Zloth

I don't quite understand that. If you run instead of downloading? Huh? Maybe you should tell us exactly where you are getting the coh updater program and where you are putting it on your computer.

No need to worry there, the phone system is set up so they can't actually hurt your ears with loud noises. If they are purposefully putting a choke on traffic, it would sure be interesting for us and NCSoft.

I had a heck of a lot of lagging and lost packets to the west coast servers, oh, about 8 months back. It was fixed eventually but 'eventually' was several weeks. These backbone companies' willingness/ability to fix their issues has gotten well into the unacceptable range.

Ghaa! Don't even say that! It hurts me terribly just to see that military guy standing in the Storm Palace zone. Before him, humans were mainly in Firebase Zulu with a small molepoint base in the Cascades and Justin Augustine (right next to the exit) in the Chantry. And what does this nameless military guy so deep in the Shadow Shard do? Well, he sells jet packs, of course.

Sorry to be a wet blanket but, honestly, I've been a lot less excited about the Shadow Shard ever since those portals got put in without any change to the molepoint system. The store NPCs are nice and some are fairly interesting NPCs - but why are they all placed right next to the zone exits? That essentially puts them all next to each other. Then the devs go and do the same thing again with the jet pack vendors. Arg. Why not just put ONE vendor in at Firebase Zulu?

All the Midnighter Club stuff was a welcome addition (and my heroes would all be quite happy if somebody were to drop a tactical nuke on Darrin Wade, even if he is standing next to a hospital) but, before they add more in, I really think they need to hit the retcon button and fix the place up a bit. Having Portal Corp and the military working together to slowly punch into each Shard while also having portals to all zones and a guy sitting in each one handing out jetpacks? That's outright nonsense.

Well, there's one problem right there. I guess Europe has a different registry entry for whatever reason? Jeez, that will mess up Demo Launcher, too. Arrrggg. I'll see if I can fix it this weekend.

The date thing could be caused by different date formats. I would trust what your driver itself reports as its version over CoH. (CoH Helper just runs the DXDiag program with XML output then picks the dates out of that.)

P.S. Why would you just go to SP2 when SP3 has been out for something like a year now!?

You seem to have it in your head that somebody went in and changed something in these specific TFs. That's not real likely - possible, but not likely. It's more likely that they made a change to another part of the game to fix some other bug (like maybe Amy's tendancy lately to attack the team that summons her) and it broke something over here.

These things happen ALL the time in programming. The only way around it that works well is exhaustive testing. If any changes need to be made to fix bugs found in the testing, you start all over again. If they tried to take that tact with this game, we would probably have just gotten issue 3 - assuming the game even survived this long, which wouldn't be likely.

So they have folks run through a bunch for a few weeks and catch what they can. Beta testers will always miss things but they probably aren't game breaking bugs. Once the patch goes live, the players will find a bunch more bugs and those get fixed over the next month or two - assuming they are fixable and serious enough to fix.

That's just crazy tempting.