Oh yes, familiar thoughts. Also reminded me of this image from the excellent What If? xkcd.

Yeah, but you had to queue with a full group of 8 people, which was a major obstacle for all but the big PVP guilds. Solo queue is a different story. And there were zero incentives / rewards back then. And people could choose between ranked and regular warzones (read: "painstakingly try to get a decent 8 man team together" vs. "jump right in"). We're talking about making all warzones ranked. But you're right about the PVP mismanagement and people having moved on part, sadly.

You may have some valid points there, but I disagree. I believe the main reason for ranked being unpopular isn't the rating or the matchmaking. It's that many people simply don't like 4 vs 4 arenas and prefer 8 vs 8 objective based warzones. I personally don't play a lot of ranked PVP, but if there were solo ranked 8 vs 8 warzones? I'd play the hell out of that. Would all-ranked PVP increase elitism and toxicity? Quite possibly. But if it improved the matchmaking and generated more competitive games I'd say it's worth a shot. Regarding "matchmaking is hard": Well, yeah, but mediocre matchmaking is still better than no matchmaking at all. How many times have you entered a warzone and instantly thought "damn, this is going to be bad" or "yeah, we'll stomp them" simply by looking at names, expertise rating, HP bars and class composition? I think it wouldn't be too hard to implement a matchmaking system that could minimize the most glaring mismatches. And I don't buy the "small playerbase" reasoning either. Even with only 16 people of the same faction queueing at the same time the most basic matchmaking algorithm could improve matchups over the current "meh, just toss 'em in randomly" implementation. But it's a moot point with Bioware obviously not caring about PVP... tl;dr: Good idea. Mediocre matchmaking > no matchmaking. Too bad we won't get it.

Thank you, I was thinking that there's something along those lines going on, but I lacked the theorycrafting knowledge to put it into words. But while this means that Krea's example is biased towards power we still don't know how this changes the result when considering all abilities. I guess we need somebody to feed the numbers into the burst rotation or (probably even better) weigh the abilities according to actual PVP combat log data.

Whoa, that's a hell of a lot of DPS there. 100 hits take you 150 seconds (without any alacrity bonus), so it's 7051.76 vs. 7302.77 DPS (using my values from above). Of course this doesn't change your point, just wanted to offer some minor corrections. Thanks for your work Kre'a!

Coryn - SGS-45 Quarrel - Pwn Stars - The Red Eclipse 117,385 damage and 179.49 DPS 33 assists

From my experience so far, Mods and Armorings can only be RE'ed following the 1st (straightforward) route. I did get prefixes on droid equipment and earpieces, so these follow the second route.