Time to merge the US servers... again. Primetime window getting smaller and smaller.

CaptRogue;9645487]
This.

I'm sure you know fully well you had no impact on this persons griefing rituals because you took over one of his faction bases for 4 minutes. You took over the base because you wanted to, not out of necessity. Or if you really think you put a dent on his habits well.. I hope you don't anymore heh. The same people keep coming back no matter how many camps you take over.

Instead of making up heroic deeds of your noble actions against the toxic pvp tyranny, how about coming up with solutions how to deal with these terrible people who ruin everyone's fun. Your personal dealings in game 5 years ago really bear no weight here. What matters is the current time.

Acknowledging the issue does nothing. Taking action does. But BW has not provided us with any tools to self-moderate toxic behavior so there really isn't much players themselves can do. It's on BW to solve, not the other players who happen to be witnessing it.
See, you cannot kick anyone out of a pvp WZ like yo can from an operation group. If that bad behavior player joined a raid and all they did was scream profanity they'd be kicked out faster than you could type in a response, hence ops and fp groups are LOADS more civil, because they know other players aint gonna take their crap if they start acting up. On WZ you cant do that. You're stuck with th person for the whole duration no matter what. BW really doesn't care about behavior there.
I think, I think the only player driven moderation is if like 12+ people report one person for spam on the same day, then the system will auto-mute them for X amount of time. But that happens so rarely I don't even know if my facts are entirely correct about it.

The reason pvp players would like to get UCs from lowbie/midbie is simply because that's how pvp gearing used to work. You'd get pvp comms for lowbie/midbie and you could use them to buy leveling gear, or save it and use it for endgame gear. This is, again, not to force people who don't want to pvp to join warzones (believe me, if pvp players hate something, it's people who queue for warzones but don't care enough about them to do their best), but to give pvp players a reason to do lowbies/midbies when they're leveling a new alt.

Many veteran pvp players don't enjoy those brackets very much since 1. they're forced to play with less abilities when they'd already know how to use all of them 2. their teammates usually don't know what they're doing (since many people are new to pvp, and it's fine, that's imo the best place to learn) and 3. It's a slower way to level than flashpoints. Now that lowbies and midbies don't give you an advantage to endgame gearing, many pvp players choose to level through flashpoints instead, and lowbie/midbie brackets suffer. If you have another suggestion to how Bioware could change the system so that either more non-pvpers would queue to lowbie/midbie or so that pvp players would once again level in there, I'm sure the pvp community would love to hear it.

As for the toxicity, I haven't seen a single pvp player claim there aren't people who play pvp who sometimes act in a toxic way. So, they know it exists. "Speaking up", as you say, leads to two people arguing in the chat instead of one, the toxic one probably enjoys the argument, and their teammates need to place both of them in ignore if they wish to have a chat they can actually use to communicate inc calls and so on. Reporting it is useless as long as Bioware doesn't do anything about it, and it's literally impossible to kick someone from a pvp match unless that person is afk.

We took over the base because he tried to hide amongst the guards, and since, as you point out, BW isn't really in to moderating PvP, which is, btw, something that happens industry wide a whole lot, players dealing with this is the expected method of handling it. I did the same stuff in Aion, sometimes leaving off leveling toons I needed to level for Legion stuff, to chase rifters back to their own faction's part of the planet, or I got chased back to my part of the planet, if I rifted over to their zone.

The only thing they can do is issue vacations, or outright bans, and frankly, I don't think they want to. They need, for some reason, to have PvP appear relevant, perhaps to justify spending money on it, and so, they have to keep whatever people playing it they can. If they're of the toxic variety, well, I guess they figure that's the price they have to pay, and again, this isn't limited to BW, or swtor, but happens a lot industry wide.

We also used to get planetary comms for gearing up, while that was going on. That's out the window now, so why should PvP get special treatment?

Planetary comms were different, as they only bought leveling gear -- now you get the gear directly from heroics. ^^ But I explained why pvp players feel some sort of reward needs to be given for lowbie/midbie. If you feel some other reward is better, feel free to share your ideas. If you don't care that there isn't many matches going on in lowbie/midbie, then you certainly have the right to feel that way, but people who do either enjoy those game modes or feel they have a place in the game (=a place for new people to learn pvp before endgame) feel very differently.

I haven't read the thread, but I don't think the existence of a popular WoW expansion necessitates all competitors immediately merge servers. BfA's massive devouring of playerbases is mostly transient.

Hate to have to give you a small history anecdote..... but:

Comms could be used for leveling gear originally... but then they moved to "crystals" and had three tiers of them.. with the blue and purple tiers being specifically to buy end game gear (though not BiS.. which at that time came from OPs). The player you responded to used "comms" in their post.. but the reality is it was three tiers of "crystals" that drove the gearing engine in PvE in the expansion cycle that preceded the introduction of GC.

Yeah.. a griefer parking in stealth inside an opposing faction camp is as old as MMOs... and is done generally to either grief lower level players and often NPCs, or to try to draw end game players out to address it.. .and hence it was to pick a fight in the open world. Before WoW introduced Warzones and only open world PvP was to be had... this was a very popular thing to spark and draw ad hoc PvP. In the era of Warzones or other instanced PvP encounters.. it is not as common... but it does still happen. There have been times when we would see a call for action in guild chat because there was some griefer camping a lower level outpost or camp and killing lowbies. Whether they were doing it to get their jollies killing grays, or just to taunt for some level parity PvP... we were happy to go out there and give them a proper smack down and camp their corpse until they decided to leave the lowbies alone.

And you are correct about a studio leaving something like this to players to deal with.. because PvP by definition is player on player conflict and tactics.. and it's not the studios place to intervene unless it is a clear violation of the ToS. And this brings us to the very pragmatic fact that in most cases MMO studios leave it to players to control and enforce to interdict the more toxic behaviors of some PvPers..... either by force of peer pressure (which apparently in this discussion... PvPers claim they cannot do, and are not responsible for), or by force of weapon if all else fails.

Players dealing with other players behaviors in a PvP context IS the norm in the industry. And yet it is clear in this discussion that most PvPers either refuse to agree that there are some toxic behaviors by PvPers or simply declare that it is not their issue.. it is the studios. They could not be more wrong here based on my years of playing MMOs ... but of course they are free to simply feign ignorance or powerlessness over this... because that too is a negative PvP behavior. I guess when you think all is fair in PvP.... including griefing.. that is the way you roll.... yet then complain that PvP queues are slow and fewer players are queuing.. even on an otherwise active server.

As a member of a guild that does do PvP and generally self-groups to queue, rather then PuG.. we do occasionally backfill with a random player or two when needed. But I can tell you... we explain to them right up front what behaviors will not be tolerated.. and it if they do even a single one of them.. they get booted immediately and we inform their guild (if they have one) about it, as well as spread the word to other guilds we interact with in the form of a blacklist notation. So.. I refuse to accept this "we can't do anything about the small number of toxic players in PvP", because you can.. it's a question of if you will or not.

Unfortunately I can't recall exactly how the gearing system went during the "crystal period" -- but I'm pretty sure purple and blue crystals were not given from leveling content.