You may have missed my previous post based on Taugrim's evaluation of the Patch 1.2 PvP changes. In it, I expressed (like Taugrim) that the recent changes to time to kill (or, TTK) in PvP were not positive. Since the patch, TTK has dropped quite substantially, which I feared might represent a shift away from Bioware's previous design philosophy of longer, tactical battles instead of the extremely bursty PvP in other MMOs.
It seems that my fears may have been misplaced. A post by Georg Zoeller on the official forums on Friday has clarified that they are aware that TTK is lower than intended and that they are monitoring the situation, though no changes besides the Tracer Missile/Grav Round bug fix were confirmed.
He also explains that some of the TTK is caused by expertise disparity, since expertise has intentionally been buffed to be the single most important PvP stat. While I agree that expertise should be incredibly important for PvP to dissuade people from using PvE gear, I am afraid of the stat inflation this could cause. Ultimately though, Bioware has shown that they are not afraid to rebalance ratings in order to make the game work better, so I remain cautiously optimistic.
It also comforts me greatly that they have acknowledged that there is an issue, though their explanation is fairly vague beyond the expertise mention. Georg notes that "stacking debuffs are creating a real TTK issue", but there's no real example of what debuffs are stacking, whether or not this is a bug, and how exactly one could fix this if it isn't a bug.
At least we didn't get a confirmation that design goals had shifted and they were aiming for lower TTK - that really would have broken my resolve (see what I did there?). In all seriousness, this is reassuring news.
I've included the post below for your convenience; you can click to enlarge.
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