care how bad I am. In fact, given the state of the game, I'm vaguely embarrassed by those players walking around with their ranked flair. It's really quite sad, and I suspect that if they stopped and looked hard and honest in the mirror they would question why they are "so good" at swtor pvp and what that says about themselves. So here's what does anger me and why am I responding: Threads like this, because they go right to the heart of the toxic vitriol that too many immature life losers like to throw around at players who are in good faith trying to learn. They destroy the game and make the swtor culture a darker place. The garbage I've seen in solo pvp is disgraceful. And it does have consequences. There is a reason this game is on the ropes. "git gud" l2p, mad cuz bad" etc... Yeah, dude, just pathetic and so very adolescent. People really need to grow up.

Hey potato dude, don’t feel bad for being mediocre, with more practice like this you surely will improve. Just remember to keep your chin up and stay positive. It kind of looked like you were having fun with that 2 v 1 at the beginning. Sometimes that’s the most you can ask for from this game. And thank god for those players who played even worse than your effort. They give us a chance to spread out and try different strategies.

Oh yes, that would be interesting, and also a few other data points as well having to do with buffs applied. In fact, maybe we also need a wz companion dummy! That would keep some us quiet for a while as we noodle around our ship parsing buffs.

I wish there was a way to have a permanent mid toon. But they quickly level and so that’s that. Is there anyway to freeze a character at a level? If I could do that I would never play 70 again.

I wish there was some way to measure a player’s effective use of ccs and dcds and interrupts.

I find it truly pathetic to see people care about solo ranked outcomes. Some players really need to check themselves.

I have, but nothing beats actual combat. Pops are slow all the time; our game that we love is not doing very well at the moment in terms of participation. Worse than most realize, I think. We had a couple people new to pvp ranked and they said they had a lot of fun even though we got beaten. I haven't heard anything from anyone this week, so I hope this happens. Anyway, I will hit the fleet Sunday 7pm est in hopes of getting a few teams together.

Thanks for the tip. That's what happened last week, and that was fine. We got beat every game and badly, but we survived longer and longer each game. And we all had fun and learned a lot. And as a bonus we got some mats and conquest. We were just grateful the other team kept queuing. Honestly, if some teams want to come farm, please do. In fact it might be fun to bring some of your lower geared toons and see how low you can go and still win. The spirit here is to keep granked from going the way of GSF. The only thing I personally ask is that people try to be welcoming. It's only an hour, there are 167 other hours in the week for granked to be an elitist playground.

I agree with this. Unless you are already heavily invested, you would be wise to look elsewhere. At minimum look for a game with a thriving community. Learning to play a game well is a big time and intellectual commitment, even for unemployed losers like myself, so choose carefully.

So I have been trying to get my guild to get granked teams together for sunday 7pm est. Last sunday we had 7 people, up from 2 the previous week. So anyways, if you are in a guild and would like to put together an intro team please join us and que at 7pm est sunday. This is meant to bring in new players and intro players to ranked (and all pvp in general). My guild is large and sometimes we will have 100 players on, and it is often hard to get even two or three players willing to try ANY pvp. That is how utterly demoralized the swtor community is for pvp. So the message is: no pressure, just come and learn, and that pvp is the best way to really master your toon. So please help us build this pvp community up!

Heals here, please don't nerf us. Unless you've experienced it, you can't imagine the fun when you're one of two healers and the other team has none. You can almost taste the frustration coming from the other team. So delicious. It would be wrong and mean at this point to take that away. Btw, I personally would drop some serious cartel coins for a Diddy Kong armor set. Bioware are you listening? 6.0 maybe?

Awesome, but totally unexpected turn in the conversation! But I'll chime in with this: Jordan Peterson has been talking a lot about psychopaths recently and interestingly also talking about the value of gaming for providing insights into social organization. So these comments are topical while also being completely off the original topic!! Peterson's idea is that concepts of justice and rightness as espoused in the popular pc culture are hopeless biased and that a better way to uncover essential truths of human psychology and social organization is to study games, specifically to see which games people will continue to play. The degree to which a game attracts or stops attracting players tell us something important about the way humans (or individual humans) are fundamentally built on a psychological level. In other words, how and what we choose to play is more revealing than what we profess to believe or think. Kind of a cool idea, I think. Anyway, back to the main topic: I'm not sure I would call some of the behavior number farming. I think of number farming as caring only about getting a certain solo metric and nothing else. A competition is about getting a bigger number than the opposition. The idea of a "game with a game" could include number farmers, but this doesn't interest me very much. What I was referring to was players actually competing against each other, but on the same team and with totally different objectives than the stated ones. Maybe for some this is a distinction without a difference, but to me the social competition is meaningful. Because with the former (solo number questers) I just feel weird being around it, but with the latter I feel down right used.

Sorry for what may be a noob question. It's obvious how to tell a player's advanced class based on their little marker, but is there a quick way to tell their discipline? Right now I kind of have to watch how they are playing and pick it up that way, but I was wondering if anyone has any quick tricks (besides inspecting player). Mostly I'm trying to tell quickly what role they are playing. Thanks for any tips.

Hey, I never meant to communicate any anger or frustration at the situation. I find the whole thing just really interesting. Regs can be total madhouses: Some people pursuing the game's objectives, some people pursuing totally different made up objectives. Some people completely oblivious of any objectives at all. And absolutely zero, zilch, zippo matchmaking. It's total insanity. How people cope with this insanity is curious to me. And how anyone can get angry about this is beyond me. Seriously, if this insanity makes you upset, then you are setting yourself up for misery.

Just to be clear, these people could easily have won if they wanted to, they were very skilled and clearly knew how to play objectives. I think they were intentionally playing a side game: Who among the four could get the most kills. Capping doesn't help this goal at all so they clearly didn't try. Perhaps they saw capping as a waste of time, or better yet a reason for their prey to stick around. It took a few seconds to figure out what was going on. Maybe by not capping it inspired our players to try to go in and defend the node, a perfect trap. Buy mostly they were hanging out by the spawn points trying to box in our players at the two exits. It was on the SS server.

Someone recently started a thread asking what do you do when you are hopelessly losing. In the same vein, I am seeing something happening more often, which is teams with good players playing outside the objective. In a Novare Coast the other team had four players obviously having a kill contest. My team won the game, and players were weirdly congratulatory, I honestly don't think they understood what was going on. Those four players had over 120 kills and my whole team had less than 30. At south the four were spawn camping but totally uninterested in capping. In Odessen, our team narrowly lost, and our team was trying hard and at the end some players were commenting that it was a good close game, but the other team had five times the kills and clearly wasn't even trying to win. My poor team was so oblivious they didn't even know they were being toyed with. I suppose the premade knew they could win, so instead treated the wz as a hunting match between them, seeing who could bag the most kills. So basically, the noobs don't even know the objectives and the experienced don't even care about the objectives. That's just fantastic. I was torn between pursuing the objectives, and trying to just keep them from being able to get their kills. I couldn't decide which game was the one I wanted to play. Who knows, maybe they are doing the game a favor: let the poor rubes think they are winning so they keep coming back; maybe they will get better with more play time.

Your post is really sad to me, but I think your idea is good. I think the next step in trying to keep this game's ranked pvp alive is to organize fight nights. I think I am going to try to do this with my guild, at first for granked. And if we can get some groups together, then maybe try to invite other guilds. But you are correct: relying on the remaining player base to que at random times in hopes of a pop, maybe those days are gone. Also, it is pretty clear that any match making is going to have to happen at the player level.

Thanks for doing this. I do love analysis. Just a couple thoughts. First the good: I like that you talk about kills. In my analysis players focus too much on dps and not enough on group kills. Second, I’m confused, can someone please help me understand: Here is the stat changes as he moved up to 248... Mastery 6272 6753 +481 Endurance 8302 8887 +585 Power 3926 4403 +477 Critical 1434 1477 +43 Alacrity 958 2189 +1231 Accuracy 1018 471 -547 (In hindsight this was a mistake, should have kept it at around 700-800 to get the 110% mark, but I didn’t want to change mid experiment) So you have 2189 alacrity (adding 1231)!?? and a 471 accuracy ( dropping 547)!?? And your Crit only went up by 43 when you moved to 248? This is a class I don’t play, can someone tell me if this makes any sense? I ask because in the dps classes I have played this would present a problem.

I'm not so sure. I think to be "good" not only do you need to know your class as you say, but you also need a working familiarity with all advanced classes. Being able to size up an opponent is so important and a separate thing from knowing your main class. I think many advancing players know their main toon's abilities pretty well, but are still shaky on other classes' abilities. These players are not bad, but they are not yet good. Novices, maybe? So my first point is this: the novice suffers more from inferior gear than the expert benefits from good gear. So at this point gearing actually hurts matchmaking. Do away with it. I know this is hard for people who instinctively think winning should be rewarded. But rewarding good players by making bad players even worse (relatively) is nuts. All it does is drive the good players to these boards where they endlessly whinge about the poor competition. My second point: not having good gear scares some people away form even playing an alt in pvp (it does me). But if people actually studied the different classes (and played them a little, say in regs) it actually makes them better pvpers. For example, I have never played a sniper, and although I would like to learn how to, the time commitment to level and gear is a real obstacle. And I don't want to go ruin a game by "experimenting with a low level sniper". But if like in GW2 I could just go and gear one to max and practice it against a wz dummy I absolutely would. I am certain this would make me a better player when up against a sniper. And better more informed players makes for better matches.

They should just get rid of mats for everyone and bolster everyone to 248, that way only people who want to play will play. No one could complain about bad faith in other players, and that alone would be priceless. The main reason players should play is because they enjoy it. An eye towards ranking in this game is silly.

This is exactly right. It's really odd watching the good players who presumably love the game (they clearly have spent a lot of time with it) encourage a course of action that would further its demise. These players should really go take a look at the GSF boards where existing players are urging new players to please come and learn the game. I like playing heals, but get targeted hard every single arena I ever play. And since I will die first I end up taking heaps and heaps of abuse. Some of it I'm sure is deserved, but a lot of it not. I see in general chat on the fleet players asking for heals to que ranked. I will, but only when I feel like dealing with all the garbage which is a big "if" these days.