Archie Gremlin

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Well .. we did it.

1 to 50 in 7 hours 46 minutes.

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Well done. That's awesome.

I imagine you're thoroughly sick of that map now.

It sounds like it might be sound problem. Try playing with sound disabled. If it's stable then you've found the cause.

Have you updated your sound drivers recently? You might have got them in Windows Update.

I think Patrol XP is still being exchanged for debt. So it'll drop if you face planted a couple of times. :-)

Ok. I tried all the port numbers using the -port switch. (80, 6994, 13094 and 23094)

Both 80 and 6994 sucked at 1k a second or less.

23094 produced about 35k and second and 13094 gives me 40 to 50k a second. Winner!

So it's definitely worth trying the different ports. Thanks for the advice folks.

As for Demon, I've already decided to drop them. Like you I've been with them for about 10 years. I've found that reliability and speed are still OK but every time I'm forced to call customer service it's worst than the time before. The last time I spoke to them, they refused to answer my question and refused to escalate the call to someone who could. Fortunately, I only have to call them once or twice a year.

Is anyone else getting truly awful download speeds for the latest update.

I'm looking at 200 bytes a second with an estimated completion time of 80 hours.

I'm trying to work out whether the bottle neck is with NCSoft or my ISP. (Demon) The rest of my internet access seems to be fine.

GR - Is it possible for you to find out if the NCSoft servers are saturated?

I'm glad that they got rid of base salvage. Whenever I used to see "salvage found" in combat I'd then be a little disappointed to remember that it meant base salvage not invention salvage.

It is annoying that the salvage racks hold so little stuff though. I know the dev's said that they intend to up the limit but I hope they'll do it sooner rather than later. 30 pieces just ain't enough.

I can understand how it might be annoying to be forced to buy salvage to craft stuff when you used to have all the base salvage you ever needed. Hopefully, you'll be able to build up a suitable supply of invention salvage before too long.

I think there's a bit of confusion about Kinetic Crash here. To clarify, slotting 4 items of KC in a single power gets you magnitude 3 knockback protection as a set bonus.

The global IOs all give magnitude 4 protection. (And can be slotted on their own.)

Ranged damage toons like my blaster do just fine with mag 3 or 4 protection. Toons that get into melee a lot will need more because the KBs can stack. Just keep adding more IOs until you get it under control.

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The other irony is that stone tankers are very reluctant to use their signature power! Not only does Granite Armour slow you to a crawl, it also has enormous recharge and damage penalties. Once you've switched it on, you may as well go and make a cup of tea until the damage toons have cleaned up 'cos you're not going to contribute much else.

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I've slotted mine for base movement speed and recharge speed. Plus, with hasten you don't have to worry about slow attack power. And a Stoner or any Tanker for that matter not attacking would make their inherent (Gauntlet) useless.

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I was (kind of) joking. You're right that the most important thing for the tank to do is hold aggro. Mud Pots does this very nicely so you can hold aggro without clicking! (Of course, you'll want to use Taunt and attacks to pick up more.)

Even with recharge and damage bonuses, the DPS is still pretty poor compared to the same stone tank when it's not in Granite Armour. It's truly pitiful in comparison to a damage toon.

Still, you've nothing better to do in Granite form so you may as well hit things!

That sounds like a good compromise between not bugging old players and ensuring that new players see stuff that the devs think is important.

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You can pick any travel power you like, but when you turn on Granite Armor, you won't be able to jump (or fly, or run faster than a snail).

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This enables the extreme sport of "Granite Bombing". This requires a blaster with group fly, a stone tank and a hazard zone. The blaster flies the tank over a juicy spawn at which point the tank turns Granite Armour on.

The goal is to drop the tank right into the middle of the spawn where it can hold the most aggro. You get bonus points for dropping it on the bosses head.

Admittedly, it's easier for the tank to teleport but that just lacks style.

Will you let us know how it goes?

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And its a right pain too. I recently got my autodoc and it cost me 70k for the invention salvage and a further 50k prestige to build it as a personal item.

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Of these, 70k for salvage isn't a lot for a one off purchase. It's much harder to raise the 50k prestige. Isn't the prestige amount the same as before I13?

The other thing that gets mentioned is invention salvage for empowerment stations. Nearly all the empowerments can be made from high level common salvage which is so cheap it's almost free.

I'm running a stone tank at the moment. I've discovered two ironies.

First of all, stone tanks are famed for being slow but you often see them moving very fast indeed. This is because both of the bread and butter powers (Granite Armour and Rooted) have huge movement speed penalties. The obvious thing to do is slot heavily for base movement speed so when these powers are off, your average stone tank tends to be very frisky!

The other irony is that stone tankers are very reluctant to use their signature power! Not only does Granite Armour slow you to a crawl, it also has enormous recharge and damage penalties. Once you've switched it on, you may as well go and make a cup of tea until the damage toons have cleaned up 'cos you're not going to contribute much else.

On the other hand, it's an ideal AT for people who like to chat in the middle of epic battles. There can't me many ATs that let you do your team job without having to press any keys.

Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday to you,
Happy birthday dear Forsaken_Empire,
Happy birthday to you.

Fortunately, you can't hear me singing!

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The only things you lose are inf from drops and badge contributions. You still level up at the normal rate.

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Sorry to be picky but without mission bonuses you don't level at the normal rate... but that is being very picky.

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True. Does anyone happen to know how significant these bonuses are for levelling?

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I think the problem is more one of perception. If it is perceived that these missions are the 'worst choice' for players then there are those who won't play them, no matter what the benefits of story.

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Good point. I have to say that the no drops thing makes me a bit sad.

Talking of perceptions, I was chatting to Grouchybeast and she suggested that the "anti-farming" limitations might improve the reputation of the MA by ensuring that the first raft of missions are stories not farms. Once the CoH culture has institutionalised this, it might be safe to slacken the restrictions.

The whole issue will be moot if arcs get moved to the Dev's Choice or Hall of Fame quite quickly. In that case, most people who play MA arcs will pick them from there and get perfectly normal drops.

Maybe we need to think of arcs that have been published but not moved to the Hall of Fame as "on probation".

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I'm just hoping what I want to do will be possible! From what we know of it so far, I think it should be. Probably going to need to use two arcs though.. Part 1 & Part 2!

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It hope there's some mechanism that lets you chain arcs together so that when you finish playing one you can go straight into the part of the multi-arc story without having to search for it.

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Makes no sense to me to be honest. If the reward for doing these missions is so much less than even street hunting, what's the point? Unless you have a plethora of high level toons and don't need to level or gain inf, I can see no point in even looking at these missions.

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The only things you lose are inf from drops and badge contributions. You still level up at the normal rate.

You gain new stories. If you don't particularly care about the stories then MA won't help you. Just carry on with farming or TFs or whatever you enjoy most.

Some people love reading the stories and get very bored by doing the same, familiar missions again and again. MA is for them really. (... and the people who want to write the stories!)

I'm impressed by the publishing scheme. It's quite cunning really. It means that you can write as many good arcs as you like but only 3 bad ones per account. You can replace the bad ones by un-publishing them though and try again.

The only fly in this particular ointment is how to fix a bug in a successful arc? Imagine you've written an arc and it's really popular. Lots of people have given it the thumbs up. Now someone notices a typo or something. You could just un-publish, fix the typo and re-publish but that will lose all the thumbs up. Maybe you'll just have to ask a GM to fix it for you.

It's possible that some or all of the crashes are down to another part of your system. The sound card and mother board are the most likely culprits. You might want to rule these out before buying a new card.

Make sure that all your drivers are up to date, not just the graphics drivers.

Try playing with sound disabled for a while. If the crashes go away or become less frequent then you know that the sound card or driver is causing problems.

Can you run with a completely different graphics card? An old card will do. If it still keeps crashing then this suggests that buying a new graphics card won't help you.

I'm running an ATI HD4850 on Vista 64. CoH tends to crash about once every 2 or 3 hours although the crashes tend to come in runs.

I know that this hotfix is mainly aimed at NV users but I thought I'd give it a go anyway. I'm pretty sure that it crashes less often now. Maybe once every 8 hours instead.

QR

I spend most of my time levelling toons to 50 with my regular duo partner. We pick a pair of ATs that we think will make a good combination and then do lots of missions. We both enjoy tuning the builds to make the duo as powerful as possible.

When I'm not doing mishes, I work the market to pay for the shinies. I mostly craft and sell high turnover set items at level 50. I avoid items with a poor supply 'cos I don't want to force prices up.

I do TFs occasionally but not often. I find them a little dull as a full team can steam roller more or less anything without tactical thought. The total carnage is a laugh though!

I'm trying to do your test. Unfortunately I get the following error when clicking the "On to the test" button:

URL: http://www-cgi.york.ac.uk/~psyc8/cgi-bin/wr.pl

malformed header from script. Bad header=flock() on unopened filehandle: /~psyc8/cgi-bin/wr.pl

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When is Windows 7 scheduled for release?
Really wanna get rid of Vista O.o

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AFAIK there isn't an official release date yet. The industry gossip is that the release will happen later this year.

My personal guess is that they'll release the business editions in Oct/Nov and the other editions in Nov/Dec. Microsoft will be _very_ keen to release in time for next Xmas.

If it slips then it probably won't be available until early next year. I can't see it being any later than May 2010.

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I've not felt like I've got anything like the best out of it.

That's clearly partly a lot to do with the my own playstyle, as well as the style of those I pact with...

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As other's have said, the levelling pact works like a charm if you play with your pact buddy at least 90% of the time. It also works well if you either play with your pact buddy or solo. Neither of these situations fit your play style so perhaps pacts aren't for you.

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I actually think it can be vastly improved by doing 2 things: Adding a "Pause" Button - so if one player isn't playing the other can pause the pact - or even choose the level of XP share when not on at the same time.

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My first thought was that this is crazy. After all, the point of a pact is to keep two toons in sync. On second thoughts though, what if we changed the pact so that the toons just have to remain within a certain number of levels of each other. (Say 5)

The game could then let the player decide to split their XP normally, keep all their XP or send all their XP to their pact buddies. The setting would be overridden automatically if one pact member gets too far ahead.

This would solve the PUG levelling problem. You could join the team, change the pact setting to "keep all XP" and play with the team. When the team splits up you'll be 3 or 4 levels ahead of your pact mate. At this point, you change your setting to "give all XP to the pact" and go and solo for a while.

The system could also direct all pact XP to the lowest level member whenever both pact members are in the same team. The same thing would happen if the active player gets too far ahead.

This would give you the best of both worlds.

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Also enable Pacts to be formed at higher level.

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As others have said, this will probably happen. It should make it easier for you to abandon one toon and level up another to take it's place in the pact.

The devs have also said that they intend to expand pacts to more people.

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Now think about this thread everytime you've flown into Atlas Park and not saved someone once your past level 10. The amount of people I've flown past and gone meh... not gonna give me xp's!

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I still feel bad about this. Every now and then I just go on a rampage and vape a couple of dozen grey villains. That makes me feel better.

They always come back though. That makes me depressed.

Then I notice that the same civilian has been captured by the Thorns again. That makes me angry. I mean, who the bleep names their child "Victim". It's just asking for trouble.