Tried after everything else this and it made it worse. It reinstalled the launcher but now the launcher apparently can’t connect to the Internet. “Unable to retrieve patch data. Please check network connection. (206)” Clicking repair under settings doesn’t do anything. Starting to suspect I’m really just screwed. Guessing my next step is installing through Steam?

To those still asking for a new game engine, the Friday the 13th game actually decided to upgrade their engine this year. It took them four months during which time they could release nothing else. This is because every single asset has to be reworked into the new engine. When it finally did come out, the bug count was as bad as it had been during the beta. Every single map in that game could probably fit on Tatooine, absolutely Alderaan. SWTOR might have more money, a bigger team, and a simpler engine but you're looking at at least a year between updates if they decided to update the engine. It is a bad idea.

I’ve always wondered about this. It’s a part of a lot of those classes default sets (or at least it used to). Did they really throw a completely useless stat on a lot of classes gear? That’s not just bad design; it’s borderline sadistic. Most people aren’t going to go the extra step to min/max.

So … teach them. I play enough lowbies and midbies that typing, “Mark and kill their healers. Defend our own,” at the start of a map is just ingrained.

Know this post predates the announcement, but it now sounds like solo ranked is being made cross-faction. That will make this considerably more difficult.

Well, first and foremost, a new player probably hasn't learned to keep an eye on ops chat. I sincerely doubt someone has been PvPing for over a month and just never played ACW. Second, you can see the grass and snow sides of the map from the spawn. Third, what I said earlier about looking for allies on the minimap whenever you see any callouts.

I’ll say it again: the problem with saying east or west is that people have a tendency to think they are facing north and believe those indicate their right and left. Honestly, on most maps you could just type “INC:” my reaction is to check my mini-map, see which direction has teammates, and head there.

I’m actually kinda shocked that they haven’t already converted Huttball and arenas to cross faction. When the game first came out, Huttball was the only same-faction map explicitly because it was so easy to justify in terms of lore. No real reason why that shouldn’t apply to cross faction now. As for converting all maps to cross faction, I’d rather they keep to the present trend of “re-skinning” older maps with different world tool sets. Part of me really wants a Belsavis “Voidstar” map.

I find people tend to fall into two camps: 1) “I picked a faction and I want that to mean something!” Basically hardcore RP or team-focused players. Lore is a good reason but it shouldn’t be an end-all be-all rationality. 2) (More commonly) “The other faction sucks! I don’t want them on my team!” This one is completely unjustifiable. The point of cross-faction is to help even out the shortfall the losing faction typically suffers. It helps them catch up in terms and (hopefully) develop the skills they wouldn’t develop getting stomped one-sided.

Ah, it’s a question of orientation. There’s a tendency for people to assume the direction they are facing when they start is north. When you spawn, you tend to think, “North is ahead of me, south is behind me, and west and east are to my left and right.” The fact that the maps tend to be oriented north to south reinforce that feeling. The problem is that you still tend to feel that way when you spawn facing south. On Voidstar I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a callout for “West” and turned to my left because I forget which way the map is oriented. The one exception is NC because the map does everything it can to encourage the player to look north: both spawns are located toward the southern side of the map and the capture “cabins” all require the player to look north. For every other map, callouts are either non-existent or focused on a geographical landmark (snow, grass, or pylon).

No, what we need is solo objective ranked. The general queue is supposed to be for everyone who wants to PvP, ideally so they can acquire the gear and skills they need to progress to ranked. If you want matchmaking that provides enforced skill and class balancing so you can have the most competitive match possible, guess what? You want solo objective ranked.

To be fair, other games have figured this out. When the queue pops you get a prompt to accept and it holds the match until everyone excepts. Group finder already uses something similar but this one would be blind so you can't game the system and tell who's in your game before you accept. If someone doesn't accept, they get a 5-30 minute lock out before they can queue again so they can't troll the system that way and waste everyone's time.

Just wanted to touch on a few things: First, I absolutely agree that matchmaking needs a rework. However, it’s not a mutually exclusive solution and I just don’t believe there is any solution that would actually fix arenas. Worse, if matchmaking changes were implemented now then it would require that arenas be offered another “fair chance” to see if the changes make them work. If they don’t, that just means more wasted time. I’d much rather they add objective matches to ranked then rework how matchmaking works. Second, to the “more people means more problems,” I’m sorry but I just don’t agree or I don’t see your point. The only point of concern is that, in theory, it increases the opportunity for collusion but, in practice, I don’t think it will be an issue. Most groups just cannot field 8 players — if they could, we’d still have 8v8 group ranked. That means they have to rely on PUGs to pick up the slack. And since the point of queue syncing is to take advantage of the lower numbers of the weaker faction aren’t likely to be the most skilled or best geared. Most syncers aren’t going to have the patience for that. That’s on top of cross-faction already existing in 8v8s. The benefits to queue syncing just aren’t as free as they are in arenas.

I find it utterly baffling that solo ranked hasn’t already been converted to cross-faction and am incredibly disappointed that there aren’t a dozen threads on this forum demanding it. This is coming from someone who’s made it crystal clear that he thinks any improvements to ranked arenas would be a waste of time. Even I think cross-faction ranked arenas should be a no-brainer.

Unless they’ve changed it, you can’t get kicked while guarding a node. You get defensive points every so often and it counts as activity, canceling the countdown. The only way you would be kicked is if you’re too far away from a node to get defensive credit.