So…I don’t know what life is/was like for you, but in the lean years of rated arenas (~s3-5ish?), I noticed names from the dominant guilds on my origin server having returned to JC from Pot5 (they had transferred there to compete in rated WZs before the arenas bait and switch). Anyway…that dominant guild was also the server’s top PVE progression guild. Individually there were some nice guys and some jerks, but as a guild they were generally perceived as your typical elitist jerks. <— that is literally all that I saw in arenas. It wasn’t some special sort of bad actors. It’s just the elitists who take their gaming seriously and set their expectations of others equal to the expectations they have for themselves. And just like when their guild wipes on a boss fight because the newbie sub on the team that week wasn’t pulling his weight triggered them, so too does having a teammate who isn’t even wearing the proper armor…let alone playing his class at (what the elitist considers) an acceptable level - which is actually a sliding subjective scale based on competency relative to the person’s skill who is making the judgement. my point is this: with the exception of one or two egregiously bad actors (like the aforementioned Mara main), all of the sniping, shaming, and aggression I experienced in rated arenas was no different from what I’ve witnessed in progression raiding…or any other team sport at almost every level. And the fact that solo rated literally turned random strangers into teammates (instead of constructing your own raid team) definitely hiked up the frustration players felt toward those who were not ‘good” or performing at acceptable levels. and it did get really bad at times. I don’t deny that. Yet there were also a lot of ppl dipping their toes in and running away screaming who just had no business playing in an intense atmosphere. Honestly, there were a lot of naive players who basically treated rated like a typical SM OPs or Vet FP that you could just /faceroll your keyboard through, which was about as likely as jumping into a NiM raid with all the experience and gear from having completed your class and planetary quests. iunno. I think both sides of this are putting a partisan spin on the toxicity of rated arenas. I’ve seen elitist jerks totally flame ppl and get really personal/aggressive, but I’ve seen a lot of players completely disrespect the spirit of high end gaming through shear entitlement of walking into rated unprepared and expecting everyone around them to what? Magically welcome them with open arms and coach them on the fly.

at no point ever was giving regs a "choice" between playing solo or grp a thing. they changed the matchmaking priorities to make sure grps were in matches against other groups when possible, and that DID happen. whatever you're referring to was never a stated goal or purpose of their programing in the first place. if you wanted to guarantee solo matches, you could queue solo arenas. if you wanted to guarantee grp vs. grp, you could queue rated arenas. everything else always has been, and always has intended to be, a mixed queue. in fact, that is the ONLY positive about the deserter debuff: it made it harder to super-Q.... then BW expanded the max premade size to 8m, and that eliminated the need to manufacture super-Qs to circumvent the matchmaker. another example of beware what you ask of BW. b/c they certainly solved the super-Qs circumventing the matchmaker problem. 🤨

I'm not doing this with you again. here's where the debate begins: https://forums.swtor.com/topic/928972-its-starting-to-get-really-quiet-out-there/?do=findComment&comment=9757220 you were utterly misinformed, gathering and using resources wrong, and your great big trump card of an argument was the "duel me bro" default by challenging me to create a new account from the ground up just to prove that it's not difficult to make your own augs. as if anyone would do that. go away. really dude. just go away. we're done here.

please stop. you're just trolling. you said as much to me in DMs. you didn't know what you were talking about regarding augments and were made to look the fool because of it. just....stop. please. and thank you.

🤣😂🤣😅🤣 you'd need a post 5x longer than Beyral's to ever do justice to the problems with BW's handling of rated (WZs and arenas). but really, I just wanted to 😂

You seem heated. I actually agree that madness is op and definitely should not have received a mobility buff. So please take this as constructive criticism when I say I rolled my eyes and lol’d (just a breath or two) when you resorted to “duel me bro.” That’s universal language in pvp for “you have successfully, 100%, gotten under my skin, and anything I say next is going to ‘sound’ like a petulant child. You have broken me.”

Players did that since s1. We even had a server wide teamspeak(?). When the q popped, you’d go to a team channel. The population was small. There were always randoms who didn’t join, but you can’t make ppl join. I didn’t play but one season after the final server merger (SF), so I can’t speak to claims of 4-6 simultaneous pops. But when I played a lot everyone knew each other anyway. honestly, what blows my mind is cease recently saying he never watched or knew about Star Wars lore before playing this game

squint...to see what that icon is? (sweet baby satan. i'm in 4k but it's 125% scale on a 48" monitor less than 24" away. and I have 20/20 vision. what's with these tiny emojis?)

tbf, I think -Bob-'s sub ran out a while ago. so he can't talk. not certain though, as I don't actually know him. 😄

you know, the guild I was last in during 6.x...i think you joined it at one point (villains and rogues or some such)....aello was in it; he's on your dischord I think(?). we were playing gr kickball games within the guild. we weren't building ELO as we kept switching up the teams, but...yeah. that was farming mats. just a generic SM conquest guild and players. a weekly pvp night. sometimes they hit the WZs en masse. sometimes make a few rwz grps. we were the least of the "offenders." so yeah. that was happening. I assume ppl were selling the parts as I'm certain no one in that guild was doing NiM content. I mean...I was healing. 😄 yep. I agreed. just...not for prizes that give a material advantage. /2cents

yeah. no. this was terrible. I agree that you need to incentivize ppl to queue, but doing it with better gear that can then be "better" in parts of the game that don't grant access to that gear...particularly when it's pvp...that was a terrible combination. it's like saying there's reg gear and rated gear. rated gear is better than reg gear and can only be obtained via rated, but you can take that rated gear into regs and enjoy the additional stat benefits. look man, I realize average rated player doesn't need the additional stat benefit to overcome average reg player. but you have to see the inequity of it all. as convoluted as gearing is now (and bad), the basic idea that it limits the viability of gear sets (regardless of ilvl) based on the instance activity is a good thing. and fwiw, the win trading in groups went up exponentially to get those gold augs. except you only got half the mats from grp, which was ironically easy to win trade b/c the queue was so empty. my point is this: incentivize with cosmetics not materially better gear (unless the usefulness of that gear is restricted to the format in which it is earned). the basic concept is good. but at the end of the day, if you grant these rewards the same way seasons does it (grinding deaths gets it for you just not as quickly) then you end up with the same issue as pvp seasons, no? AFKing and win trading. I just don't think you can offer meaningful rewards that can be achieved by hamster wheel achievements. edit: snipped. this is for the whole 2nd post.... this is all fine and dandy. but I have to be honest, there was never anything wrong (imo) with solo rated other than BW didn't police it. as you said, most of the rage monkey stuff goes on in regs too. take nikana out of the equation, and solo was probably less "toxic" than regs. but it was a lot more intense and difficult, which means a much smaller population. for w/e that means.

anecdotal evidence is anecdotal, but the one premade I ran into in 6 matches today lost to my pug team (each team had a sorc healer). they also had the only gold flair in the match. for w/e that's worth. I do appreciate the post though. it's an excellent twist of the screw. (seriously!) I couldn't get a WZ the one night I wanted to (to practice after a few weeks off). 😄

iunno. a lot of the complaints are over the top, but in general, when the boat loads of players jump on the complaint waggon, there is a problem. I didn't play merc at its height in 5.0, but I did play assault/pyro PT at its height, and it really was a joke that anything could hit that hard and be that easy to play.

no. just make their "achievement" (using the term really loosely here) more skill/performance dependent than corpse dragging your toon through (e.g.) Orgrimar (in swtor terms, that's the equivalent of AFKing 6x to get your daily done...an investment of time only). but honestly, you need to stop asking Biosword to "fix" anything. 7.2 "fixed" pvp.

repeated healer taunts, no buffs... to be fair, I spent most of the Orbital Station watching his two stealth buddies pop out one at a time on different targets...when they weren't literally standing on their PT. stealthed sin trying to avoid the grapple? 😄 wasn't assault spec at that time something like 2 abils. spam a 15' attack until it procs a rail? I'm fairly certain I got gold doing just that the first two seasons.

you last played in 7.1. that was yesterday in BW terms. no. nothing has changed.

the english major in me is grinding his teeth. 🤨 😄

ok. perfect example from my previous post. there is clearly a problem in which burst classes are performing sub par in pvp. obvious knee-jerk solution: make burst specs hit harder. nuanced response: "hm. I see there's a problem here. what is the root cause of that problem?" increasing burst would be disastrous. every burst class would hit like AP (imo, already hits too hard with little down side - no longer "glass cannons"). but why is the dot tree almost universally the best dps option, regardless of your play style? dcds? mobility? (both often related to wonky pruning and impossible skill tree choices). example: defel splice was broken. full stop. no "balanced" mind would disagree. it gave maras better effective stealth than actual stealth classes. but they effectively neutering the tactical. at the same time, maras lost major - signature - dcds in the 7.0 prune. all of a sudden it's like "OMG! WTH? c'mmon, man!" without pacify, undying, and with reduced mobility, the old defel splice doesn't look like such a broken abil. 😄

I've said this sarcastically for a few years. but there's some truth to it. on the one hand, there's the old saying that (e.g., in baseball) an umpire knows he's doing a good job when both teams are upset with him. but usually when both teams are upset with him, it's because he's consistently bad (maybe all the pitchers like him). iunno. I guess what I'm saying is that you should expect negative feedback when you nerf someone's (favorite) spec regardless of how warranted the nerf is, and you should expect the same player to stay silent or downplay balance concerns when his spec is pretty clearly outperforming everything else. but there are sooo many heavy handed design and balance decisions in this game's history - decisions that have a basis in player requests - that I really do have the contemplate the wisdom of ever asking for, or complaining about, anything, because the "cure" often feels more painful than the disease. Examples: Back fill - back fill was/is a serious problem in WZs. many players would leave for myriad reasons, the top 3 prolly being don't like the map, don't like the teammates, lost the first door/node/round too quickly. a bunch of rage monkeys come onto the forums and demand that players not be allowed to leave. BW, in their infinite "wisdom," gives said monkeys exactly what they asked for. now players, who would otherwise leave, just AFK or go off doing their own thing to kill time until the match ends when a back fill may have actually tried to win. soo many other, less draconian, more nuanced solutions: make back fill an option; limit back fill to the first minute or two after the gates drop; allow players to leave without penalty before the gates drop; create "mercy rule" scenarios for every WZ so weaker teams and back fill don't get abused by superior groups who just want to farm kills/numbers in objective-oriented games. but no. BW went with the most knuckle-headed, belligerent, narrow-minded solution that rage monkeys came screaming to the forum and demanded. bubble stun - remember when bubble stun could be applied to every teammate and could be activated at any time, even without taking damage? how did something like that ever make its way out of the PTS???? how did the devs not see how that would destroy game play? smash was a problem so you solve it by making melee game play impossible? what is a scrapper or deception even supposed to do when their entire burst rotation is predicated on melee openers that will always (100%) trigger a soft stun that nullifies their burst? that was, hands down, the dumbest balance decision ever made in this game. pruning - good lord. pruning. I still don't understand what they were going for here, but I suppose this one was on me. pruning was obviously necessary as too many DPS classes were too independent. but OMG! the incongruity in the pruning. now some specs are completely self sufficient and others are just limp *rhymes with chicks*. there are a handful of others. I have NFL Sunday to prep for today. but dayum! don't ask for anything. just pray they don't make changes. kinda being facetious, but kinda true too. 🤨

redundant thread is redundant. the flair flaming drama is more interesting. carry on, bois!

this feels like a trap, but I'll take the bait (why is b.i.t.e. censored?). I would like a system in which winning or losing matters when you play a game, not just winning gets you the same thing faster than losing gets it. but that would also incite a riot from the myriad "players" who are "forced" to pvp. but I'm an old fashioned guy. I also don't think giving a person with adhd notes to every lecture or a copy of the professor's notes is a good idea either. but apparently, I'm wrong b/c that's exactly what the state of NY requires teachers to do.

I doubt you could set any dps/heal/prot thresholds without inciting a riot from the masses who flood WZs to storymode their way through the daily/weekly grind.

where, exactly, does this tell you their priorities are? I ask this as a person who gave up on end game activities like OPs and FPs years ago out of shear boredom and lack of new content. they then "spiced things up" with GS crap that sends you off to do random SM grinds on (literally) decade's old content. they "updated" pvp with seasons that turned a naturally competitive game mode into a hamster wheel grind copy of GS. I'd say about the only thing they DO prioritize is dumping more gear into the CM and scouring the forum for users who circumvent their ridiculously "progressive" censorship ideology (that reminds me, you'll prolly see this thread deleted on Monday for the title 😄 - only partially joking). never ask for anything in this game...for fear they will give it to you (hackneyed and indiscernible...but nevertheless done at your request).

the routine of it really is fascinating. break the routine a little and the compulsion to play disappears. I've been much more productive in the past 3ish weeks (not defaulting to swtor - obviously doesn't apply to readit, yt, and forums! 😃).

doesn't the patch make them, already mobile, more mobile at a time where everyone (and I do mean everyone) has seen their mobility nerfed (7.0)?