I'm a PVP junkie. It's by far my favorite thing to do in SWTOR. I'm trying to improve at ranked PVP.

The problem is the que times. I'm on Star Forge. I was in que for 30+ minutes last night at 8pm Central time. No pops. I got bored and logged off.

Bioware has to do something to incentivize people to join solo ranked or come up with a way increase the number of players to participate. I know we don't want random noobs with no gear queing and making games awful, but everybody has to start somewhere.

SWTOR is a really great game. I love it, but this is just broken as-is. I'm not sure what the solution is, my thought would be to increase rewards and add a minimum 306 gear requirement.

Looking for feedback on what can be done to help the situation.

Heh welcome to swtor my friend.

The issue with solo ranked goes way back. The problem of the pops on SF is not just not enough players but also the fact that there is a lot of cheating in ranked and people see no point to que. A lot of times you get bots, wintraders, trolls, throwers and so on, which ruin the game for people. This topic has been discussed way too much here and its still as it is, so I dont want to bring it up again.

Lastly, you need to realize the amount of players in ranked, its maybe 50 players who actively do it, even much less. This is not really an group in which the Devs would be interested. They rather invest more into stories, cartel market stuff and so on. This will keep the many players subbed.

Heh welcome to swtor my friend.

 

The issue with solo ranked goes way back. The problem of the pops on SF is not just not enough players but also the fact that there is a lot of cheating in ranked and people see no point to que. A lot of times you get bots, wintraders, trolls, throwers and so on, which ruin the game for people. This topic has been discussed way too much here and its still as it is, so I dont want to bring it up again.

 

Lastly, you need to realize the amount of players in ranked, its maybe 50 players who actively do it, even much less. This is not really an group in which the Devs would be interested. They rather invest more into stories, cartel market stuff and so on. This will keep the many players subbed.

I see what your saying... I don't think it would be a big ask or a heavy lift for Bioware to increase the rewards in PVP and add a 306 item level requirement. I'd start there and see if it had a positive impact on pvp.

I see what your saying... I don't think it would be a big ask or a heavy lift for Bioware to increase the rewards in PVP and add a 306 item level requirement. I'd start there and see if it had a positive impact on pvp.

Not sure when you started playing cause a while ago there were crafting mats dropping in tanked and it was a disaster, mainly for team ranked. It only suited the wintraders again.

Putting on more restrictions would kill the que even more. 306 item level is pretty much standard so that would help much.

The issue with solo ranked goes way back. The problem of the pops on SF is not just not enough players but also the fact that there is a lot of cheating in ranked and people see no point to que. A lot of times you get bots, wintraders, trolls, throwers and so on, which ruin the game for people. This topic has been discussed way too much here and its still as it is, so I dont want to bring it up again.

There have been no bots or wintraders queueing on SF this season that I've witnessed (though there is one that wintraded on SS).

It's true that over the last few weeks, pops have been very inconsistent on SF. Some nights it pops a lot, even multiple games at once, some nights it doesn't pop at all. I think the biggest factor is that many people are simply unwilling to queue unless they know for sure that it's popping (hence why it always pops more when someone is streaming), and that ironically makes it much less likely to pop in the first place. I wish more people would just have a little patience and queue, and we would get a lot more games.

Not sure when you started playing cause a while ago there were crafting mats dropping in tanked and it was a disaster, mainly for team ranked. It only suited the wintraders again.

 

Putting on more restrictions would kill the que even more. 306 item level is pretty much standard so that would help much.

There has to be something that can be done to help with que pops. WOW doesn't have this problem. I understand that WOW has many more players, but there has to be some way to address this problem.

Not sure when you started playing cause a while ago there were crafting mats dropping in tanked and it was a disaster, mainly for team ranked. It only suited the wintraders again.

 

Putting on more restrictions would kill the que even more. 306 item level is pretty much standard so that would help much.

Didn't expect from a wintrader like you to understand. It was already proved throughout discussion that having mats in team ranked makes in much more healthier, competetiveand less fitting for Wintraders and botters:

HERE:

You are totally wrong. First of all let me extremely shock you now - dodging is also a thing in solo ranked. I got two chars to top 1 spots (including one in this season) by dodging really skilled players in sr who had less rating than me. If you queue sr when other skilled player is in queue you risk getting bad team mates in your group while that skilled player gets better team mates. Thats why i created a big friend list on both imp and rep chars which allows me to monitor throwers and bots online to dodge them AND skilled players who have less elo than me to avoid situations where they get better team mates because of their elo. When i queued on tank i avoided less rated but skilled tanks because i knew they will get stronger dps.

 

Literally by dodging in solo ranked i was fighting with no names against other no names carrying my team alone and telling them what to do. Sometimes i fought skilled players who had more elo than me since i knew i will get better team mates. Easy top spots in sr.

 

NOW TO TR - ONCE again even if one team is dodging more skilled teams they still will have to fight other decent teams and more skilled queue dodgers. There is no way an unskilled team could find a free time when they could farm only mat farmers because there always been 1-2 decent teams or skilled queue dodgers in queue who were willing to get elo. So all these teams were competing with each other for free from top teams time. There ALWAYS WAS COMPETITION AND SKILLED GAMES BETWEEN DECENT TEAMS AND QUEUE DODGERS AND STOP CLOSING EYES ON THIS.

 

top spots in tr season 10 were like this:

Top 1 spots were taken by top players in best teams

TOP 2 spots were taken by less skilled but decent player who probably dodged top 1 winners but won everyone else

TOP 3 spots were taken by less skilled players than previous two teams but who dodged top 1 and top 2 teams yet won everyone else

 

SO you can see that all spots were taken by the best, those who rarely fought each other but won everyone else who also tried to get top spots. There is literally no way an unskilled team could reach top spots since such team was farmed by stronger teams which were climbing up to top spots. There always existed strong and weaker teams and only strong reached top spots by farming everyone around.

Here:

But same happens in tr. Queue dodgers could not dodge that easy because as i wrote before teams were always different. Skilled players just swapped chars you didn't have in friend list or went to other faction which fully screwed up queue doding. Those queue dodge issues you wrote about sr fully concerns tr.

I wrote about reducing win requirement for sr not because of myself. in sr for now i need only 2 wins to get 200 and thanks to queue doding in sr i have more than 1700 rating and will get top rewards. So queue dodge works in sr perfectly as it worked in previous seasons for tr and sr and win requirement isn't a problem for me. I wanted devs to reduce win requirement due to notorious wintraders who reached 200+ wins but dropped from high elo thanks to legit players vote kicking them. Yet skilled legit players who aren't dodging throwers, wintraders and bots hardly can get even to 150 wins.

You don't need to be a genius to compare what happened in mat farm era and now. In mat farm era we had all types of teams in queue: bad, decent, unbeatable, queue dodging etc. ALL these teams were competing with each other (even dodgers had to compete between each other). Wintraders and bot users didn't had any chances except for queueing in a deep morning (which was pretty obvious and easy to qualify as a wintrade though)

What we have now?? All teams are Wintraders or bot users with 10-50 wins which were made by playing against teams which were prepared to lose in advance (so called "contracted fights). What we have now is pure wintrade. Iam glad to hear that devs are not going to reduce win requirement for team ranked so all these cheaters won't get rewards.

HOWEVER, IN HIS LAST THREAD, MIKE B. ACTUALLY STATED THAT IN FUTURE SEASONS THEY WILL "TWEAK" NUMBER OF WINS NEEDED TO BE QUALIFIED FOR RECEIVING RANKED REWARDS WHICH means that in next seasons team ranked Wintraders will get what they want, af! When devs will start "tweaking" win requirements we will enter into full team ranked wintrade era while solo ranked will die due to lack of participants (we can already see it dying on star forge).

Overall, no mats - no competition in team ranked and wintraders win

Ranked issues require more than a simple fix. Ranked requires more resources and "hands on" management then BW is currently willing to allocate.

Multiple fixes are needed to the system itself not just a gear baseline of "Max Tier". Really they need multiple types of qualifiers (that should be tied to Regs AKA people that regularly PvP) to queue ranked on top of gear requirements.

Regarding the WoW comment, Bioware does need to put on a season event stream running the top teams in a bracketed competition season finale to draw players to ranked play.

It's all about Bioware deciding to put in the time and resources to make ranked work well...Without that it will continue to struggle.

I love PvP and avoid SWToR ranked like the Plague!

Let me add that the PvP 'community' is broadly perceived by less active PvPers and non-PvPers as toxic, rude, and gate-keeping. That's for a good reason, especially in ranked! Gate-keeping is really important to maintaining (The admittedly already highly variable) the reasonable level of skill in Ranked that we have on SF.

But it's hard to get the balance between incentivizing ranked to a degree that you have a substantial player base against introducing way too many clueless conquest-seekers. The greater the rewards, the more players, but the more unhelpful idiots and bots you're going to find.

I suspect a population of ~50 active, vaguely decent PvPers is all you're likely to get for solo ranked without seriously disrupting the ecosystem. As others have noted, why would the devs put effort into this limited aspect of the game that so few players take advantage of? (When was the last time you heard about a GSF update, for example?)

Nip dead buds.

Unpopular opinion: arenas are dumb, bring back 8v8 ranked.

snip

I agree with a lot of what is said and quoted here.

Season 10 was actually very active and enjoyable on SS. Yes, there were some wintraders and throwers w/e. That will always be a thing. But there were more people in q, more games going and at least some semblance of fair games due to more population.

I'm a PVP junkie. It's by far my favorite thing to do in SWTOR. I'm trying to improve at ranked PVP.

 

The problem is the que times. I'm on Star Forge. I was in que for 30+ minutes last night at 8pm Central time. No pops. I got bored and logged off.

 

Bioware has to do something to incentivize people to join solo ranked or come up with a way increase the number of players to participate. I know we don't want random noobs with no gear queing and making games awful, but everybody has to start somewhere.

 

SWTOR is a really great game. I love it, but this is just broken as-is. I'm not sure what the solution is, my thought would be to increase rewards and add a minimum 306 gear requirement.

 

Looking for feedback on what can be done to help the situation.

A lot of the problem is the scoring system. It's possible to lose 20 points in a loss for every 10 points you gain from a win. So if there are throwers or newbs in queue, it's just not worth it to queue; it's too much risk (if you care about your rank). BW needs to rework the scoring system so that you don't lose rank/score if you lose (but maybe yes if you drop). Make wins just a few points. There would be no punishment for losing as you can't control your teammates in solos--and people who play a lot and WIN a lot get high rankings. In fact, BW only doles out Top 3 titles now to people who have a certain number of games under their belt.

You don't need to be a genius to compare what happened in mat farm era and now. In mat farm era we had all types of teams in queue: bad, decent, unbeatable, queue dodging etc. ALL these teams were competing with each other (even dodgers had to compete between each other). Wintraders and bot users didn't had any chances except for queueing in a deep morning (which was pretty obvious and easy to qualify as a wintrade though)

If that were true where are the teams now?? Why dont the decent and unbeatable que? Cause there is no point since they do not want to go against eachother. They all just wanted to farm the bad ones. So what kind of game is that when you just farm the mat farmers?? Yeah sometimes you got unbeatable vs unbeatable, but then they stopped quing, simple. Everyone in this game wants the top3 handed to them for no effort.

Everyone in this game wants the top3 handed to them for no effort.

-Mero 2020

I'm a PVP junkie. It's by far my favorite thing to do in SWTOR. I'm trying to improve at ranked PVP.

 

The problem is the que times. I'm on Star Forge. I was in que for 30+ minutes last night at 8pm Central time. No pops. I got bored and logged off.

 

Bioware has to do something to incentivize people to join solo ranked or come up with a way increase the number of players to participate. I know we don't want random noobs with no gear queing and making games awful, but everybody has to start somewhere.

 

SWTOR is a really great game. I love it, but this is just broken as-is. I'm not sure what the solution is, my thought would be to increase rewards and add a minimum 306 gear requirement.

 

Looking for feedback on what can be done to help the situation.

As i am sure others have highlighted here, there are quite a few reasons why people especially on SF don't participate. As someone who is a also been a pvper since the start of this game in 2011 has gotten golds in multiple ranked seasons and i would say is a pretty good player who participates not just in hardcore pvp and pve content I can share what I have seen over the years to add to what all these other pvpers who have been around the block have seen. So here is a couple of reasons.

1. You are on a rper server, I know it doesn't say it anymore on the server screen but this is where all the rpers are. Just watch guild recruitment and 70% of the time its a rp guild recruiting.

2. Swtor has a very casual community, people in tor just simply don't care about competitive pvp like they do in other mmos. Even finding a raiding team that is actually trying to improve can be a difficult process because majority of the players are here for the star wars novelty.

3. As others have said, cheaters, wintraders, trolls, throwers, bots. If there are only 20 people in que and 3 of them are any one of those entire games get ruined. If you are a tank and one of the healers is throwing and there are only 2 in que.....you see the problem that is arising it is not worth it.

4. Bioware has started to take action against these people but trust in the ques is long gone and will take time for them to earn it.

5. Class balance, if your main is at the bottom of the meta it usually means you get tunneled first and die first. That gets really old after 10 games to alot of people. So now you have alienated people who like to stay on their mains and they will just wait till the meta hops. Not all players hop to the better class for that patch. Especially with all the rng gearing now.

6. Gearing, I know some ranked players who are still going to war with rng atm. And many of them like to be able to swap specs often depending on who is in que and they are fighting the gearing system atm.

Now why I personally have stopped que ranked and taking it seriously in tor. I use other mmos for that sweaty pvp experiance, mmos that either have mega servers or cross server ques. But here are reasons specifically to tor.

1. Group ranked is dead, now what does this have to do for solo's well why would I spend all my time playing 4's and trying to climb when all those problems above exist when i can't even play with my friends.So I have no incentive to play solo's and practice when I can't play with my friends consistently. And when you do get into que and play granked you have to play one of the best teams right off the bat. There is no climb anymore.

2. The lack of population, a fraction of the player population plays ranked, there are not enough people in que for bronze, silver, and gold to mean anything. If you get pushed into bronze because you lose against a team of golds and are constantly playing people high or low gold because there is no one else in que, you are not getting an accurate read of where you belong. So why go through all that stress, toxicity for literally no gain. Its not even competitive, there is no climb. You can see how you perform against the general player in warzones since thats where every one is at.

3. kinda building on point 1, I can't play with my friends. So most of the time one of them is online I would rather do 100 warzones with then spend an afternoon doing ranked.

These are just my observations over the years, I am sure more can be added by others. This is just my analysis

-Mero 2020

Yup. Now people, that have no life and time play to get the 200 wins and hope they will be high enough to get the top3 what silly system is that? I do like the win requirement for top3 but with this pvp community it missed the point.

People strive just to get their platinum. I did it to prove how silly it is to get it and that was enough for me.

People strive just to get their platinum. I did it to prove how silly it is to get it and that was enough for me.

Another example of admitting you cheated with no remorse, because you're an immoral piece of ****.

Another example of admitting you cheated with no remorse, because you're an immoral piece of ****.

I really dunno what you guys are reading. I said i got it, not that I cheated to get it..... read the text.

I really dunno what you guys are reading. I said i got it, not that I cheated to get it..... read the text.

We all know you cheated to get it, and you've admitted so multiple times on the forums. Who are you trying to fool at this point?

As i am sure others have highlighted here, there are quite a few reasons why people especially on SF don't participate. As someone who is a also been a pvper since the start of this game in 2011 has gotten golds in multiple ranked seasons and i would say is a pretty good player who participates not just in hardcore pvp and pve content I can share what I have seen over the years to add to what all these other pvpers who have been around the block have seen. So here is a couple of reasons.

 

1. You are on a rper server, I know it doesn't say it anymore on the server screen but this is where all the rpers are. Just watch guild recruitment and 70% of the time its a rp guild recruiting.

 

2. Swtor has a very casual community, people in tor just simply don't care about competitive pvp like they do in other mmos. Even finding a raiding team that is actually trying to improve can be a difficult process because majority of the players are here for the star wars novelty.

 

3. As others have said, cheaters, wintraders, trolls, throwers, bots. If there are only 20 people in que and 3 of them are any one of those entire games get ruined. If you are a tank and one of the healers is throwing and there are only 2 in que.....you see the problem that is arising it is not worth it.

 

4. Bioware has started to take action against these people but trust in the ques is long gone and will take time for them to earn it.

 

5. Class balance, if your main is at the bottom of the meta it usually means you get tunneled first and die first. That gets really old after 10 games to alot of people. So now you have alienated people who like to stay on their mains and they will just wait till the meta hops. Not all players hop to the better class for that patch. Especially with all the rng gearing now.

 

6. Gearing, I know some ranked players who are still going to war with rng atm. And many of them like to be able to swap specs often depending on who is in que and they are fighting the gearing system atm.

 

Now why I personally have stopped que ranked and taking it seriously in tor. I use other mmos for that sweaty pvp experiance, mmos that either have mega servers or cross server ques. But here are reasons specifically to tor.

 

1. Group ranked is dead, now what does this have to do for solo's well why would I spend all my time playing 4's and trying to climb when all those problems above exist when i can't even play with my friends.So I have no incentive to play solo's and practice when I can't play with my friends consistently. And when you do get into que and play granked you have to play one of the best teams right off the bat. There is no climb anymore.

 

2. The lack of population, a fraction of the player population plays ranked, there are not enough people in que for bronze, silver, and gold to mean anything. If you get pushed into bronze because you lose against a team of golds and are constantly playing people high or low gold because there is no one else in que, you are not getting an accurate read of where you belong. So why go through all that stress, toxicity for literally no gain. Its not even competitive, there is no climb. You can see how you perform against the general player in warzones since thats where every one is at.

 

3. kinda building on point 1, I can't play with my friends. So most of the time one of them is online I would rather do 100 warzones with then spend an afternoon doing ranked.

 

 

These are just my observations over the years, I am sure more can be added by others. This is just my analysis

Right this post sums it all up exactly. ^

The amount of variables that can cost you the match are so great it's ridiculously nerve wracking and the majority of legit players aren't going to fiddle and waste their time with such a garbage scoring system.

I always prod BW to revamp the ranked scoring system. No one likes my ideas, but no one adds anything to improve the system. Instead, most people shortsightedly blame the bad experience in ranked on a low population.

That's just part of the problem, though. The pop would increase if the system itself was better, and there were far less cheaters, trolls, bots, wintraders, throwers, vote-kickers in the matches. Like above is stated, all it takes is a few of these trolls to be in the queue and the entire contest gets ruined.

Probably more people would queue if tank heal games were more consistent. Rarely are their consistent tanks and heals in the queue unless it's coordinated.

Hence coordination, we need to come together as a community and coordinate it. Which is already asking too much out of our community tbh.

However, SF probably has the most active GR scene of all servers right now. Form a team and queue or ask around, someone will likely bite.

If that were true where are the teams now?? Why dont the decent and unbeatable que? Cause there is no point since they do not want to go against eachother. They all just wanted to farm the bad ones. So what kind of game is that when you just farm the mat farmers?? Yeah sometimes you got unbeatable vs unbeatable, but then they stopped quing, simple. Everyone in this game wants the top3 handed to them for no effort.

Can you read those statements i linked? It was correctly stated (which is also logical) that if team ranked is alive and full of absolutely different teams there will always be competition. Queue dodgers who didn't want to fight very strong teams had to fights with other queue dodgers (since that small time period when strongest team didn't queue was limited but everyone wanted to use it). Even queue dodgers had to fight other queue dodgers and only the strongest dodgers succeed. So why it is not competitive? I was one of queue dodgers but my team was weak, yes we could win mat farmers easy but we didn't reach top rewards even close because every time we queued during periods when strong teams weren't in queue we were farmed by more skilled queue dodgers who also used that small fraction of time free from strongest teams. YOU always had to fight for your rating in mat farm era since there always was someone else decent enough to take what they want even during time when strongest teams were offline.

And what we have now? Team ranked is dead, all rating received there was wintraded by wintraders like you, who asked/paid someone to queue for easy wins, legit ranked players quitting the game since team ranked is dead, Mike B. already gives up and states officially that they are going to "tweak" the number of wins needed for top rewards in next seasons so that Wintraders like you could get their rewards with like 20-50 wins made thanks to wintrade in team ranked. Great isn't it?

I really dunno what you guys are reading. I said i got it, not that I cheated to get it..... read the text.

We all know how you got it. Your sentinel was hidden during all season 9 up to the end thanks to an old bugg which allowed players to hide their characters from leaderboards, the famous wintrader lyvala (name is changed a bit) who used same bugg then confessed that he did it with your sentinel too because you paid him for this. That character had small amount of wins for season 9 which only proved you wintraded it.

Now you say that mats in team ranked is bad because all you want is team ranked remain dead as it is now so cheaters like you could easily wintrade more rewards using dead condition of team ranked since Mike B. already stated that they are planning to tweak win requirements in next seasons. Of course if team ranked will be revived as it was before season 11 you will not have any chance to cheat due to big quantity of teams queueing all the time which are capable of farming your team in few seconds.

We all know you cheated to get it, and you've admitted so multiple times on the forums. Who are you trying to fool at this point?

Please do not "hijack" the thread just to talk about me, thank you. If I bad stuff I wouldnt be here now, would I?

We all know how you got it.

Everyone seems to know everything these days....

Your sentinel was hidden during all season 9 up to the end thanks to an old bugg which allowed players to hide their characters from leaderboards, the famous wintrader lyvala (name is changed a bit) who used same bugg then confessed that he did it with your sentinel too because you paid him for this. That character had small amount of wins for season 9 which only proved you wintraded it.

I can honestly tell you I did not pay money to anyone, not for a virtual game, not for pixel titles. My toon was not hidden by any artificial means. If you do not know how my toon wasnt visible, then you know far less about the mechanics of this game. I can assure you it was nothing illegal and Devs knew fully about it.

Now you say that mats in team ranked is bad because all you want is team ranked remain dead as it is now so cheaters like you could easily wintrade more rewards using dead condition of team ranked since Mike B. already stated that they are planning to tweak win requirements in next seasons. Of course if team ranked will be revived as it was before season 11 you will not have any chance to cheat due to big quantity of teams queueing all the time which are capable of farming your team in few seconds.

I have said it before and I say it again, I do not care about rewards in this game. I got the title to prove how silly it is and also how pointless. Team ranked is only a way for wintraders to get their rewards, which is greatly unfair. Well, not wintraders, the top pvpers in this game. They are the ones who always occupy the top spots, over and over, it must give them a warm nice feeling in their harts that the got pixels!

The points system is and has always been a meme. One thing I would like to see for a change though is that the matchmaking system would at the very least consider balancing out classes between teams.

I.E when there's 2 dps mercs in the queue.. not put them together, but put them on opposing teams. Class stacking of any sort is a real problem in this game though and one too many of one class against some other class can be very problematic depending on the matchup itself. Then it really is more of a battle between classes than between players.