Stop complaining about EXPERTISE

I'd welcome you to find a successful PvP MMO that isn't driven by some sort of character progression. Perhaps Guild Wars will end up working for you. Even then, I guarantee you there will need to be some sort of reward system for continued participation.

Resilience made Wintersgrasp pointless and completely segregated the WoW game into a bifurcated progression system where PvE and PvP players very rarely mixed together in open world PvP.

TOR has a very nice opportunity here with its OPvP zones to attempt to actually make PvP meaningful and a part of the total game experience. As compared to WoW which pretty much made PvP only matter in a small boxed encounter called a Battleground or the Arena.

To actively support OPvP and make "War" a part of what this game is, you cannot reward PvP players over PvE players, as stated in my last post if BIS PvE gear is substandard compared to BIS PvP gear, then you end up with less PvP...not more PvP.

PvE and PvP end game gear should be equal to each other in all respects other than model design, making both play styles valid, and both play styles able to intermix with each other without any level of disparity between them.

Doing it the way its being done now simply does the same thing that happened to WoW, a massive bifurcation of each servers player base, and very little intermixing between raiders and pvp players.

Add in faction imbalance and your philosophies of what is "right" and that allows me to literally do every daily OPvP objective on Ilum solo, on my level 50 Jugg, completely unchallenged on The Harbinger, which is one of the busiest US West servers.

Wheres the "war"? Oh yes its being fought in a box somewhere where it doesn't matter to anyone but a handful of people who measure their greatness at a game in the terms of "Skill = gear" which isn't the case.

I can seriously worry level 50's in full Battlemaster gear on my level 25 BHPT AP spec. Kill them? No, simply not enough survivability on bolster alone against that much expertise, but I can make them wonder whats wrong with their "gear". What happens when I get my level 50 BHPT AP into full Battlemaster? What happens to your "skills" then when I come along with an even field advantage and drop you like a clicker noob?

Hate to break it to you, but open world PvP in TOR was destroyed the moment they didn't enforce faction balancing.

You're raiders/PvPer intermixing thing sounds like fancy to me. If a raider enjoys PvP, he'll partake, and vice-versa.

When i raided, my Druid had a full set of PvE and PvP gear. I used whichever one was applicable. When I PvPed purely on WoW, my Rogue had absolutely no interest in dealing with PvE players what-so-ever. If I wanted to raid, I'd work on getting PvE gear.

I agree. PvP should be about player skill and nothing more. I would PvP all day just because it's fun. I say save all the gear enhancements for PvE and let PvP be about skill.

Removing progression for pvp players so you can have vanity items is a bad idea and wont happen.

Open World PvP won't have much chance of recovering naturally from the faction imbalance if everyone that swaps sides to try to even it out suddenly realizes they can't win their OPvP objectives without a 4 to 1 numbers advantage.

I am a PvPer, primarily, I raid on the side, I did both in WoW when I played but I stopped before Ulduar and never went back to WoW afterwards.

Raiding was not equal to PvP, and PvP was not equal to raiding. They became separate communities thats not good for OPvP.

This game just launched and if you're already ready to accept the complete failure of OPvP as a concept, thats not good news at all.

Expertise != progression. Its a completely artificial stat that makes bads good and gives them a rather distinct advantage against everyone else til they run into someone with equal gear. Simple as that. Call it whatever name you want, you're defending a game dynamic that is designed to hide how bad at PvP some players really are.

Let me give you a good example. I bind every key on my UI to my keyboard, I've been playing FPS games since there were FPS games to play, even before there was internet gaming. I have great twitch reflexes and tend to pick up on class dynamics in MMO PvP very quickly.

My wife has never played an FPS game in her life, shes lucky, half the time, in Huttball, if shes carrying the ball to the right goal line. She clicks every button on her hotbar with her mouse and is damn near a keyboard turner in all respects. Put her in full expertise gear and I won't be able to kill her if I'm in full PvE gear. It doesn't matter that I'm about 10 times more skilled than she is, she simply has so much resistance to damage and damage increase, she can sit there and mouse click and keyboard turn to her hearts delight and me, doing everything on hotkeys and circle strafing her like a banshee....I will still more than likely lose or come up completely unable to do enough damage to her to win.

And heres the deal, calling that "progression" is ludicrous cause my wife has 12 - 14 hours a day to sit around in TOR, she can get rolled in PvP all day long, she doesn't care long as she has fun....and eventually just cause shes been there 12 - 14 hours a day she'll be rewarded with this set of gear which makes her nearly impossible to kill regardless of how skilled you are, if you don't have the same gear thats appropriate to your class and AC.

You call that "progression"? I call that a win button for slow, but patient children.

Your font hurts my eyes way too much to even begin reading that.

If bioware understands pvp players they won't bother with this. pvpers arn't really interested in vanity items.

Expertise is fine because pvpers will generally have equal expertise because pvp gear isn't that hard to get (it takes some luck but everyone will get it eventually and a lot quicker than pvp games like WAR). What it does is stop hardcore raiders and pve only players just queing for pvp randomly and owning all the hardcore pvp players who don't have the raiding gear. That is what expertise is designed to do, separate pvp and pve gear to keep everyone happy. At the same time a pvper can't just go in and do a top level raid because they won't have the gear for it.

Its ok guys. Guild Wars 2 will have true skill based pvp that dosen't use gear as a crutch for unskilled players to feel good about themselves. Be patient, this is not the pvp game you are looking for- it is a pve game with pvp tacked on.