@Bioware - I'm trying not to hate but please stop being willfully stupid.

I'm a developer. A UI developer originally, now something of a generalist. And here's what I see because I went through it myself but I'm also used to actually thinking about the consequences that completely thoughtless design and code has on my users and that experience is the reason I am not criticizing and am in fact personally emotionally pissed off at you as a team of programmers and designers right now. So here's how it goes:

People try PVP. They like PVP. They keep playing all the way up to 55+.

And do you know what happens? They start dying instantly and they have no idea why.

Do you know why?

Because there is no !@#$ing and I mean no god-!@##$ed-!@#$ing manual, no obvious duh reason, no nothing, to even hint to them that if they wear the very best PVE gear they can until they can afford their PVP gear, that they are completely !@#$ing themselves and the teams they land on. They have been led to believe this is the way to go because it has in fact been working out great for 45 levels of PVP up until that point.

Then it doesn't and they either get frustrated and they rage-quit in the middle of matches or they keep on trying their damnedest to do better because they have no idea that it's just a stupid gear thing. And they make themselves miserable. They make the teams they typically 30-60% compose miserable and they make the people who know better resent them when it's really YOU we should all be pissed at.

WHY HAVEN'T YOU FIGURED THIS PROBLEM OUT?!

How are they supposed to know it's the gear? There's no warnings. At least none that ever worked right. I kept getting warnings for augments in my guns for several months but augments never hurt you so that didn't make any sense and I still got the warnings when I pulled the augs out so that made even less sense.

What knowledge are they supposed to magically arrive at through this process to make sense out of all of this?

PVP gear is better? Okay. Fair enough. We can expect them to figure that out.

But why should we expect them to understand that if they go any higher than 162 item quality (Just PVE gear we're talking about folks) in all but the mainhand weapon which of course must be no higher than 156 (or the three mods average to 156 in the case of a mainhand item, as long as none go higher than 162 - I mean that should be pretty obvious right?) that they are completely screwing themselves?

And it's not like they get a little bit nerfed when they pay no attention to these not-so-obvious things one would have to learn by checking forums and doing research. They in fact get a LOT nerfed. They get bazooka-mega-!@#$ed nerfed and they hose the chances of the teams they're on or just die instantly leaving players like myself to feel like we're trying to at least tie in a 1v8.

They decide they hate PVP or that they they need to learn to play better and they keep trying and ruining the games of people who did bother to do that research who in turn unjustly resent them for not doing that research when really IT'S YOU we should !@#$ing be pissed at. Because it is not that damned hard to spend a little bit of time thinking about what the people trying to enjoy your app are going to think about and respond to and then making some non-catastrophically stupid decisions based on that.

And it's not their fault. IT'S YOUR !@#$ING FAULT. Or at least some previous team's fault and now your responsibility.

But for the love of !@#$, !@#$%ing FIX IT already! Who on earth thought it would be a great idea to make the 186 gear even WORSE than lower quality PVE gear in PVP? At least flatten it all to some base level. Don't actually make the expertise WORSE than if you had lower quality gear - are you crazy?