• Server Population and Why Cross Server Queues are Needed
Currently, many people are unhappy with their server population as it greatly restricts the hours that they can play and if they can play at all (As you are well aware, long queue times are not fun as there is nothing for the PvPer to do in queue gameplay except alt tab. Dailies do not count as something to do as they are not enjoyable.). These are the more obvious reasons for cross server queuing and those that affect the more general population.
There is another reason that is not nearly as big of an issue for the average player. When you reach a certain skill level, thee game starts to get boring repeatedly fighting people over and over that you are significantly better than. Cross server queuing, while it might not necessarily have you fighting people at your relative skill level more often, it would add some variety to the queuing so that you might not necessarily know how good people are immediately.
• Lack of Any Open World PvP and why Isle of Quel Danas was Awesome
This one isn't a big thing for me personally, but having talked to many people who are quitting or generally irked with the PvP system in the game, lack of open world PvP seems to be a pretty big thing. I realize that open world PvP to the scale of Warhammer's Castle System or Warcraft's Tol Barad/Wintergrasp would take a long time to implement.
However, this is not the only type of world PvP. In Burning Crusade, the best daily hub near the end was a place called the Isle of Quel Danas. This had a small neutral area, and a medium sized island where all the dailies were completed. Throwing everyone together into this small area for dailies sparked a lot of open world PvP that was actually a lot of fun. Even though I didn't like doing dailies, I would still come out here quite often to fight people.
It should also be noted that this place was extremely easy to access. There was a portal to get here and back to the main city.
• Roots
This is one of the things that drives me the craziest. Roots as a concept are not bad at all. Even roots not affecting Resolve does not seem like a poor design choice. However, I and many others do not believe that there should be no diminishing returns system in place at all for roots considering how many there are.
The only reliable counterplay to all roots is the CC-break ability which I'll call a trinket from here on out. However, using your trinket on a root is basically a death sentence considering how much hard CC exists in the form of stuns, or Mezes.
Perhaps some sort of system where you cannot be affected by another root for a certain period of time could be put in place. Perhaps we could get a separate root breaking trinket on a short cooldown, though I'm not sure adding more abilities would be a good idea.
• The Guard System
This was a very neat idea. However, currently, it is too powerful depending on how it is used. I remember hearing a statistic that there is actually a significant correlation between amount guarded and chance of victory in a warzone.
When guarding a target with a lot of mitigation already, it is extremely hard to kill said person. Generally, killing the target doing the guarding is not a viable option either, especially if the target guarded is a healer.
I assume the lowering of heals and the increase in relative burst was made to combat this. However, this affects situations where there is no Guard class adversely. Perhaps the person doing the guarding could take more damage while guarding. Perhaps, the amount guarded could be decreases depending on the amount of armor of the target being guarded.
• Resolve System
The resolve system in general is an interesting way to go about CCs. As it is however, with the amount of lockdown in the game, it is generally a death sentence to use your trinket outside of capped resolve.
I realize that this rewards good positioning, though I feel that the penalties may be too harsh even so.
• How Changes Affect the Meta Game (Making too many changes at once.)
I understand that people want changes, and want them now. However, making too many balance changes at once can have unforeseen spillovers as I'm sure you know as game developers. The meta game changes with every balance change, so balancing might not work as expected.
As a result, it's generally better to make fewer changes at once as there will be less huge power swings that so plagued World of Warcraft. They were also wayyyy too slow on fixing obvious things. I commend you guys for making tweaks quickly, which was the situation with operatives.
Something to keep in mind as well, is that the meta game will be different on every server. Adding in cross server queuing could help this and perhaps alleviate some of the forum complaining. (I can't read the forums anymore without getting angry.)
• Tank Damage and Kinetic Shadows
Adding tanking to PvP was an interesting idea. The way taunts work is something that I personally thought was very neat, though perhaps a bit too powerful, especially in the case of aoe taunts.
Also there are certain situations where tanks are doing far too much damage while still maintaining the survivability and Guard mechanic of a tank class. Kinetic Shadows and their Assassin equivalent is a prime example.
• Faster Gameplay Affecting Healing and Pressure Classes
It seems to me that you are trying to speed up the gameplay. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it seems to me and others that the gameplay in PvP wasn't terribly slow before unless a Tank was involved. However, I and others do like the faster gameplay awarding better positioning.
But I digressed a bit from what I meant to talk about here. When the game is made faster, that starts to devalue the need for healers if healers themselves aren't somehow compensated to match the greater burst and faster throwing out of damage. At some point, this can devalue healers so much that they become a hindrance.
Also, faster gameplay starts to devalue pressure and dot classes unless they are given more survivability to compensate. That's just something a few of us are concerned about.
• No Competition
I realize you guys are working on this through ranked warzones so I'll keep this very short. This is very important to the PvP crowd. I played 16-18 games in a row the day of the 1.2 patch and won them all. After that, I've played maybe 5-6 total matches as it's boring for me because of little to no challenge. I've even resorted to helping the guild run operations.
• No Variety
This goes back to the need for cross server queuing. There's little to no variety in who I'm fighting with or against, so things start to get stale.
• Voidstar and Absolutes in Door Capping
This is more of a personal thing for me, but I hate Voidstar. With how the doors are either capped or not capped, there is no incentive for the defending team to fight at all. All they need to do is run around pillars and occasionally interrupt people capping.
This warzone would be so much better if there was some incentive to fight people.
• Targeting and Character Models
I hate to be so harsh here, but targeting enemy players in PvP right now is abysmal. The tab targeting system is overall useless as you can't get to targets you want quickly enough or target people outside of LoS. I primarily use Target Nearest for my auto targeting.
The best way to target people in Rated Battlegrounds in WoW was by clicking on nameplates. It was reliable and quick, and made it so that character models had no impact on targeting. In TOR, it is actually a disadvantage to not play as small a character model as possible as clickable name plates do not exist. These are really needed.
• Counterplay
Counterplay is what keeps this fun and interesting for PvPers. That's all I really have to say here as I'm getting tired and am sure you guys realize this.
• Why Novare Coast is Awesome
Novare Cost is great. The map size is the right size so that there is very little downtime and mostly nonstop fighting. The cap style is also non-absolute in the fact that you can work on it gradually, which is awesome. I love the design =).
Yar, was more a response to the first line in the post xD.