Guild summit fail imho

A bit brusque but yes. When I first was on the 'Net, I think we all were a bit charmed by the ability to talk to folk from all around the world and behaved. That, however, didn't last very long (see USENET ).

Generally, and I don't mean this to start a war, but I find the thought that hopping online and behaving like a complete prat is horribly juvenile. Sadly, it has become rampant which irritates me because there is still that "magic" that could be, being able to communicate freely with people from...well, just about everywhere now. I guess I still retain the awe that inspired and wish that we could stop behaving so badly and start really communicating.

I also wish I was still 20 and maybe this time 'round...a redhead?

Because you didn't read a post you like you resort to insults. Yeah...that shows that you are much better suited to express yourself in a forum than I am. Also...where did I mention the devs were "trying to ruin this game"?

While I don't think the summit was a failure, far from it, 1.2 really looks impressive. I do think the OP is correct in his assessment that BW is either unable or unwilling to address faction imbalance. The OP focused on the PvP ramifications of faction imbalance, but it also affects other aspects of the game as well on the PvE side of things like the in game economy and the ability to find groups or guilds to even do content with.

When asked about faction imbalance this was all they had to say yesterday:

I fail to see how the Legacy system is going to address this, but I may be missing something. I have a level 50 Sith Assassin that I leveled as an insurance policy against this very occurrence. Yes, while I leveled him I was somewhat active on the Empire side, but once I hit 50 I only log into him once a week maybe and then only to send my companions out on gathering missions. That contributes nothing to the Empire side of my server (not that they need it).

Meanwhile, the Republic side of my server is a ghost town. Finding groups is next to impossible outside of brow beating guildies into going, and the GTN is empty. Our economy is non-existant. Need some low level mats to craft gear for a guild mate? No problem I'll just go to the GTN real quick...oh wait I can't because there is nothing on there. Legacy won't fix that problem, neither will a dungeon finder tool, or cross server WZs. If BW is unwilling or unable to address faction imbalance, they should simply make all the GTNs cross faction.

The OP is correct about the differences in PvP. For whatever reason, the Empire simply has a huge lead over the Republic in the Valor arms race. I wasn't 50 yet when the 1.1 Ilum fiasco went live, but apparently a lot of Empire players got Valor rank 60 very quickly and very easily. Even without that type of advantage, statistically speaking, on a server where Republic is outnumbered 3 or 4 to 1, there will be 3-4 times more Battlemasters on the Empire side verses Republic. And make no mistake, having even one Battlemaster in a WZ has a huge impact on the outcome. Even with mostly Champion level gear with some Centurion and PvE pieces mixed in, at 550 Expertise I get shredded on my Commando by any Imp wearing Battlemaster gear. Cross server WZs may alleviate this somewhat, but when the problem is so widespread amongst servers it will still be an issue.

Nothing said or introduced at the guild summit addressed any of these issues and BW doesn't seem to even consider it a major issue. That is what is deflating from my perspective. Anecdotally, this is one of the reasons I quit playing WoW as my PvP server went from about 60/40 in favor of Alliance during Vanilla, to 20/80 in favor of Horde by Cataclysm. Most of the larger guilds abandoned ship and left the rest of us stuck on a server with no economy and no large guilds to run content with. Blizzard made no effort to solve this problem either, other than allowing me the pleasure of paying them $20 per character to transfer to another server.

The cat is out of the bag. Imps now outnumber Pubs on most servers, and by a large margin on many servers and there is no way to quickly fix that problem now that the game has launched. I don't expect BW to force anyone to play a certain faction, but I did expect them to take this issue more seriously. There are many passive methods they could use to encourage people to play Republic and help balance populations over the long term, and there are several active solutions they could have taken in the short term to help alleviate the issues that having imbalanced populations creates. BW did none of this and seemed to just brush off the question. That is likely what upset the OP, just as it upset myself and I'm sure others who are facing this situation.

"Hater" I think. That's what I guessed but I'm not sure.

My quick observation is that the OP posted an opinion.

Server imbalance. On the Ebon Hawk I don't know what the server population is really like (I'm think more Imperial), but for some reason the Republic own our warzones from about 5pm to 11pm central. Sure we get an occasional win (and hopefully DOT's nerf in 1.1.5 helps even it up) but all in all if I waited to do my daily warzone WINS at that time .... It takes me several HOURS. Not 1 ... not 2 .... but 4,5, or 6.

Part of it is the half premade stuff ... part of it is bad pvp ... part of it is newer to pvp. But add all that up compared to the lack of it on the Republic side (I run into the same people over and over in warzones) and you have an imbalance on the opposite side benefitting the lower population side (all if my speculations are true).

I'm not for cross server action .... it lowers accountability and ruins the community. But I'd be okay with some sort of server merge with lower pop servers.

I'm just saying that I'm not seeing the same 'downside' of low server population in the pvp realm. As for FP and OP .... I'm sure that a low population sucks.

So much for quick

imho

i - in
m - my
h - humble/honest (usually honest)
o - opinion

And what can BioWare do about players choosing to play a class that they want to? They have put things in place to encourage people playing both factions but ultimately it comes down to the players. What? A PvP buff? Not gonna make people join the opposite faction. XP gain? All that will do is shorten the time those people spend on their opposing faction alt getting it to 50 then forgetting about it if they don't want to play it.

They stated overall the difference between factions is less than 10% which means on some servers Republic outnumber Empire. Server merge? Well it's not going to happen until they can work out doing it right if that is even if that is their intent.

Bottom line BioWare cannot do anything about that.

That is completely untrue. There are a lot things BW could do to passively push players toward playing Republic. You see this in other games all the time be it a cool new race to play, cooler looking gear, or even a pvp mechanic that is slightly better than the other faction's counterpart. Honestly, that's just off the top of my head based on what I've seen in other games. Basic psychology is an easy tool to use to encourage people to passively make the choice you want them to make without taking player choice out of the equation.

Also, based on the guild summit, faction balance overall is sitting at 57% Empire and 42% Republic, which is a bit more than 10%. Also, citing overall population balance ignores the very real problem faced by servers where the population imbalance is significantly worse. Who cares if population balance is 50/50 if its only because on half the servers 100% of the population is for one faction and on the other half of the servers it is 100% for the other faction. Overall population numbers can be misleading. Most PvP servers have populations that heavily favor Imperials. It is rare to find one in favor of the Republic.

As I said there are also things they can do in the short term to mitigate the effects of a small population such as cross faction GTNS. I also stated that most of us whose factions are ghost towns would be happy if BW just acknowledged the problem and laid out a roadmap to at least try and bring some balance to the populations. Instead BW basically swept the problem under the rug like it wasn't a big issue.

No where in my post did I suggest a server merge. So I'm not going to respond to that.

You can't force people to play Republic, on our server everyone has alts on both sides so sometimes its super unbalanced in favor of one side and sometimes its decently balanced. As for the whoel battlemaster thing what would that prove? Nothing because you still can't force republic players to play pvp and you can't force empire to play republic.

They're atleast opening up more of the warzones to be mixed like Huttball but for rankings I believe its enforced which side your on. I missed a bit of that part.

I mean what do you suggest the devs do? Offer 1 million credits to a number of players to swap sides? The cookie dangle to get players to swap sides doesn't work. Warhammer tried it adn guess what..didn't work. People play what they want to play. I play bothsides, most of my friends do but I know alot of people don't or they're merely concentrating on one or two toons at a time.

Just a couple things I wanted to correct based on my own experience in game:

I watched the Summit on livestream. I think Bioware brought up many of the 'hot topics' I've seen people complain about. Specifically: Ilum is broke, they addressed that ("We need to go back to the drawing board"). Legacy is currently 'just a bar', they addressed that. There is faction imbalance, they gave hard data on that and said that it has been worse in other games and they aren't sure what to do about it here. They gave hard data on class popularity, the economy, leveling... lots of stuff.

Are there still lots of issues to address? Yes.

TBH, though, the issues you bring up are... not nearly significant enough for me unsub. They are for you, apparently, so I wish you luck and fun in whatever you decide to do with your time.