Bespin.

The official count didn't quite sit right with me. I specifically noticed the "needed" count increasing significantly slower than the number of "needed" votes. Because of this, I decided to redo the count myself. I counted pretty carefully (and intentionally favored "Not Needed" in my tally). Whenever I suspected a post was somebody's second vote (I didn't write down all of the names and cross-reference), I counted it if they voted "not needed" and didn't count it if they voted "needed". For people who stated an opinion without a specific vote, I counted it as "needed" if it was a clear defense of Expertise as a stat or if it was a defense of completely separate PvE and PvP progression, otherwise I counted the vote as "not needed" (even if their response was pretty neutral). My count is as follows: "Needed": 82 "Not Needed": 55 Edit: At this time the "Official" count is 68 "Needed" and 51 "Not Needed".

In addition to xxdragonragexx's point about some people combining the two progressions, there are other major problems with your premise. -A 1-month PvE progression may only take 10-15 hours /played. It could also take 50 hours, depending on how good a player/guild is. (i.e. the actual play time required is skill dependent) -A 1-month PvP progression based on the current rewards systems is likely to take 100 hours /played, regardless of a player's skill. Additionally, a lazy college kid on summer break could do that full progression in 5 days, while someone with kids and a job might take 6 months. Then, if the progression rate were changed to be skill-based, you'd run into a different problem where people can always practice until they're good enough to beat a computer, while the same doesn't apply to PvP (some people will always be better than others). I'll repeat what I said before. PvE and PvP are fundamentally different playstyles and there isn't any reasonable way to equalize their progression. Other games that get away with not having a PvP-specific stat avoid this problem by eliminating one of the routes for progression entirely. SWTOR can not and should not do that.

WoW is the absolute best example because it's so similar to SWTOR and also supremely successful. All of the games that don't have PvP-specific stats either have lackluster PvE progression or have virtually nonexistent PvP. Any game that has both has PvP-specific stats to separate the progression because of the problems that WoW encountered and solved.

You can't structure it like that. Raiders have a lot of limitations beyond time that don't currently factor into PvP gear progression in any game that I'm aware of. -Raiders actually complete content/win in order to get gear. -Raiders need to play in the equivalent of 16-man premades in order to even attempt their content (it was 40-man in Vanilla WoW). -Raiders can only do each raid once per week. The way PvP gear progression works, all you have to do is play 100hrs/week and gear up like crazy. You don't have to worry about coordinating your play time with other people, actually being any good, or artificial limits on the number of items you can get in a fixed amount of time on the calendar. The only way I can see making PvP gear acquisition anything like PvE gear acquisition would be to have gear be rewarded in a once weekly, single-elimination tournament between premade teams. In this tournament, all members of your team would get new bracers for making it to the second round, belts for getting to the 3rd round, boots for the 4th round, etc. It would need to be impossible to get the chest armor/mainhand without winning the tournament outright. Any progression short of this would be easier than Raid progression (and/or less time consuming in terms of calendar time for people who can play all day). Unfortunately, the progression I just described would be unacceptable because people actually expect a chance of earning their gear at some point. Fundamentally, this is different from PvE progression because you actually have to beat other players. It's effectively zero-sum, where only one team can win (and can thus block other teams from winning). This is distinct from PvE because in PvE you only have to beat the computer, not other players who are trying to get the same gear you're going for. Because of the fundamental differences between PvP and PvE, it would be impossible to equalize the progression the way you'd like. The solution is to have separate progression. Additionally, the fact that PvP gear isn't any good for PvE shouldn't matter to you anyway. You just have to go through the PvE progression like everyone else. It's not like you're only allowed to have one set of gear. Just because you have War Hero gear doesn't mean you can't go out and run hard mode Flashpoints, and it really shouldn't let you skip over those flashpoints directly to nightmare mode Operations.

For a pure burst-DPS 2v1 duo, I'd go with 2 Snipers. If you want to be any good 2v2, or 2v3, I'd suggest something else though.

I played Vanilla WoW, pre-Resilience. Raiders absolutely dominated PvP because the PvP gear progression had lower stats than the PvE progression. Additionally, endgame raiding guilds had extremely strict gearing requirements for new members. These requirements amounted to all best-in-slot pieces available without doing whatever Raid they were working on clearing at that time. If Blizzard had resolved the imbalance between Raid gear and PvP gear simply by buffing the PvP gear, I 100% guarantee you that endgame guilds would have started requiring PvP gear for new members. This is why people are saying Expertise is necessary and there are MILLIONS of people who have had first hand experience with this exact situation through Vanilla WoW.

The way I see it, you have 3 options: 1) Resign yourself to dying a lot and being unappreciated. 2) Respec as DPS. 3) Only play in premades.

That should be in the patch (I hope). It seems especially likely since there was a dev post last week stating that they knew there was a problem and that the problem was caused by accidentally applying a change intended for ranked Warzones to all Warzones. Since they know what the problem was, know exactly what caused it, and know it's related to a feature that's not even currently in the game, it should be trivial to fix. I was (very) surprised it wasn't in Tuesday's patch, to be honest.

FYI: If you were able to ninja-cap like that, someone else was doing an incredible job of keeping the defenders occupied elsewhere.

I was thinking that the patch would be to close the exploits/loopholes so that future bans aren't necessary.

PvP-centric stats are needed so that Raid Gear doesn't dominate PvP (and/or so that PvP gear doesn't become required to raid). That said, Expertise is a terrible implementation of a PvP-centric stat. Instead of having a single PvP megastat, there should be separate PvP stats for damage, and mitigation (with healing either being a 3rd stat or being included in the damage stat). That way, people can actually gear for the role they intend to play and it's much easier to balance the effects of the PvP stats on various classes/roles.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's related to this: http://www.swtor.com/blog/action-being-taken-against-exploits-and-cheats

I share it occasionally. Heck, I have a similar frustration on my Sniper when I dominate the scoreboard and only get 1 MVP vote. That's how MVP votes are. (I usually chalk it up to other people voting for their friends or noticing some great accomplishment that I somehow missed.) I was expecting this thread to be about the most frustrating situation I find myself in when playing my Combat Medic: One of my teammates is in a fight and about to die. I heal him, expecting him to kill his opponent. Instead, he just stands there and does nothing (or does less damage than a wet noodle). Eventually, I run out of ammo keeping him alive, he dies, and his opponent comes after me. Then I die because I ran out of ammo trying to heal my incompetent teammate (when I could have instead just let him die and killed his opponent myself from the start).

Cavalry are mounted troops. "Reinforcements" would be more accurate. I'm a big fan of this idea and would go so far as to give the medal to anybody who joins a match more than a minute after it starts (i.e. they're obviously not part of the original queue pop). One extra medal isn't going to unbalance anybody's rewards and seems like a fair reward for joining a game that's already in progress (and highly likely to already be beyond hope in terms of winning/losing).