The Expertise stat has to go...

Too bad the most successful PVP games disagree with you. This, btw, does not include WOW or others like it. PVP is bolted on to the side of a PVE gmae in those and if you clocked peoples hours the vast vast majority spent wwaaaayyyyy more time in PVE than PVP.

Games like Dark Age of Camelot and Guild Wars with a significant PVP basing and crowd however had a relatively minor power difference due to gear. In fact changing this is one of the main reasons Dark Age of Camelot lost most of it's players, sharply declining after the Trials of Atlantis expansion.

Likewise other competitive PVP games outside of the MMORPG sphere are similar. DOTA, FPS games, RTS games, etc are all based around the idea of player skill being 90% of what gives the win or the lose.

Sadly even FPS games are starting to suffer somewhat of the WOW effect, but even now in an FPS gmae a completely new soldier is either competitive out of the gate, or competitive almost immediately, getting their essential gear very very early. Example: BF3. You start effective but need to unlock your first 2-3 items to really be competitive. Luckily this takes literally less than a weekend.

Rubbish, I fight bad Warriors all the time as a Guardian and beat them because they failed to make the class work for them. s'funny watching Warriors trying to use their own Master Strike without stunning me first, then wondering why I interrupt and kick the Sith out of them.

sadly even the fps community is choking on "progression means skill"
just look how cod games turned to **** on pc

more people still playing cod 4 than there were on blackops and mw2 combined before mw3


/backontopic
give us balance and new content and unlocks for visual bonuses and out of arena beast mode. dont make us grind post 50 in pvp just to be competitive or even competent

I want to add my voice to this discussion. I completely agree with this ^^, 110%.

Nothing kills the fun of endgame on a new toon faster than the pvp gear grind and inherent gear imbalance (for me and for a lot of other people that I have known over the years).

Depending on how old the game is and how deep into the PVP stat all the vets are, the grind becomes less and less enjoyable.

I quit wow over a year ago and have had no desire to go back.

Can you guess why that was and is?

It was because of the PVP.
It was simply impossible to catch up to the top people and have a shot at being competitive.
It was because of the lack of fun that created.
No matter how skilled or how bad I might be at pvp on any given day or in any given match, it always ended up that Gear > all.


I want to close by saying I fully support the notion that Bioware completely remove PVP stats from pvp gear. Remove Expertise and bring back combined brackets.

I had a blast vs 50s on my low level, bolstered toons. I think the system is just fine, until 50s started stacking expertise, that is.

Expertise is the problem, not the solution.
It needs to go away.

I agree with the core of the message that a lot of people have been posting, that being, there is a problem with PvP right now.

Expertise is not the problem. There are a LOT of good reasons to have a PvP stat, which have been highlighted by people much better able to explain these reasons than I am.

The problem is how difficult it can be to gear up. On my server, the Empire has something like a 2:1 number advantage over the republic. This means more 50s, and more importantly, more geared PvPers. This makes winning warzones on republic side a very difficult task. In the same amount of time it takes to grind out the warzone and merc commendations on my republic characters, I can get 4-5 times as many on my empire side. This is a vicious cycle. Empire has better gear, means harder to win WZs, means slower to get gear, means you fall further behind.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not whining about favoritism; this is a player-base issue, not bioware's fault. What IS bioware's fault is the way they implemented the PvP dailies. Quests to get WZ WINS is not how they should've gone about it. The quests should be to PARTICIPATE in warzones. Maybe make it 'either win 1 warzone, or participate in 3'.

Another good step to solving the gear problem would be to implement, as someone mentioned earlier, a 'mid-tier' PvP set. Something like the honor blues from WoW, that are easy to pick up, but don't quite compare to the higher-end gear. Something that a new PvP'er can easily pick up to be able to compete to some degree.

There are lots of interesting points, arguments, and counter-arguments being made here. I understand where OP and his supporters are coming from; gearing isn't working as it should be. Yet. But the problem does not lie in the existence of the Expertise stat. That's just something that's easy to point to and say "FIX!"

FPS games should be about player skill, i was talking about MMORPG PvP which should be more about gear and leveling. Just because something is labeled PVP doesnt mean you have to make every character the same for balance sake. That is what MMO's are all about, leveling, gear, etc. Or else why play an MMO if all it is is an FPS with auto-targeting and an overhead view? Lets just give everyone the same abilities, same gear, same weapons, after all that is the most balanced approach right?

If you don't want gear advantages in an MMO, i suggest Counter-Strike or games like it where you are meant to be evenly "geared". This is an RPG.

15 games a day is, what, 3 hours? I mean, that's a lot, sure, but it's not a "ruining my life for this game" lot. I run maybe 5 or 10 every couple of days and I'm already sitting on a 6% expertise bonus, which isn't ZOMG THE BEST EVAR but is plenty to keep things from getting too frustrating.

My main issue is that I'm on the low-population side (I'm told that Empire has a 3:1 advantage) so I tend to be on the side with the random sub-50s who can't access expertise at all, against guild groups full of 50s who've leveled up exclusively on PvP, not that I'm individually underpowered. The addition of the level 50 bracket will fix like 90% of my non-profanity-filled complaints about PvP, i.e. the ones not involved in some juggernaut leaping me and hitting the goal line in the 0.0001 seconds I was out of cover.

I'll be perfectly honest, this sounds like an excuse from someone who lacks skill, and wants a game they can win without it. That's probably not how you meant it, but that's what I read it as.

All PvP should be largely determined by skill because that is the point of PvP, to test your skills against the most dangerous prey: another human. You don't need to test your gear to know it's better than other gear, it has numbers on it. If you just wanted PvP to be about levels and gear, you should create a game that calculates out the stats of your gear and build and that of your opponent, and just tells you who the winner is without having the hassle of playing a warzone.

Claiming that PvP should be about gear because it is a Role Playing Game, well... makes about this much sense.

Wanting to turn PvP into a gear pissing match (granted it already is one, much to my chagrin) is misguided, at the least.

You do realize that people who have life, and work, and (god forbid for MMO gamers) family actually hardly can spend more than 3-4 hours per day gaming AT ALL?

Add to this frustration from newbie teams, getting pawned by Imperial premades, wins that don't register for daily quest, Expertise BS, and you have big chunk of playerbase removed from PvP.

This.

Sadly: Majority of MMO gamers got used to a comfort of game where skill doesn't matter, but gear and grinding does.

And despite of what they so strongly and often repeat: It DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY! or actually: it SHOULDN'T be this way if you want to create competitive PvP community!

This is what happened to WoW and why I hate/hated that MMO. I hope to hell, these same whiny *** kids don't ruin this mmo as well..

Also, instead of whining about the gear and getting your *** handed to you, why not pvp and get the gear? I got owned a lot early on, but it only incentivized me to get that gear! I can have the best of both worlds, a pvp set and a pve set. This is the best route as most players enjoy the rewards of receiving epic gear.