Lower the cost of War Hero and other Higher end gear.

As I said, I'm not opposed to your view on skill vs. gear. Changing the gear grind now would simply make me feel like I wasted my time. I put a lot of time into this game and knowing that I could have spent that time on alts or crafting, or whatever rather than grinding comms for gear, I wouldn't be very happy. Ultimately, I know that this is the model BW wants, so at most they may reduce down the time to get gear (which ranked has already done to some extent anyway). We'll see, but either way, I'm excited to see if PVP without gear grind can work well this weekend.

Yeah, I did some ranked early this week. One night was great, rattled off 4 in like 2 hours. Other night was slow, between waiting on people to be available and then the right combination of people to be available.

It's almost not worth the trouble. Normal q's are near instant, still around 5 minutes per wait.

Most of the problem with ranked currently is the only option is a full team of 8 players. When BW gets solo queuing together (hopefully in a format that makes sense), I think that will change. Ultimately, this was never meant to be a PVP game, but the players ended up taking it in that direction. It would take a complete overhaul to get the types of things you are suggesting into place (ladders, contests, etc) because currently the gear and class imbalance is too large to function properly. While I think some more competition options would be fun, it is going to take a lot of resources to get us there (most of which are working on f2p right now). I think BW will have to change the entire gear design system for PVP in order to have any type of true competition and ranking system.

Roger that. I definitely understand your (and the majority's) perspective. I think it's just a mindset adjustment, that's all. I enjoy PvP (save for the rare occasion where I'm frustrated out of my skull) for just the sake of doing so. The competition where when you win you learn something, and typically when you lose, you learn more.

It's a never ending event, whether it's open world or 'in the box'. You can go 6 and 1 one night in warzones, then get lulz/undermanned groups the next night solo queueing and go 3 and 3.
Heck, last Friday night I rage logged after the third straight group that was never filled. Fought with anywhere from 4 to 6 other people through 3 straight warzones. Crazy stuff/bad luck.

The sole reason why people are against this is because for some psychopathic reason, people need to justify to themselves that they have been neglecting their work, their families, their loved ones, and their chores to get Full WH gear and it needs to feel like such a hard and valued accomplishment. Otherwise, they will realize that this is only a game and it doesn't matter what the person next to you have in terms of pixeled gear or how they acquired it.

Sad... really, really sad.

LOL! I love this reply I'm all for free WH gear for all players. I PvP for fun.

Someone sounds bitter at life lol

I'm sure you weren't serious, but that's not the reason people with WH gear dont want it to be free. The real reason is, most of those people are playing an MMO on purpose, and they want some sense of gear rarity. Its part of the genre. If this game had all gear for free and you didnt have to work for anything, it wouldnt be an MMO. If you dont like it, you may want to consider a game console such as the PS3. Those game have cheat codes to unlock everything for you so you dont have to do anything yourself.

Nah, I get it perfectly. I have been playing MMOs since UO and never before WoW was there a such thing as PvP gear. Actually Dark Age of Camelot was a prime example of how getting end game PvP gear was so easy and there were thousands of people still playing regardless of the lack of gear on a stick dangling in front of them.

I am all for gear progression for PvE, which if we are talking about the early days of MMO, all there ever was. It is logical, it is understandable. In order to beat a harder boss, you need better gear. Well guess what, players are not Bosses and there should never be a gear disparity in Player vs Player combat. It is simlpe as that...

Yea that is definitely a valid point. I could see there being no gear progression, stat wise. But I just want something to mark my progress and gear is a nice way of doing that. If anything, it should at least allow for gear grinding to get cosmetic gear.

I am all for that too. If you are willing to spend the time get gear that will only make you LOOK ****** but not MAKE you ******, that is perfectly fine.