Hey, at-least augment your gear and use a Stim before you enter a WZ.

The qq is strong with this one.

18 toons and you can't be bothered to level up scavenging on a few of them? Run lvl 450 missions and sell the mats you gain on the GTN for about 80% of the going rate - you will be swimming in credits.

There is literally NO reason to whine about being poor. In between WZ queue pops you just re-send your companions...it's like 15 clicks. Not hard.

Now that I think about it, the bus comparison is pretty good, if for nothing else than for the fact that in the eyes of the bus company (Bioware), smelly people have the right to take the bus since they bought the ticket. However, I think it's orverly simplified. Irl, you have plenty of choices to choose from when traveling from place A to place B, while in pvp, it's the regs bus or staying home. I'd say we also have to add at least three things more:

First, taking a shower until you are fresh again would take probably 20 minutes, having full purple augments doesn't. Getting one blue augment before joining is like washing your hands before going to that bus - it doesn't help the smell, but you can wave your hands at the other passangers and say "hey, at least I did something!".

Second, in a bus in real life, it's assumed that everyone else in the bus has showered and does mind the smell. In the bus called regs, this doesn't seem to be the case. There is some amount of people who smell just as bad as you do, and there are some amount of people who have the ability not to smell you at all. No one is sure what amount of these people there are - forums seem to sometimes give the picture that most of the people do mind it, but people inside the game give a different picture. Whether this is because people in the game are less likely to speak up their mind than people in the forums or that the type of person who usually is against unaugmented players queueing is also the type of person who goes to forums, I can't say.

Third, in the bus called regs, there's pretty much always a smelly person in there, and everyone who have taken that bus a couple of times knows it. I think this is the reason most of the people who think augments aren't needed in regs/regs don't matter think as they think because of this. It's not that they wouldn't realize how much showering means, they just have accepted that regs bus can will never be smell-free and think that since there already are so many smelly people onboard, might as well let a few more come. They may have moved on to slower bus with better air, also known as the ranked bus.

Under these circumstances, does this make not showering fine? Maybe not, but it definitely makes it less of a crime imo.

Your exaples are pretty straight-forwards cases where it's clear something's wrong: if these people actively pvp daily (or almost daily) and show absolutely no improment, you have to wonder why. But I'd like to think there aren't many people who actually do this. We are more likely talking about people who are getting pvp gear but not augments (probably because they're saving their money for something else) and people who do pvp only occasionally (so from your point of view, they have been running in warzones for weeks without augments, and from their point of view, they have participated on 10 warzones without augments, and you both are right). Combine these two - a person who's saving his money for something who also doesn't do that much pvp - and I think we have a much more complicated case in our hands.

Perfect example is TheSupaCoopa from the last page: he doesn't have augments, because he really wanted that dewback (I can understand, many people probably throw a party when they heard dewbacks are coming) and he's not doing that much pvp. We could ask him to put pvp before anything else, but if pvp isn't that important to him, he probably won't. We could ask everyone who doesn't have pvp as their first priority to stop pvping, but this kind of behaviour is imo part of the reason why pvp players are often viewed as rude and unpleasant to deal with. Pve crowd is usually happy to accept pvp players who sometimes do a little pve (there are exceptions though) and I'd guess RP people/people who practically play this as a single player game/people who haven't commited themselves to any particular activity also have no problems in pvp people sometimes doing what they do while putting pvp before that. It's no wonder if these people think it's unreasonable to say that you're supposed to have pvp as your first priority or you shouldn't pvp at all.

I really can't say that you would have been unprepared: you searced online for guides, geared your character and even rolled more alts of the same AC in order to be prepared. I'd guess most of the people would say that's at least "prepared enough". However, I think your story in a way speaks against your point: you are saying that people should put some effort in preparing before queueing to level 55 warzone, but at the same time, you tell how you did a lot to prepare yourself and it didn't matter, you still were a burden to your team. In a way, all this preparation of yours was in vain and you could have just queued the second you hit 55 with the skills and gear you had at that second.

However, I'm hesitant to believe all your hard work would have truly been for nothing, so I ask you: do you believe every person should not only do the same thing you do, but maybe even more, before queueing to level 55 pvp? I'd dare to guess that if people were faced with the choice of not queueing to level 55 pvp at all or queueing only after when they have rolled multiple alts of that same AC, searched guides online, watched video guides about pvp an/or your class/rotation, gearing their characters and spending quite a lot of time practicing their rotation on a training dummy (possibly with a parse), I'd say most of the people would decide not to queue and we'd have pretty empty warzones.

I definitely agree. I'd say that telling people who don't have augments that they are lazy, selfish and there's no reason not to have them does nothing but makes them defensive (and therefore even less likely to listen to you). Symphatizing with them probably works much better. Imo it's also a pretty bad idea to tell a person that they shouldn't buy that vanity item they have dreamed of for a long time before getting to full purple augments. It's like trying to convince a person who loves steaks to replace his meat with vegetables: you get better results if you say that it's okay for him to still eats steaks, just replace some other things. In a similiar way, you could ask a person if would it be okay to start buyng augments after he got that vanity item of theirs, or buy one augment for every million credits he collects for that vanity item.

In fps and ops, the amount of credits and comms depends on how far in the fp/ops you got: credits imo come mostly from the thrash mobs, comms only from the bosses. So if your group doesn't manage to get the first boss down, it's 0 comms for you. If your group in pvp gets steamrolled, you still get your comms.

I didn't take the weekly and daily quests of pvp to this comparison because I feel that if we're talking about pvp dailies/weeklies, we also have to talk about pve dailies/weeklies. In pvp weeklies, a couple of crappy geared guys causing a loss after a loss makes you complete your daily and weekly slower. You're still completing it, just not as fast as you'd complete it if you won every match. In pve, the dailies and weeklies require you to complete the fp or kill a certain operation boss. If a couple of crappy geared guys cause you not to complete that fp/reach that operation boss/kill that operation boss, you're not getting your daily/weekly done at any point. In short, pve gives you bigger rewards but only if you succeed and it punishes you for failing, while pvp gives you smaller rewards but it gives them to you for trying hard enough, even if you'd do nothing but fail. I'd say that in here, too, it's better to have a crappy geared person causing losses in pvp than a crappy geared person causing not to finish things in pve.

No, I did fully understand the point of your thread (and was very grateful for it and a bunch of others I've read here), and it was patently obvious to me after reading all of these threads that I needed to focus on augments before doing everything else. That is actually precisely what I did, and IIRC, I had several blue augments and a couple purple one on my orange shells before getting my first Conqueror piece (benefits of having crafting skills maxed).

What I was writing about, though, wasn't what my personal experience was, but what I figured might be a fairly common instance among new and returning players. I've run into more than a few people in game who didn't seem to have any clue as to where their priorities should lie in regards to upgrading gear, and I've had a few discussions on general or PvP chat where it was obvious that a lot of the more intermediate or advanced knowledge isn't overly widespread. Then you have the trolls who decide to tell new players that they need to stack willpower on a sentinel or aim on a guardian, occasionally followed by two or three other trolls following suit.

To you and I (and I'm sure to anyone else on these forums), the idea of adding augments is about as obvious as it can possibly be. However, I would ask you (and everyone here) to consider what it's like as a brand new player. There's an awful lot of information available for a player to soak in prior to becoming passably decent in PvP and I don't know how reasonable it is to just assume that every new player is going to know how to sort through the differing opinions to find those nuggets that will help the most.

Yes, augments and stims are important, but how easily does a new player hear that message in the midst of hearing about stat priorities, dailies, target priorities, warzone roles, bolster, etc.?

For a new player, gearing and undertsanding WZ objectives are the basics, the other things come with experience. So while this message can be lost amist the other L2P stuff, if a player has reached endgame without knowing the basics, its a problem. This is why I advocate education first, but also advocate valor and HP checks, especially for Ranked since that que can't support decent manchmaking.

If the players that don't want or don't care to do these basic things, then they shouldnt have a problem playing in a different que, preferably to lowbie, and if lvl 55, no rewards. Then maybe that will give them some incentive to get the basics...

I will say that I think you and I agree on most of these points and aren't that terribly far apart. I don't know if this is a fair assessment (and please understand I mean absolutely no offense by this), but it seems to me that the main debate here is between personal responsibility and personal freedom. Granted, it's in a video game environment so it's sometimes hard to take the personal responsibility angle too seriously, but at least from my point of view I look at this as a question of trying to have as much fun as I can in this game without hindering other people's enjoyment. Of course, then I have to ask, "whose enjoyment am I talking about?" On the one hand you have people who, for whatever reason, do not consider preparing for 55 PvP as a priority. On the other, you have people who do. Given the lack of options here, the only group I see who are truly at fault for this situation is Bioware. However, I do think that in the absence of other options, it would be polite to at least attempt to prepare for 55 PvP. To wash your hands, in other words. Maybe the next day, you scrub your face. Perhaps in a week or a month, you've worked up to basic hygiene.

And yeah, I recognize the 'but no one else does it" argument. Not a fan of that mentality (as you should likely know). I always figure that giving up is the surest way to lose. Of course, it also occurs to me that the mentality of a lot of our PvP "elites" isn't much different than a lot of our "bads." The bads supposedly don't care enough to become better, right? Well, guess what? A lot of the elites don't care enough to help. Not much difference between the two, now that I think about it. I would further venture to say that if a player isn't helping people in game (and I don't mean ranting and raving at them; that doesn't help), he or she has no right to complain that bads aren't trying to prepare for 55 PvP.

Definitely agree there, and maybe my opinion differs from others on the forums, but I think it's a matter of degree. On the one hand, you have the players who refuse to spend any time, effort, or money on anything that could assist them in becoming better at PvP. On the other, you have the players who pull out every stop and do everything humanly possible to gear up and prepare. I don't know where the "ideal" lies, but my feeling would be that if you're not trying at all, that's a bit rude to your fellow players. Do you take an hour out from your playtime to go run PvE dailies that bore you to tears because you want to earn enough money to buy one augment, or do you spend that time doing other things that you enjoy? Sure, maybe you only have 1-2 hours a day that you play (or maybe only a few hours a week), so it's actually a major investment of time and effort to do so. Maybe you don't even know how to run the dailies efficiently, so it takes an even more significant amount of time and effort to improve for PvP.

However, I do believe it all comes down to a question of where does "I have a right to have fun" take a back seat to "Everyone else has a right to have fun?" There are no mechanisms to prevent the former from infringing on the latter in PvP, whereas there are such mechanism to prevent in in PvE. Further, as you point out, there are many more options in PvE to where someone who is a detriment to their team can try something else that still provides the PvE experience.

As a result, I think it's both rude and selfish for someone who doesn't try and doesn't care to queue for warzone PvP. That doesn't mean I'm going to rage at them for queuing up, and I'll do everything possible to help them get better (if they're interested), but I still think it's rather a "screw you, I'm doing what I want" kind of attitude.

I'm guessing I misspoke, then. I do think I was significantly better prepared than I could have been, and at least had a baseline to work off, in that I was at least running to the right place and trying to do the right thing. I was hitting about as hard as a 5-year girl and was as tough as wet tissue paper, but I did have a place to start from to where I could add Conqueror pieces relatively quickly and started at least making an impact after a few days. I had a few augments as well (some purple), so I think that someone who was actually skilled at their rotation probably would have had an impact immediately, if they were playing my toon.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect other people to do what I did. I did all that because I'm OCD, a dedicated min/maxer, and very cognizant of my impact on other people. However, I do think it's reasonable to ask (if not expect) that people at least be trying to do something and that if they have the resources available to bling out their PvE content, I think it would make sense to ask that they spend some resources on their PvP as well. Maybe not everything, and maybe not even as a priority, but would it not be polite to try not to be a complete impediment to your team upon entering a warzone and/or to try and get better?

I do think if someone comes into a warzone and is completely helpless, but is actually trying to get better, there's a lot of understanding and help available.



Yep. Exactly. It's all about compromise and communication.

Fair enough; I didn't realize you didn't get any comms at all if a PvE raid wipes.

No argument from me, although I don't know how doable this would be at this point in the game. Given the reduced playerbase and lack of cross-server queue, I would think we're stuck with what we have. Of course, if Bioware were to actually implement cross-server and policy address the bolster issue, that might re-ignite interest in PvP, but I don't hold out a lot of hope they're paying any significant attention to the PvP side of things.

The sheer amount of words in this thread hurts me...

Less time typing, more time gaming. Get out there and play your toon, instead of talking about playing your toon.

It's really problematic that these crappy geared people are matched with and against the people who would like to have competitive matches. (I actually talked about this with DainjaMouz a little before starting the Fight Club and we came to the pretty much same conclusion - people with different ideals forced to be queued together.) Because really, actually both the geared people and the ungeared people are hindering each others' fun. Undergeared people make the geared people frustrated since from their perspective, the undergeared people are asking to get carried and are ruining their fun. Geared people make the ungeared people frustrated since from their perspective, the geared people are asking you to either be just as geared as them (or get to be as geared as them asap) or get out (which would ruin the ungeared people's fun). You can't blame people for trying to be as well geared as possible, but at least I really can't blame people for wanting to enjoy pvp, either - even if they wanted to get some cool mount or augments to their pve gear before getting pvp augments.

It a little hard to help people to prepare for level 55 pvp, especially if you don't want them to stop pvping for a while when they hit 55 (assuming you want them ready and prepared before they queue to a single match). Most of the people don't seem to use these forums. I didn't even know they existed until I googled something SWTOR related and ended up here by accident. Even people who go to forums but who are not actual pvp players seem to often stay away from the pvp forums, since these are often considered to be a place where people just insult each other and cry nerfs for pretty much everything. A new player's first thought probably isn't to come here and read all the threads, so they may not know about things like buying augmentation kits before hitting level 55 until it's too late and they are level 55.

Though, "nobody else does it"-argument imo does have some ground when we're talking about pvp - or, to be more exact, "the enemy doesn't do it"-argument. Most of the people don't think you should augment yourself to lowbie or read guides about your class before queueing to lowbie. Why? Because "no one else does". And in order to be competitive, you don't have to be as good as possible, just as good as the people you're against. If you're against 6 geared people and 2 ungeared, it might actually be better that you have 2 ungeared people with you, since it evens the odds - and vice versa.

I think "screw you, I'm doing what I want" is a little extreme way to put it (since that isn't exactly the way they are thinking about it), but I can understand why it annoys you. Imo it doesn't necessarily mean that a person doesn't try or care - or probably just thinks that trying inside the warzone the best he can is enough and i.e. buying conqueror gear when he gets the comms is caring enough. If you tell them their behaviour insults you, they probably don't say "why should I care about your feelings?" but "why what I'm doing isn't enough for you?". In their eyes, they might be "washing their hands" and "scrubbing their face" by buying pvp gear, being as skilled as they can, paying attention to objectives and/or planning tactics and calling incs in the chat (or at least following those tactics and answering to incs).

Certainly, if someone is prioritising something else (whether it's pve augments, that cool mount or a guild bank to your guild), you could always ask to put i.e. 5-10% of the money they get to pvp augments instead. I'd even guess many people wouldn't find it completely impossible (I could actually do it the next time I have to grind money to something in Red Eclipse, whenever that will be...). You just have to be careful of not demanding too much. I.e. 1 augment per day might be too much for a person who doesn't even play every day and 1 augment per week might be too much for a person who only plays 1-2 hours a day and is trying to save money for something else.

Oh and just to clear up one thing (I'm not sure if there's some miscommunication)
A wipe doesn't necessarily cause you to have 0 commedations since you can try again. If you try again and don't wipe, you get the comms. But if you aren't geared/skilled enough to do anything else than wipe and wipe and wipe some more, then you aren't getting any comms, either.

About the L-RANDLE's proposal, I'd definitely support letting 55s queue for lowbie, at least if there was a way to make sure this doesn't lead to fully optimized premades steamrolling level 30s. Not sure about the absolutely no rewards-part though; if this was the "lowest bracket" of pvp, it would imo make sense it would help you gear up for the next bracket (regs). It imo could give at least some amount of credits per match (for augments, stims and so on) and maybe medpacks/adrenals (since also everyone else in that bracket has the access to those).
55s could always have some sort of gear "gear nerf" instead of boost from bolster if they joined lowbie, so people getting ready to regs by buying augments/people in pvp gear wouldn't completely slaughter the actual low-levels.

Now you at least know better than letting me and Georgemattson have an any sort of long conversation in here. Sorry, I realize I'm writing pretty much novels here, but I enjoy hearing well rationalized, calm arguments against my arguments and I know that if someone, Georgemattson can provide them.

Can't play when I'm at work, so when I have slow days, I post. Side effect of being a wannabe writer with no imagination.

You do realize you don't have to read them, right?

well i roll a sniper on jdi covenant and have 2018 expertise and i can see the point of augs if you need the extra hp but im not paying wat it caost to aug my pvp gear when i dont NEED the extra hp, but thats just me i guess, augs really arent neccessary if you get your full pvp gear