It's not. I am meticulous about things like this and keep an eye on temperatures (CPU, GPU, etc.) at all times. It's one of the first things I checked, along with disk activity (sometimes a background updater or virus scan will slow something down, though it's never caused crashing before).

I'm not sure if this is the same thing you're reporting here, but for the past week or so I will have the game play fine for a while before suddenly stuttering severely and literally freezing up for several seconds before starting to go again. It will usually do this a few times before it just crashes.

Bring back rated warzones and the PvP community will explode. Removing them was the single worst thing ever done in the development of this game and restoring them would bring back a lot of people, including those who haven't played in 10 years.

This would basically be a matter of "grading on a curve" for the ratings, which would come with the same benefits and drawbacks as grading on a curve has in academic settings - the drawbacks being significant (I am a math teacher and so I have examined this issue for my work). Teachers don't grade on a curve much anymore below the college level, and even at the college level they do so much less commonly than in the past. One reason is that there is the potential for pretty significant unfairness. Say that everyone in the class gets more than 90 questions right out of 100 on an exam. That would naturally work out to everyone getting an A or and A-, but grading on the curve might mean that if you got, say, 93 out of 100 correct while most other people scored 95 or higher out of 100, you could wind up with a C- for your grade! Students hate this and consider it unfair, understandably so. The same problem would be at play with the system as described. A player may put up objectively great performances but if enough other players also put up good performances then the player who did a good job could wind up being ranked poorly. Another problem is that grading on a curve does a decent job of comparing a particular individual to others rated around a similar time, but makes it more difficult to compare their performance to an objective standard. A class may one year be one of the most intelligent groups to ever attend the school but the next year that class may be one of the weakest. The students that perform the best relative to each group will each have an A+ on their resume even if one of them is a far, far, far more intelligent student than the other. Once the grade is on the books, it becomes impossible to really know the difference between the two.

Overall the changes look fine or reasonable, but the removal of the knockback from Re-establish Range is awful. Snipers are already in a very rough spot in PvP (the only place this change will matter) because of being the least mobile/hardest to avoid damage class. Is the idea here is to try to buff Snipers by giving them this talent for free now, but to avoid making it too strong by removing the knockback? If so, this won't be a minor or moderate buff, but a pretty significant nerf.

I love Huttball, and always wanted more of it, but I'd say the only truly good Huttball map is the original. Quesh is just awful, awful, awful. The other one is okay. I'd accept another map similar to that one, but not Quesh. Preferably, though, give me something that's a variation on the classic.

There are fewer stuns than before 7.0 and more stun breaks. People have complained about stuns since the game's launch, so while I've always disagreed with those complaints, I can understand them. I don't understand your complaint that the game is worse since 7.0 and stuns are a notable reason for that since stuns are unquestionably less frequent and easier to deal with than they were before.

The most fun I ever had in PvP in this or any game - and it's not even remotely close - was open world but WITH an objective. Back when the Gree event was first held there was a central node that people had to carry an orb to and interact to get some reward - I forget what. On some servers, people lined up and there'd literally be lines of players stretching across the entire map waiting for their turn. On other servers, it became a big PvP focal point where groups of players would "claim" the node as their own and try to prevent anyone else from using it. One night three or four of us from our guild were there honestly, as far as I can remember, just to complete the event and for no real reason beyond that. Then a player from a rival guild came to deliver his orb and so we stopped him. A few minutes later he came back with a few friends and tried to do it, so we stopped him again. This all entirely unintentionally developed into a night where increasingly large groups of players would come to try to deliver an orb and we would fight them off. At first they tried to just kill us. When that didn't work they started trying to trick us. They got pretty elaborate trying to use decoys and basically sending five or six or more people just to try to control us long enough to buy time for one person to deliver the orb, but as I recall we didn't let a single person succeed all night except for one Sniper who actually did manage to make very well timed use of his entrench to get it to work. That was great fun, but if the entire thing was just a fight to the death with no objectives, it would not been nearly, nearly as interesting and fun.

In the 1.0/2.0 - even the 3.0 and 4.0 eras people were always asking for more Huttball maps. You'd see posts about it all the time. There was even a sizable community of players who wanted Bioware to create a Huttball league where teams could form and specifically play only Huttball. In fact, if I recall correctly the Rotworms and Frogdogs uniform armor sets was in part Bioware's sort of half-hearted attempt to give these people something. It was often raved about as something very unique to SWTOR and one of the things that really shined about it. You always had some people who didn't like Huttball, but it was for the first half of the game's life or so a relatively small group. I make no comment on anyone who doesn't like Huttball today because I haven't been a part of the community in a few years so I don't really know what it's like, but at least back then when you'd read posts from people complaining about Huttball they usually came across as pretty clearly not understanding the map or other classes or even their own class and it was obvious they would get frustrated on the map because they didn't understand what they were doing well enough to be successful.

For anyone on the "stealth in the endzone is OP" side, this is all correct. Even in the days of rated warzones with perfect team compositions and teamwork, do you know how Huttball was played? By sending ONE ball carrier to the end zone, usually sortof/sortof not accompanied by a sorc healer. Everyone else fought in the middle to try to control the ball spawn. If the opponent's ball carrier got past basically the acid pit, you ignored them and let them score unless it was going to be the winning goal. The top priority, no matter what, was the middle. You won these games by wiping the other team so they couldn't get the ball. If you were the ball carrier and you got to the end zone you didn't score until your teammates told you they had control of mid. You would hide behind the grate to make sure you couldn't get fire-pulled and then only score when you'd either wiped the opponent out of mid or had got it down to a player or two that you knew you could control. A stealth player in the endzone really should be a detriment to a team BUT I will say that unfortunately it often isn't because people overreact to it or otherwise don't know how to just play for the ball. Still the solution is not to nerf the stealth: it's for people to get better at playing the map.

Ok, so I do agree to a large extend here. <hysteria> easily ignores objectives more than any other group I've ever seen, even ones going full in on damage farming. In fact, there's something about the way they do it that actively makes your team worse in a way I've really never experiences before. People complain about premades all the time but I half laugh because at least on SF almost all the premades I encounter lose the match. For a couple of these guilds, I don't think I've ever actually been in a match where their team won. I also sympathize about damage farming. I will usually do what I can to help the team win but at a a certain point all hope is lost so you just join them. I agree with arenas BUT only if we're talking about the 3 or 4 meta specs. On almost anything else people just get immediately annihilated. In any case, maybe it's personal preference but I just don't find a 4 DPS arena match fun no matter how competitive it is. I've got to have a healer in an arena or if just feels like a waste of time to me.

Very hard disagree. If I'm honest, I think arenas have never really been worth it. The game has never been balanced for them and they are really just an extremely simplified version of the game that reduces a lot of interesting and well designed mechanics to DPS. I think they went a long way to ruining PvP in the game because of the mindset they promote. Do I take it from this comment that you are one of the people who goes into warzones and ignores the objectives and just fights in some corner somewhere as if it were an arena?

As I said in another reply, stuff like this needs team support to survive and always has. Yes, you often don't have the right team composition for this these days because of the population, but I really do not think it would be good to mess with the basic "infrastructure" of combat to account for that. You don't fix one deficiency (in population) by adding another (in game depth). I have to say that this is easily my favorite PvP experience in any game over the past 12 years but I'd probably stop playing if they changed the way the whitebar works: it's just one of the defining characteristics that makes the game what it is, and I suspect that even if they wouldn't specifically recognize it a lot of other players would also start to find the game less enjoyable if changes were made to these systems. It's probably not something a lot of people want to hear, but I think arenas are just for the most part not worth playing. You really do need a solid trinity composition for them to make sense, but the population is such that you can't always get these. This is probably part of why BW removed ranked arenas in the first place. It's unfortunate and sad, but I think it's true.

This is how it's always worked. The fact is that it's a team game. It can be hard when you solo queue - trust me, I understand as it's all I've done for years - but the reality is that surviving this stuff requires team support. I think changing it would be a net loss for the game, which has already moved too much away from team play. Short stuns do add resolve. Roots have never added resolve and I'm very happy for it as it's a layer of depth to the tactics in the game. Using Creeping Terror or a Juggernaut leap, for example, to catch a ball carrier at just the right instant to kill them in the fire trap is just one of the things that makes the game so much more interesting than a mindless button smashing/damage-fest. If you aren't a fan of premades who just farm damage and ignore the objectives (and most people on these forums seem not to be) then little subtleties like this are the sorts of things we should want more of, not less. They're what makes the game more than just that farm. The strongest slow will take precedent, but slows do not stack. I think this is good. This is how it is supposed to work but there are a few bugs which cause debuffs to sometimes persist through defeat.

I think there are fewer slows and roots than there used to be, too, and honestly I can feel it when I play. I know intellectually that there are fewer stuns, and sometimes I notice it, but I always feel like I'm slowed a lot less. I also think that the impact of these slows are overestimated and often there's a pretty significant tradeoff to them. For example, it's true that Engineering Snipers can put that slow out BUT... the best way I can explain it is to say that the experience of playing Engineering is brief moments of hilarious burst surrounded by an overall existence of overwhelming, suffocating mediocrity. You can blow someone up if you get the right set up, sure, but the rest of the time it feels like you're playing on a starter planet where you don't have all your abilities so you just use random skills in a way that doesn't really make sense. In other words, yes, you get that slow but even with the awesome burst the whole spec is still, in my view anyways, very mediocre. Similarly, look at sorcerers with the broken Deathbrand. Obviously this should be fixed and it is annoying, but with sorcerer being one of my more played classes and I just never take this. The loss of DPS from Deathfield is just way, way too much. In a duel I'd take the Deathbrand slow, but in a warzone or even an arena I just think that if an opponent is playing with this, hey, good - they're being way, way less effective than they could be. They'll have an easier time surviving against a single melee that focuses them, sure, but while they're kiting that one guy they could be killing the entire enemy team instead. So honestly even the more annoying slows don't bother me that much. I think there is a little work to do in getting the balance quite right between all the classes, but overall I'd say most of the most annoying slows represent pretty significant tradeoffs right now. Pulls and jumps should absolutely be allowed with the ball. They've always been a huge part of the strategy and they're one of the main things that makes Huttball what it is. Some people hate Huttball, but honestly my experience over the past 12 years has been that this is at least often a matter of players who aren't all that good and don't know how to use the various movement skills well or to counter them, or players who don't like playing objectives. I agree that full on warps shouldn't be allowed. At least in the past you would drop the ball if you used these. If any of this has been changed it should be changed back. Eh, I've been on the short end of that. It's not that much fun, but I think the reality is that sometimes you're going to face a team that's just better than you and more than just a game, that's just part of life, honestly. Sometimes you have a really rough time of something and you need to move on and try again.