You can't call faction imbalance a minor issue in ilum. It is a major issue with ilum and the current design of ilum heavily favors the dominant faction. I would actually say that Server imbalance is the number one reason that ilum fails.

Well they have said that when rated WZs come out that they are completely redesigning the pvp gearing system. With that said. I honestly feel like Valor should not be tied to gear at all. The valor system that we have right now is very tainted. First we have the issue of population imbalances correlating with higher valor ranks for the dominating faction (usually imps). We have the day that Ilum went in to meltdown where people gained an absurd amount of valor for camping the weaker faction's base (again...mostly Imperials doing this) and in the end there was no valor roll back despite the need for one. And now we have kill trading where people can farm up to battlemaster in a couple of days. The current valor system is also completely unsustainable and hurts the game long term. You say you want new gear for rank 70....and then 80....and then 90....etc. Think about the pvp environment that this would create for fresh 50s just getting started. Do you really think that fresh 50s in their lv48-50 quest blues are going to want to sit there and get slaughtered by rank 90 geared people for the 5-6 months that it will take to get to rank 90...or 100...or 110...etc. New gear sets tied to the valor system would kill PVP pretty fast. The only real solution that we have for the gearing system is to remove the valor system from gear altogether. The valor system should instead only provide cosmetic, or non combat rewards. The Titles and mounts that we currently have are great, but they could expand this to include a vendor for valor rank items. Examples of this might be unique color crystals, Alternate colored gear (ie: Jedi Shadow BM set is white with green trim, the valor vendor could sell the same battlemaster set but in black with yellow trim.), additional mounts, etc. With this system, Valor can still be used as a status symbol. Having the Elite Warlord title would still be a big deal, but this way it would just be a status symbol, instead of being a requirement in order to obtain the current highest tier of gear. This would also give people with high valor rank additional ways to stand out from the crowd. How cool would it be to run around with Elite Warlord in front of your name with your rank 95 white w/ black core saber crystal and your rank 90 Battlemaster Stalker set that is black with yellow trim instead of white with green trim like everyone else. So then you end up with the question of how do you handle gear? There still needs to be some sort of pacing/gating system on gear so that fresh 50s are not getting full battlemaster gear one week in. At the same time, despite the recent bag changes, the battlemaster token system is absolutely awful. You have cases of people pulling a token from every other bag and you have other people who can go for two weeks without getting a single token. It is simply a bad system and a poor way of gating battlemaster gear. One solution could be a trading system. First you change the ilum daily/weekly to award mercenary commendations and the WZ daily/weekly would award Warzone commendations. You then take Centurion Gear and make it purchasable for mercenary and warzone commendations similar to how you buy champion bags from the pvp vendor now. Champion gear would also cost the same amount of commendations as the champion version, but you would have to trade in the centurion version along with the commendations. The same would be true for Battlemaster gear. This would allow people the option to work on fully upgrading one piece at a time, or getting a full set of one tier and then work on getting a full set of the next tier and then the next. For example: T1 - Centurion Gloves - Cost: 200 Merc/200 WZ T2 - Champion Gloves - Cost: 200 Merc/200 WZ/Centurion Gloves T3 - Battlemaster Gloves - Cost: 200 Merc/200 WZ/Champion Gloves Total Commendation cost to obtain Battlemaster Gloves: 600 Merc/600 WZ or 3200 WZ commendations if all Merc comms are converted from WZ comms Then, when a new tier of gear comes out, they can remove the lowest tier and shift the previously middle and top tiers down to become the new middle and lowest tiers. For Example: New tier comes out...Centurion Gear is completely removed from the game and we get: T1 - Champion T2 - Battlemaster T3 - Whatever the new tier is called. Overall I think this would help to allow new players to be able to get in to pvp without feeling as though they have a massive uphill battle ahead of them in the valor grind. This would also solve a lot of issues with gear discrepencies between the highest and lowest tiers of gear. The valor system would still be in place so that long time pvpers could show off the time that they have put in to the game.

Don't think that this is how it is all of the time. Yes you will occasionally run in to griefers, but it is far from the norm.

Get enough commendations to purchase a Champion Gear bag. It will only let you hold one and you cannot open it until 50 but it is good to bank this one that you are allowed to have pre 50. Then....farm up enough warzone comms to convert them to 1000 mercenary commendations. Then farm up enough to cap out at 1000 warzone commendations. If you want to continue PVPing after you have capped out then buy Expertise Stims/WZ Medpacks. Essentially you want to have 1 banked champion bag, 1000 merc comms, 1000 WZ comms, and a metric ton of Warzone stims/medpacks when you ding 50. This will allow you to open 6 bags as soon as you ding 50 , as well as have a ton of consumables (which you will be popping like candy). In between all this you can spend commendations on the low level pvp gear/weapons, just try to have what I mentioned above for when you ding 50.

There is no pvp between the starter planets and nar shadda. Tattooine is the first true PVP planet and for the most part empire and republic still have their own areas for questing so the only time you will run in to each other is if you are actively looking for them in their territory and vise versa. Alderaan is fairly separated but again you can go looking for the opposing faction. Quesh ... I have never even seen someone of the opposing faction there. Hoth and belsavis are separated at the beginning but these are the first planets where some a good majority of the questing areas are shared between factions. Voss is completely shared between factions aside from a couple of faction bases but for the most part pubs and imps share all the areas. This is the first planet where you will really see any real pvp going on at a consistent rate while leveling. Corellia takes a step back and you will see some separation between the factions but there are a lot of areas where you will run in to eachother. Summary: Leveling is not a big deal on PVP servers. World PVP does not exist before Tattooine and the only time where you will ever consistently run in to the opposing faction is on Voss.

I honestly don't think that things like instance caps or something like a tenacity buff is a good way to fix server imbalances. They need to come up with a much more organic way of balancing things out other than limiting the number of people that can get in or simply buffing the opposing faction. Examples might include giving the underdog faction champion level NPCs at key locations around the map, strong level reinforcements to help balance things out.

Here is what I think they should do: Quick Travel to Ship -Don't know why this was not in at launch. Add a preference to have the spaceport elevator take you directly to your ship unless there is an active quest or an available quest in the space port. To prevent annoyances of this feature they can move all the flashpoint couriers down on to the planet where they belong. -Seriously unless there is a quest that I need to pick up or turn in inside the space port it should be skippable. It was cool the first time but after the 100th time traveling between ilum and the fleet it gets really old. Edit: also to the people that claim this is a time sink. You are wrong. This is an annoyance. A time sink is something like grinding daily quests for rakata earpieces and implants, or grinding social rank to get the speeder, or grinding space missions to get the pilot outfit. The whole point of a timesink is to pace people who are working towards some goal, be it loot or a title. An inconvenience is something that serves no purpose other than annoying many players and unjustifiably prolonging an activity. Time sinks =/= inconveniences.

Removing Armorments is not the solution. The solution is to add armorments to both the north and south node so that one faction cannot camp both the armorments and the underpopulated faction's base at the same time. One might argue that then the overpopulated faction can just camp all three nodes as well as the base. This might be true but it spreads the overall population of ilum out a lot more than it is now which makes the individual populations at any given node a lot more manageable for the underdog. For example: if 80 imperials are in ilum right now you might have 30 camping the republic base and 30 camping the middle node. If armorments are more spread out you might have 15 imperials at each of the four locations, thus spreading out the overall population makes it easier for the republic to deal with any of the individual pockets of imperials. just a thought.

I dunno these days it seems like half of the imps in any warzone are playing Operatives with knife spam keybound to every slot on their hotbar.

Sentinels are very gear dependent. Geared Sentinels/Marauders absolutely crush things. If you feel this way about your Sentinel then you are undergeared or you need to rethink how you are playing the class.

Deserter isn't that big of an issue in this game considering the majority of your commendations/valor/exp/credits are tied to medals rather than wins. If you are not participating you really aren't getting much out of the warzone.

So after I heard about the patch I logged on to my gunslinger to see how things were going. in PVE everything was smooth and responsive. I decide to queue from a warzone expecting Gunslinger to still be unplayable due to the lag of going in to cover in addition to general ability lag. I get put in Alderaan which is as we all know the worst when it comes to lag and framerate killing. Played the full game and character responsiveness was fluid and lag was virtually non-existent. Everything felt as smooth as butter. Anyone else able to report similar results?

Expertise is not the problem. Expertise needs to be in the game or raiding will the the requirement to pvp. The problem is that it takes too long for a fresh 50 to obtain a respectable gear set so that they do not get crushed in pvp. The pvp token/commendation system needs to be reworked...not expertise.

So apparently Expertise is bad because it makes it too hard for new 50s to get in to pvp? Solution A: Crafted blue pvp gear. This would allow fresh 50s to go to the GTN and purchase a full set of expertise gear so that they aren't getting completely crushed in pvp. It also adds a huge market for for crafters, especially on PVP servers. Solution B: Drastically reduce the cost of Centurion gear. Centurion gear is the lowest level pvp gear currently in the game, yet it takes far too long to actually obtain it. Currently, assuming you get unlucky opening every bag, you need to open about 12 bags (more for weapons) to obtain one piece of gear. The average pvp player can probably earn enough for one bag a day through commendations alone, maybe 2 if they are playing a lot that day. That means that it takes about 6 days to earn enough centurion commendations to purchase one piece of gear (excluding dailies). With Dailies/weeklys a person might be able to buy 2 pieces of gear per week assuming they are completely unlucky. The time it takes to earn one piece of gear is absurd and considering how easy it is to earn champion gear it further devalues centurion gear. Bioware could easily make a valuable place for centuion gear by making it the starter pvp set. Make it cheap and easy to obtain (like 2 weeks for the full set).

50% of the time Force cloak simply wont even activate despite spamming the button non stop when trying to get away. I cannot even count the number of times I have died because I tried to run away and cloak only to have cloak not even work. When I mean not even work I mean the ability will not be on cooldown and I will sit there and spam my cloak button and it wont even activate. Resilience is the same way. I can sit there and spam it and it won't even work. FFS Bioware fix this.