More elitist schmuckery plz. As if casual players need more reasons to stop playing PvP on top of the premade self-justifying hypocrisy. Now, even guild players must just shut up and suffer insults from bunch of l33Ts for some reason never actually have the balls to appear in team ranked? Oh this is just too rich.

Joke aside, factually speaking, among all the types of multiplayer games out there, the MMORPG genre has basically become a very riksy business during the last 10 years. Things are very different nowadays from... let's say when Blizzard's WoW first launched more than 10 years ago. Way back then, there weren't any games that offered multiplayer access in a way MMORPGs did. Everything was in the early days -- didn't need as much technical/systematical investment as it did nowadays. Mid-sized game developing companies would come up with mediocre MMORPGs and still it would meet somewhat success. Then, everything changed. The entire industry changed. The "1st year crisis" SWTOR itself went through in 2012 shows how much things have changed compared to 10 years ago from that point. MMORPGs came to need incredibly more investment, and has become progressively more expensive to make. New tech, new graphics, new server and technology....voiceovers.. graphics/art experts... music scores... needs a huge development effort to create a humongous PvE content to satisfy people... and all of this is now managed by a tighter corporate system that strictly judges profit/loss. SWTOR itself took millions of dollars to develop, and required a huge profit base to keep up... which almost failed, until it finally turned F2P. Even the old subscription model of game-fees were falling apart by then. Compared to other multiplayer game genres that has appeared since then, MMORPGs are extremely expensive to develop and manage, and yet requires a very fragile and delicate management to meet success, as well as continuous, non-stop development and support system to keep it going... and what's worse, despite all that more and more people are becoming bored of it all... there hasn't been any new, refreshing, truly original and unique MMORPG in years. The stories and narratives are a big cliche, UI and system unoriginal and too familiar, combat is much slower paced and not exciting enough, graphics are limited compared to other genres... and PvP support is also more difficult to handle. ...MMORPGs... are on the decline as a whole. People just don't find it fun anymore... as well as there really aren't any big-name game developers/publishers that are willing to risk a frail and risky AAA game genre that's losing popularity.... MMORPGs are, I'm sorry to say, currently going the way of the dodo. It's not just 'unpopular'. Game developers/publishers, genuinely do not wish to make this type of game any more... sort of like how nobody really makes real flightsim genre games any more. Unless there's some kind of... I dunno.. a technical breakthrough, or some ingenius, never-before seen way of coming up with a MMORPG system... or some kind of incredible cost-saving measures for everything required to maintain a MMORPG.... SWTOR very well may be 'the last of the great MMORPGs'... with no more real 'MMORPGs' coming out for maybe even decades.... TL;DR MMORPGs.. by today's standards, are too expensive to make and maintain, and yet too risky and unpredictable. So nobody really bothers to make these AAA-sized MMORPG projects any more.

It all went extinct after the arrival of F2Ps. Players that refused to acknowledge the needs of other players also didn't help much.

There's certain thing called 'skill' and 'awareness' usually related to stuff like this...

..that's a really long winded way of saying "no, I don't know what a skank is".

Nah, you're not an idiot. You're just a person in denial, turning blind idea to existing imbalances and injustices, and simply labelling them "coincidences". Clearly, it's a common trait, judging by the number of people who just roll their eyes and looks away when faction imbalance issues turn up in discussions. So you don't need to feel bad. I understand your maladies. My suggested cure would be something called listening and trying. Like, try leaving your comfort zone from time to time. Away from premade douc*ebag deathsquads, away from easy-mode Impish people, and experiencing first hand the realities of what people you never think about are suffering from the likes of you. It helps. Really.

More like 'profitable'. Everything's easy when you go with the flow, to the path of least resistance, and victimize everyone else on the other side. The justification as in stuff like 'better aesthetics', ;'better story' and etc.. are just icing on the cake. The sweeter it is, the easier to fool yourself. Always more little kids and casual players on the 'good guys' side. Why try and help them to balance things out so the game can be even, when we can just cross over to where all the BAWS are and just vicitimize the entire other faction to be our pickings in PvP? People still think its individual balance issues and some obscure problems in ranked matches which is vastly unpopular and frankly inconsequential when compared to the entire PvP population, that is the reason behind why PvP is dwindling.... when in fact, in most cases its the absence of conscience and absolute denial of the reality how some people revell in that imbalance, which discourages more newbies, more casuals, more people in general to enter PvP and get hooked to it. Oh, this is an exaggeration? You guys enter as pubs sometimes but never have it that bad? Try it. Cross over completely to pubside for maybe 3 months fully, plenty of time to reach lv65 and farm gear that;s on par with your Imperial counterparts. And see just how much you enjoy it in the same way[/b[ you do as Imps. Try see how many respond to your premade recruit call. Oh sorry, did I not mention most Imp dominated servers already have a monopoly on players who'd actually make premades? Must have left that part out. Why, you need to win matches to get enough comms to gear up quickly... except here, it takes straight 15 matches to finish your weekly, that actually takes a week, whereas you used to just finish it in a single day as Imps. Witness the wonder as you notice how every casual player that fills the pubs to the brim, are perpetually undergeared this way. But no. Why should you actually come here? Why should you know what its like to start out in the pubside as someone interested in PvP, and then just regretting the fact and then dump the victims behind and to cross over to join the perpetrators? No, Imps. You've really got no idea. I don't really care about sides. I just log in to go help out whichever side that seems to be taking it bad. I have Imp characters as well, actually. Except, for the last 5 months, I never felt the actual need to log in with any of them.

Yup. There's a reason why people consider the ages between 13 to 25 the dumbest years of a man's life. Oh wait. I'm guessing you've probably not heard that phrase either.

Just wait 'til he reaches puberty.

Real men play defense tanks.

That's really too bad. Raging hormones and social awkwardness is just a natural part of growing up. If some of you've never been there, I guess you guys just need to wait for it.

You're saying that as if there's another way...?

It's just a case of BAWS - Bad-Arse Wannabe Syndrome, Alrik. I've also written about it some time ago. It doesn't really affect children before teens. It starts affecting usually boys as they enter puberty, and lasts upto around late 20's at maximum. You know, the age group where boys start becoming corny, twisted, and for some reason it's cool and bad-arse to be a jerk... So they view the goody-two-shoes, altruistic, 'good guy' side as boring, and think its much better to be all that dark, goth, sexy, trendy-black 'bad guy' is much better, especially fashionably No to mention they receive some psychological gratification in destroying and PWNing the side that's supposed to be good, lawful, dutiful, orderly and etc etc... The boys of that age simply enjoy being the arse-hole jerk with a power-hungry fantasy, and will do anything to feed their craving for attention and egoes. In other words, we've all been there, some of you are still there. They even have a term for it in Japan -- "8th Grade Syndrome" It's practially the same in any game that feature rival factions. More demon guys than the angelic ones in Aion, way more Horde than Alliance in WoW, and way more Imperials than Republic in SWTOR. ....the grim part of this is that when this tendency continues for a long time, it lands itself a deep imbalance in terms of player numbers. Same here in SWTOR, same in other games as well. Some of the worst cases I've seen was WoW servers, and the same deal also happens in SWTOR as well.

Well... agents/smugglers in general are hard to play, just due to the fact that this class simply has the most numerous amount of skills in a game where skill optimization is already very weak. I mean, among all the MMOGs I've played during the last two decades, SWTOR is simply the most messiest one I've ever played when it comes to skills. Even if we disregard the current game design trend which is continuously shifting towards "faster, flashier, and more casual and easier", even by 2011 standards SWTOR already had way too many skills. Three full sized hotbars as a control panel setup, and I still barely have enough room to map even my most used skills. Jesus Christ... mouselook, W, S, A, D movement, and then 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, <SHIFT>+ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, <ALT>+ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, <CTRL>+ 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, <TAB>, <SHIFT>+<TAB>, Q, E, R, Z, X, C, R, F, V... mouse button 4... mouse button 5... ...barely, just barely do I get to map most characters' skills so I can access it with my left hand alone... but with ops and scoundrels.... there are still 3~4 more skills to use and therefore, it usually gets mapped to a keyboard position where hotkeys become meaningless... like 6, 7, 8, 9, 0... etc etc.. This is actually part of the reason why SWTOR PvP is more complicated and difficult than most other games, despite the fact that it's an old-school targeted-skill-use game that is much slower paced than compared to some of the modern games. Skills are way too diversified, so and therefore their effects aren't really spectacular, and yet you still HAVE to use it... I mean the only skill I don't use with my scoundrel is that slice droid thingy... and even the hands-up surrender skill that's supposed to lower aggro in PvE dubs as a root-breaker in PvP... So most of the times, newbies in PvP in SWTOR simply stumble over just which of the 15~20 active skills they need to use.. compared to other modern MMOGs which usually reduce amount of active skills to less than 10, preferably 5~6 at most. So in this aspect, ops/scoundrels are actually difficult! Every time I play it my left hand gets so tired and busted that I need to rest a bit before I can PvP again!

Well, according to the premade apologists, its still the pugs' fault. If they don't like it, they should just go make premades of their own and stop the vicious cycle of losing. Usually, that sort of thinking goes on until there actually aren't any pugs left to play against, and finally PvP dies, as in no matches for days. Seen this happening in a lot of games during the two decades I've been playing online games. And guess what, even at that point, they still think its the pugs' fault ...as they just sit around in PvP chat and talk about good ol' days and why nobody PvPs any more.