Leaderboards are part of the hook. They drive competition. They're there to show who is there to beat to receive the end of season / high ranked rewards. They're the wildstar progress and DPS parses of PvP.

and for Carbine, they're the clear example of an out of touch Studio struggling to understand, while subsequently ignoring, the PvP feedback being given to them by not only competitive PvPers, but the casual as well. They took forever to come out, were displayed simply as a glorified spreadsheet, and weren't even proofread. They then took them away, on the grounds of, "keeping high standards."

So if you ask me, good Leaderboards are Carbine's way of saying, "hey PvP community, we've finally listened. We've finally heard you, and we're on a path to a successful pvp game." It's like a promise point that needs to be filled before any reasonable PvPer that has been forced to leave deems the game worth of return.

Also, the rallying gear is a simply a short term fix for what really needed to happen, and that's 1. Locking PvE gear out of PvP, or 2. Completely re-itemizing PvP gear to become best in slot, as well as nerfing potential PvE gadgets / imbuements that provide an advantage.

Same-faction battlegrounds follow the same pattern. Where we need mixed faction battlegrounds, D+E vs D+E, we're getting same faction battlegrounds. This has potentially disastrous consequences for the dominion. As the under populated faction, we often enjoy shorter queues than the Exile. I feel for them as they have to wait for queues, but same faction battlegrounds? There needs to be a clear priority for the underpopulated faction in the matchmaking. If there is ever a time that I'm waiting on 2 exile teams to finish a match, and my queue won't pop, then I'm going to be very displeased. I'd wager that many other people would be too.

Unfortunately, due to the PTR requiring at least 16 people to test a BG, it's pretty hard to organize it. This would require a Carbine sponsored playtest, which for some reason, refuses to be acknowledged.

Same faction BGs should be very simple to implement. A same faction BG should pop ONLY if there are enough of the opposite faction to pop a standard BG. Pretty ridiculous if there are oversights that widen the population discrepancy.