Realistically it will start small. First they will offer cartel marked 344 gear in order to "help" players who don't have much time to catch up. Then they will start adding cartel market exclusives, usually small things that people will just look past, then once people are used to it, CM will have BiS stuff which will take an extremely long grind to get normally. It is pretty standard for these companies. P2W works because there are people who will pay to win, unfortunately. Anyway, this is off topic and it honestly started as a joke, so I'll end it here.

It's broadsword. Not sure if anyone knows what this company does, but ultra monetization and p2w are their specialties. P2W is definitely coming.

How does this help the cartel market though?

Why would you want to waste time and energy on something that is not profitable? The cartel market, like it or not (you can even hate it if you want), is profitable, so that is where they will concentrate their time and energy. This game isn't a charity for toxic whiners, it is a business. Yeah, I read them. 99% of them are terrible and ridiculously biased towards their preferred class. Every single suggestion can be summarized by the following verse: "Dear BW, Please nerf paper and buff rock, scissors is fine. Signed Rock". What does this have to do with anything? It doesn't change the fact that ranked wasn't making any money and was more likely costing them money, therefore they removed it. So you're saying that redoing the leaderboards wouldn't take any time, wouldn't cost any money, you can just snap your fingers and everything will work fine? Have you ever worked at a company, like ever? Oh yeah, I can just imagine it. They have long board meetings discussing new and more fun ways to spit on the 20 people in the "ranked community". It's all they think about all day. they dream about it even. When one of them gets married, they have a giant ice sculpture of a ranked player crying at their ceremony, using the melting ice as tears. That is the only thing they care about. It's not money to feed their families or anything like that... The decisions they make cannot possibly be based on numbers and financial data or anything like that ... nope, ranked player tears is what pays the rent at BW.... The world revolves around the 20 people in the ranked sphere...

No, I just don't bother reading posts from anyone who excuses cheating by saying "well everyone can do it".

Don't you hate it when people derail threads with personal attacks with no evidence. We need more constructive dialogue like this:

Stopped reading right there. Do you understand the meaning of the word "solo" in solo ranked? Also, why are you defending him so much? He is an adult and can speak for himself.

The number 20 actually came from a well known streamer who does ranked all the time (your friend mentioned his name above), I personally thought it was 30. But I guess he never played ranked huh? Also, if you are interested in my ranked experience, you can watch some of your friend's (eyessoitchy or something??) old streams where you were "having too many friends" (wink wink) and still lost to us. Now you made me sad for losing my 94k ranked comms simply because I took a break 1 month before 7.2 *cries in a corner*

All 20 of you left?

For FPS/heroics deception is probably better since you can thin out their numbers with quick kills, better DR and deception shines in skirmish types situations or against bosses that don't have much health like fp bosses. For ops, with few exceptions-like brontes-hatred is better.

They keep clinging onto a post by BW, choosing to believe what they want to believe and closing their eyes to the truth. Probably, none of them worked at a big company before and don't understand how these decisions get made. You can explain it to them 100 times and they still will not believe it because they choose not to believe it. Sometimes, you just have to experience things for yourself to understand.

At this point, we should just accept it and let it die. It is not coming back, no matter what BW/BS does at this point. No changes that people recommend here will do anything for PvP overall. It's time to let it go.

Force bound and grit teeth destroyed warzones. Skanks would do incredible damage while living 5ever. Me on a op healer (worst healer in game) and skank friend defended a pylon from 7 average dps. It was made to help the darling juggs in garbage ranked, but destroyed everything else in the process.

The population was decimated in 5.X and never recovered. Before that, it would've been possible if they developed cross server queues. But after 5.X it was pretty much over. 6.X population was nothing to brag about and definitely not enough to do anything you wanted. None of your ideas will bring people back at this point, not to the level you need to in order to support any ranked system. I personally think the only thing that might bring people back is if they use the amazon servers to create a "classic" swtor server, that has swtor as it was in the end of 1.X or 2.X. WoW did this to great success. It will bring back the people who loved playing in those times, it will bring back the nostalgia people, and a lot of newer players will go to the servers to see how it was like playing then. I think that would give enough of a population to support some sort of ranked, at least in the short term, then it will be up to BS if they can hold it. EDIT-I personally think it was lack of real playable content that drove off the players. There is just nothing to do in the game anymore.

This is pretty much the problem. It always was the problem, it always will be the problem. None of the ideas presented here can work unless this problem is solved. And in some ways all of them can work if it is solved. If we had the player base we could easily maintain a ranked. BW would have an easy time balancing for arenas because they would be able to enforce the trinity. Queue pops would be relatively fast. Matchmaking would be an actual thing that works. ELO hell wouldn't exist. And windtrading would be much harder because of the different players everyone would get. But, we don't. And as long as we don't have it, your idea will not work (you admit it yourself), no ones idea will work, because the game doesn't have the population for it. Getting rid of ranked was the obvious decision.