Do you think that competitive pvpers in swtor are uniquely horrible people? Do you think the game turned them into monsters? Do you think something about this game attracts them? What is the theory here? I'll tell you my theory. Swtor's hardcore pvp community is no different from any other hardcore pvp community in any other game (other than being smaller than most). When there are stakes involved in high level competition, and people care about their rating and rewards, people can get emotional, which is as it should be. In other words, it's completely normal to be mad when you lose a game. An environment where no one cares about losing is totally counterproductive to fun pvp. A game mode where everyone is just happy and gets along is anathema to competitive pvp. We already have pve and rp for that if that's your thing.

The answer is easy: Bioware is lying to you. They have no conception whatsoever what ranked was really like, because they stopped moderately it entirely several years ago. They stopped reading the reports, and failed to ban the most blatant rulebreakers, including people that threw hundreds of matches. I understand that it makes sense to you to trust Bioware, especially when you're already biased against "toxic" ranked players, but we are telling you how it was. There was always some toxicity in ranked, without question. The nonsense creeps in when people become hyperbolic and vastly overstate the degree and nature of that toxicity. Most ranked players, and most ranked matches, were not toxic. The vast majority of ranked games you'd load in, someone would call a strat and mark targets, and then you play the game. Win or lose, then queue again. Sometimes a gg, or nice job, sometimes people blaming teammates, sometimes the handful of toxic people went overboard (and there is an ignore feature, lest we forget). All of this was totally standard pvp behavior that you see in every single other competitive online game.

I said "conc op was virtually always near the top." And by "near the top" I mean in the top 3-4 classes...out of only 8. Plus that is one stealth class. The viability of all other stealth classes has been all over the place. Sins have been both near the bottom, near the top, and in the middle. Same with leth. Your point is nonsense, which is sadly the norm for non-ranked players talking about ranked.

Smart. Ignore all of the arguments against your position and just flail wildly. Also, here's a little query for you. When I was actively playing swtor, I almost exclusively played solo ranked. Many other ranked players did the same. And considering that you and virtually everyone in favor of these changes never played ranked, how exactly will us leaving benefit any other aspect of the game? If anything, more of these "toxic ranked players" will be crushing the masses in regs when 7.2 drops.

We've had these arguments before and you're still wrong. The most toxic people that ranked has ever known were all part of groups. I'm talking about sexual predators, racists, people that speedhacked and harassed people. They found like-minded degenerates and played together. So your whole theory about ranked toxicity being lone-wolves has little basis in reality. Furthermore, ranked has rarely been dominated by stealth classes. In season 10 and 11, mercs and maras dominated. In seasons 12-14 ap pts and lightning sorcs were among the top specs. Sure, stealth specs were always viable, and conc op was virtually always near the top, but they were rarely overpowered (and when they were, Bioware actually nerfed sin maul spam). This sounds great in theory. But without ranked, without any way to measure yourself against other players, pvp will be a hollow experience, just like regs is now. Others have talked about this, and I agree: with no incentive to improve or "climb the mountain," pvp will be stagnant, boring and a shell of what it was when people were competing to be the best.

Before you try psychoanalyzing people, you should look in the mirror. Virtually every ranked hater hates ranked for one reason only, it's not exactly a mystery. Also, you realize that historically the pvp forums has been filled with ranked-hating whiners like you right? Ranked players have long considered the forums a complete joke, which is why I'm one of the only ones that has posted here consistently. I've tried my best over the years to dispel the various myths and nonsense that people make up about ranked. Unfortunately, there is only so much misinformation that I can correct. The fact that you unironically believe these changes will improve the state of pvp is amusing, but also quite sad.

They've supposedly had matchmaking in regs all this time, and it's barely evident, if at all. Why on earth do you think now all of the sudden they're going to get it right? Just because there's more people? That is laughably delusional. This is such a bizarre take. Just because some people enjoyed playing solo ranked does not mean that they "invested their self worth" into it. And just because you didn't personally enjoy solo ranked because you were bad at it doesn't give you any special insight. I understand Bioware has done what you've begged them to do for years, but some day soon you'll have to reckon with the fact that it's not going to change the nature of regs at all. They will literally be identical to how they've always been, maybe with just a few more people mindlessly grinding for season rewards.

There is no way you can actually believe this. If you think that Bioware will actually implement a functional matchmaking system that even remotely captures skill accurately when there are premades vs solos, you are going to be terribly disappointed. Bioware hasn't even acknowledged whether arenas will be role mirrored or not. I suspect not lol.

I chose my words deliberately, thanks for your concern though. You're just being pedantic. The point is, top 3s did drive a decent amount of toxicity. Many, probably most, ranked players supported the removal of top 3s, which would have solved virtually all of Bioware's stated goals. I never saw the leaderboards in general create toxicity, and I played many thousands of ranked matches over the last few years. More importantly, it's a true accusation. The point is, any winrate stats will be utterly meaningless when premades and solos are in the same queues. Person A queues exclusively in a premade and has a 70% winrate. Person B queues exclusively solo and has a 60% winrate. How could those possibly be fairly compared lol. I strongly disagree. I wish I could use much stronger language, but their forum moderation rules are ridiculously soft.

God forbid Bioware had to do any work to improve pvp. These are outright lies. Virtually no one cared about leaderboard positioning outside of top 3s. Furthermore, reports for wintrading and throwing were not "spam," though it makes sense in hindsight that that's how Bioware viewed them. Finally, there was no moderation or investigation regarding wintrading or throwing in ranked over the last few years. The only actions that people were punished for were account sharing and hate speech, which can occur in any part of the game. How will those stats mean anything when people can just exclusively play in premades and fight solos? Spoken like someone that doesn't even remotely "get it" lol.

Is this meant to be satire? If so, well done.

The fact that you continue to repeat this piece of misinformation proves you're just arguing in bad faith. There were not enough eligible GROUP ranked players for top 3 rewards. That has nothing to do with solo ranked, which is what people mean when they say "ranked" 99% of the time. Furthermore, go look at the leaderboards and you'll notice that ranked participation has not declined. In fact, season 14 participation was above season 13 participation, and far above season 12 participation. It was on par with season 10 participation, which was about 4 years ago. Not to mention you refuse to grapple with any of the arguments against your completely unsupported positions. It's just sad at this point.

Repeating nonsense does not make it any less wrong. I've already explained the situation several times. You haven't even attempted to refute any of the facts, you're just expressing a principle that doesn't happen to apply in this case. Bioware 100% could have continued ranked indefinitely as it was and made a "profit." No one soberly looking at the situation could deny this reality. After all, if this decision was so obvious, why did ranked remain in the game for as long as it did? There is no evidence that ranked was in decline. The population has been steady for years. The only thing that has changed is that Bioware has put less and less resources into it. Not to mention, the idea that Bioware only makes decisions that increase profits is laughable. Anthem and Mass Effect Andromeda provide examples of such incompetence on so many different levels, to trust that Bioware knows what it's doing from a business standpoint is...questionable to say the least lol

Riku definitely wasn't, but you're right that some others may have. But even so, it's still the wrong way to look at it. As I've also argued at length for many years, solo ranked was never all that toxic. Most of the people that had bad experiences simply came into ranked totally unprepared for the experience and cried when people said mean things to them. True toxicity, like bigotry, targeted bullying, harassment, etc, was quite rare. I should clarify though, just because what I've stated are the facts, as observed by myself and other people that actually have played ranked, doesn't mean Bioware sees it that way. As I've observed elsewhere, the people currently in charge at Bioware clearly have no appreciation for competitive pvp whatsoever, so they may actually agree with the forum/reddit narrative that ranked was super "toxic". But that just speaks to Bioware's incompetence and bad attitude, and says nothing about the actual state of ranked.

This is closer to being right, but I'll correct you again. Ranked was costing Bioware virtually nothing, but it also had a small player base, so it wasn't bringing in much revenue either. To make it even clearer, you're trying to claim that designing one armor/weapon set or mount per season (with seasons often lasting a year or more) was more costly than the hundreds of people (at least) that subbed just to play ranked. That is plainly nonsense. Bioware looked at ranked in its neglected state and faced a choice: (1) properly invest in ranked and see what happens, (2) just leave it as is, or (3) remove it entirely. The first option is obviously a risk they didn't want to take. If they actually started moderating ranked, adding cool new rewards, doing frequent balance passes on classes, etc, there's a decent chance they wouldn't have gotten a good return on that investment. The second option was also unattractive, because they probably realized it was wrong to leave ranked in the state that it was in, with speedhackers going unbanned and players like moophy ruining hundreds of matches with zero consequences. Which just leaves the third option. There is no reason to keep spreading the nonsensical rumor that Bioware is removing ranked because it was costing them too much, especially when it's spoken from a place of ignorance and bias against pvp.

That's an impossible task. As soon as you add meaningful, skill-based rewards, people will get mad when they lose and will sometimes be "toxic" to people they view as bad. That is an unavoidable fact of human nature, as it can be seen in every competitive online game, and in most competitive settings generally in life. But it's also why some people fundamentally don't understand pvp. These are people without a competitive bone in their bodies, which clearly includes the Bioware leadership at this point. When the people in charge have no appreciation for competition, these are the kinds of systems people should expect.

It doesn't really matter now, but just so you know, they added win requirements to ranked in season 12. For that season, it was 100 wins for gold, plus reaching 1500 rating. They lowered the win requirement to 80 for seasons 13 and 14. I've never healed in ranked, but I have played a ton of sorc. It sounds like your issue is that you aren't setting your phasewalk fast enough and getting away from it. The initial positioning is key. You should drop out of spawn and go to where you want to place it, and then get as far from it as possible (while still being in range of course) without any wasted motion. If you do all that correctly, when you get initially stunlocked, you should be able to phase away and heal (not that you should always instantly phase, but if you're double stunned and 3 of them open on you hard, it's probably a good option). From there you just LOS and heal until you're forced to barrier, then keep kiting, LOSing and healing. And if you can master not getting killed quickly, people will usually stop focusing you.

No...they don't, which is part of the issue lol. Bioware stopped taking reports seriously a few years ago, possibly stopped reading them entirely. How do we know that? Because people often included links to screenshots and videos, and the view counts never went up, meaning Bioware never even looked at them. Not only does Bioware not know, they don't care. Also, the last major action they took was to actually reverse the permaban of a whole group of wintraders. I guess I could have been even clearer that I was only talking about solo ranked, in season. Group ranked has been a mess for a long time. I can't speak to anything that's happened this preseason because I didn't play it, but there are also no rewards at stake. I'm simply arguing against the premise that the OP raised: "most ranked rewards were wintraded for, therefore they shouldn't stay at all exclusive." To your edit about "perception," you're correct in a larger sense, but that's why I mentioned how many games I played. Unlike most people on the forums, whose ranked experience is either extremely limited or nonexistent, I played it, and enjoyed it, a lot. I knew what was going on in the ranked community from the inside. There are sometimes borderline cases where whether someone wintraded is disputed, but it's usually pretty obvious either way. My "perception" is worth a lot more than people that just queue for a handful of matches, no offense to anyone. You shouldn't lump group ranked and solo ranked together. Many more people played solo ranked than group ranked, with far less cheating involved. If Bioware just removed group ranked, you would find only a few people that would be upset about it.

This statement is inaccurate. Wintrading did happen, and I have been among the most critical of cheaters within the ranked community, often making me a target in the process. It's shameful both that Bioware failed to ban blatant cheaters, and that certain segments of the ranked "community" tolerated, sometimes even celebrated, such cheaters. But with all that being said, as someone that played thousands of ranked matches over the last few years, I can tell you that only a tiny minority of all solo ranked players cheated for their rewards.

What about arenas? Arenas have to mirror match like ranked did (4 dps vs 4 dps, 3 dps 1 heal vs 3 dps 1 heal, etc). If they don't, they will be unplayable, just like regs arenas are now.

There were 5291 characters with 10 or more wins in solo ranked in season 14. Obviously people have alts, but there were clearly hundreds of unique players (at least). And you answered your own question there. Bioware stopped policing ranked entirely for the past few years. If you want proof of that, go look at past seasons on the leaderboards and sort by rating. You'll see a lot of characters at 1, which means they got reset for wintrading. There were few resets in season 13 and 0 resets in season 14. And no, wintrading did not magically disappear. Bioware just stopped doing their job.

I do indeed have complete achromatopsia. Thanks very much for the screenshots! Can't tell any differences but as you say, that was expected lol. Thanks for this as well The changes to the enemy nameplates and health bars may actually be useful to me. I'll have to test in game at some point to be sure.

I wish I could test this, but pts doesn't seem to be working for me on steam. I'm completely color blind though, so I doubt these options would make any difference for me anyway. There are certain hud elements I would love to be able to change, like enemy health bars that I can't really see at all, but I don't think these changes allow that.

Almost certainly much less, possibly none. If the matchmaking is bad, definitely none. Role mirroring and premades vs. solos are both concerns. No, not at all. Not only are the rewards themselves lackluster, I see little point in rewards that literally anyone can get regardless of skill, or lack thereof. No. If I do play at all, I will mostly play arenas. I highly doubt it. The only thing that would properly incentivize objective play would be to make winning matter in warzones. It currently doesn't in regs, and it won't in this new version either. Yes... It will be boring compared to ranked. Dangling shoddy rewards that are easily accessible by everyone will not encourage people to win, it will merely encourage people to grind. And if people don't care about winning, there is little point in competing to the best of one's ability. These changes will probably lead to more people queueing for pvp, so if your goal is purely to pad the numbers, you'll probably succeed. But it should go without saying that it will be a hollow victory. Pvp will be a shell of what it could be with proper care and development. It seems to me that, like many of the pve players that laud these changes, the decisionmakers at Bioware have an active disdain for pvp and do not value high level competition for its own sake. It's great that there is finally a casual way to practice arenas! Unfortunately, there is nothing left to practice for with ranked gone lol Echoing what others have said, you have removed any incentive to win, to improve, or to compete at a high level. Add some way to sort players. Provide a way for players to set goals and achieve them, based on skill and commitment, not just grinding. That is what made ranked fun for me and many others, along with the higher level of play that resulted from there being actual stakes involved.

More babble. There were more than enough eligible characters for solo ranked top 3 rewards. Team ranked has no bearing on any of these discussions. If they just removed team ranked, that would upset about a dozen people that genuinely enjoyed that mode. Solo ranked is a different story. There were a total of 17,257 characters that played solo ranked last season. So unless you're claiming that each player had 172 alts, you're talking nonsense as usual.