All the great pvpers left the game?

Two things stagnating the influx of new skill are the community being toxic and the lack of a ladder to climb in terms of skill.

From the outset of hitting max level players are thrown into a giant mob of players who often have at least one premade on one side. This usually results in an slaughter in which neither the team doing the slaughtering or the team being farmed gain much.

Arenas which were meant to help this really don't, as most of the player base doesn't really play in arenas, and the community that does is very tight-knit and usually does not seem very friendly to new-comers.

A great deal of players have left yes, but the game is easy enough to where someone could become top tier in 4-6 months from scratch with the right attitude, but the atmosphere is not exactly helping this, as most players get discouraged quickly in pvp when they feel like they contribute nothing to the match.

Edit: I changed a few things, as I seem to write like I'm 8 sometimes.

My personal opinions:

Going against a premade is fun as a solo player because it forces you to elevate your playstyle and calculate better. I was streaming yesterday and there was a 2-3 man Q sync happening on pub side Harbinger. Did I go pubside? No, instead I stayed impside and ate those losses. Thing is, even though it's unfair, it was both 10x more fun for me to play and 1000x more fun for my viewers to watch, because knowing that the enemy team was as coordinated as they were forced me to step my game up and think more strategically. It also gave my viewers at the time a good idea of how to react to a premade/q sync and how to play against one. That's the REAL issue with why the skill level of average players won't rise. They would rather complain about premade q syncs and how they can't gain rating. Key Phrase: Can't gain rating.

I lost 120 elo last night when they were Q syncing, but I never quite because it was a good learning experience for how to better approach the next situation when my enemy does x,y,z. In fact, I ended up regaining all of the rating I lost in the exact same day, all on stream, all without Q syncing, I never queue dodged, I didn't change factions. I just kept queuing.

The toxicity and unwillingness to fight when the odds are heavily stacked against you are what make the level of skill stagnate. Toxicity is only an excuse for those who are sensitive, sorry, but it's true. I receive a ton of toxicity from people I don't even know, just because they see the name "Kre'a" ingame. I've had people call me the 'N' word on stream, off stream, in reg matches, in ranked matches, but you don't see me quitting, do you?

People need to stop using the crutch of "toxicity, premades, q sync" and instead learn from the experience. Sometimes it's better to just accept that you'll have **** rating for a pvp season and take a step back and use that season to learn how to better react to a certain situation. Things like if you're a sorc "I know the team is q syncing on the enemy side, I know they will coordinate their burst on my squishy merc. I'm going to be a good player and pull him when he's in danger, I'm going to CLEANSE HIS HARD STUNS, and I'm going to offheal him until the focus is off while still throwing in some dps here and there"

But people aren't willing to do that, because it's easier to complain about it.

I don't know if all the great PvPers left this game. I just know that 99% of my friends have, and frankly, that's all that matters to me. I rarely play this game anymore. Just sort of checking in from time to time until the expansion. Will give that a go and then finally bolt once SW Battlefront hits.

I wish SWTOR the best and hope everyone has a ton of fun in 4.0, but the PvP balancing info I've been seeing looks like a **** show. I don't think any of the new Dev tinkering is gonna be enough to persuade PvPers to stick around long after they've played through the new 4.0 content. New Meta, same as the old Meta. Oh well...

One of the biggest problems with ranked arenas is there is no way to "practice" in queues of ONLY arenas. If you queue unranked, you will get only a rare smattering of arenas when pops are low, but otherwise it's always 8v8. Thus, you never get a chance (without going to ranked and dealing with that toxic environment) to learn the ins and outs of arena gameplay which are totally different from 8v8. I've never understood this "omission". Just open up an arena-only unranked queue and I think it would benefit the PvP community a great deal.

I think the sad part is playing with your friends is looked down on. The problem has always been, and will continue to be, no match making period. With limited population to cross server, no match making makes PvP boring. The only thing that keeps me playing is the few friends i have left playing the game.. Sad with a little less ego, a bit more effort, and a lot more communication the devs could give us a real good PvP environment in TOR.

That only applies to guide writers. Even then it's still failing because guides such as Xinika's teach how to play Assassin the meta that the guide was written for. The guide(s) do not teach the methodology that was used to derive the content of the guide. Considering the meta shifts over time this means Xinika's guide won't help billy become as great as Xinika because it didn't teach billy the most important part - the process of discovery.
This is why the people that read guides never go on to become the people that write guides.


The other issue is the fact that many of the upper echelon don't leave guides behind. I'll use myself as a example: I have a extremely unique perspective and methodology to approaching problems, one that is divergent from the mainstream perspectives seem by the wider PvP community. When I leave my perspective will be lost, and my legacy will be nothing. Sure someone with similar perspective could come along eventually, but they will have to redo all of the work I did.

8v8 was popping? Please, the forums were full of players making excuses that it was too hard to get 8 players together at one time to queue to explain why they just made 4 mans to farm pugs in regs instead.

That's actually a really good point that I hadn't considered. Even when writing my own guide, I simply provide what works best in certain situations, based on evidence that I found from multiple tests. I don't think that I ever actually elaborate on HOW to help others identify for themselves though when a certain situation requires an audible play to be called.

The difficulty in providing that though is two-fold. First, it's almost impossible to truly convince someone to see my methodology through their eyes. Simply put, we think differently and everyone solves a problem differently. It might take me 10 less steps to discover what the next meta shift will mean for Assassins than the next person. Because of this, no matter how you try to illustrate the thought process that was used to arrive at the destination, it still won't be read the same way by 1, 2, 10, even 100 different readers.

Second, self discovery requires just that, an emphasis on the self and willingness to learn. No matter what I or anyone else puts in a guide, we can't push someone else to want to discover things for themselves. I think that's a bigger reason why guide readers don't become guide writers. Majority wish to just pick up a quick guide and learn that way because it requires less effort than testing it on their own. This is evident by Dulfy guides. Her PvE operation guides have become a mandatory staple to join most pug operation groups. There is a social norm in place that you will read the Dulfy guide before you queue up for the operation, because no one wants to waste time wiping to discover it for themselves. I think this problem is amplified in a PvP scenario because unlike PvE, PvP is highly dynamic. There are hundreds of different ways an arena could turn out, ultimately though, the ending will be the same, one team loses, one team wins. So people would rather have, say, 50 of those 100 potential plays memorized so that they can gain Elo as opposed to discovering for themselves and losing a **** ton of Elo.

Classic example, everyone knows that Season 3, I had 850 Elo. Before I created my 2nd sin to try again, I continued on my 850 Elo sin to practice and discover how to identify certain situations and when to apply CC here, or pressure here, or peel here. I learned when it's best to let a team mate die and when it's best to charge back in to the enemy team when I have 15% hp remaining. That took trial and error, and the penalty was 850 Elo. The 2nd time around, I pulled 1649 elo on a 2nd sin with this new found knowledge. But not many people have the time to test for themselves or the willpower to do so. This, in my opinion, is why most guide readers don't write guides.

I would be elated if someone made a new sin guide that built over top of the knowledge collected by myself, xinika, and various other guide writers out there. Even Aelanis' PvE guides have information that are applicable to PvP. But will we ever see someone who will pick up the ball and keep it rolling after we've all departed?

Who knows...

Not everywhere and not every day

But yes

I remember 1 day we couldnt get a pop for an hour and we started synq queue for normals with 2 groups ... The funny thing that almost every second game we were playing against same double premade or 2 separate premades in 1 team ...

Reinventing the wheel is indeed a long process. Someone's guide is a good first step to ensure a basic performance. Some people discover, some synthesize, some just do things by rote. Were you a mediocre player, Kre'a, you would not have advanced to a stellar gameplay through experimentation. Let folks find their own way to what matters to them.