Atonement_EU

Hey all! People are always complaining about the huge number of farm teams floating around and the vast amount of players seemingly only wanting to powerlevel yet no-one's done anything about it! So here's my attempt to ease the tension between the farmers and the regular players: ANFTC!

What is ANFTC?

ANFTC stands for, surprise surprise, Atonement's Non-Farm Team Channel.

What is ANFTC's purpose?

Members of ANFTC can discuss all matters relating to non-farm teams. Found a great Architect Mission with a unique story buried amongst the scores of farms? Tell the members of ANFTC! Setting up a regular team and you need members, be it for non-farm Architect Missions or canon missions? Tell the members of ANFTC! Starting up a Task/Strike Force? Tell the members of ANFTC!

Atonement, you callipygian He-God, this is the best thing I've ever heard of! How can I join?

Easy peasy! It's a public channel so just right click your chat bar and select "Channel Search". Now type in ANFTC and join!

All you've got to do now is right click your chat bar again and click 'Add Tab' and stick the ANFTC channel in your new tab and voila! You can talk to other like-minded players wishing to play the game as it was meant to be played!

What are the rules?

There aren't any really. Just try not to upset other members of the channel and please refrain from posting material of a 'mature' nature until after 9PM GMT.

How can I promote this?

If you like this idea please post in this thread to keep the thread alive and please tell all your friends about ANFTC.

Great idea Atonement; you're clearly some sort of celestial super-human. But is there anything else we should know?

Sure! An easy way to send messages to ANFTC (i.e. without having to click the chat bar and manually change to the channel every time you wish to post) is through implementation of the following bind:

/bind ` beginchat /send AFNFTC

(note there is a space after ANFTC)

Now whenever you press ` your next message will be sent to ANFTC yet all other messages will still be sent to your regular channel. So, for instance, if I have team chat as my current chat output pressing ` will not change my active channel from team chat.

Nifty huh? You can also choose another button if ` is taken by replacing ` in the bind.

Yes, forcing people together worked wonders for me! I'm so glad I had the chance to meet Larry Large Head, i.e. the guy that stole 344m infamy from me. This would have been easily avoided had something similar to the proposed account-wide inf transfer been in place.

[ QUOTE ]
It's been suggested many times and declined many times. The whole idea behind infamy and influence is it represents your 'standing' or how much influence you have with the city. I doubt they'll allow the sending of inf via email, it would be a gold sellers wet dream.

[/ QUOTE ]

With all due respect neither objection stands. If it were genuinely the case that infamy/influence cannot be sent via emails due to lore then what is the special circumstance that makes trading at all acceptable, be it between characters or for items?

Essentially, if we are to follow the lore, then when I trade 100 million infamy to someone I stand next to them and shout loudly "THIS GUY IS SPIFFIN' BRILLIANT!" and then for some utterly arbitrary reason I become less brilliant in everyone else's eyes and the other guy becomes that exact (albeit entirely conceptual and immaterial) amount more respected. Yet this makes literally no sense. Take the following example: I trade all of my infamy to someone. That means I lose all credibility with everyone in the world. Yet my act of lauding the person to whom I 'gave' all my infamy is still respected? So everyone looks down upon me as the lowest of the low yet they still respect my recommended villains?

Furthermore, when I go to a shop and buy an item where does my infamy go? Do I become less feared because I've purchased an item from the black market? And how do I put items up for sale? It's an analytical impossibility to say I want "x real-terms amount of infamy (an immaterial thing) in return for this item". So the devs really can't claim that lore is the reason they won't allow the proposed email changes. To make this statement they'd have to imply that the lore as it stands, with all the paradoxes and plain ludicrousness as I've shown, is currently worthy of respect which it clearly isn't (at least not in this area).

Lastly, on the matter of gold sellers, it would make next to no difference at all. WoW, LotRO, Everquest 2, Matrix Online ... I could go on, all have this email system in place and all have totally functioning economies. Know why? Because it basically changes nothing as far as the gold-seller is concerned. It just means that instead of meeting someone in person they send them the money by email. Which is easier for the devs to track. There's a list of all ingoing and outgoing emails for sure, I'm not sure if there's some sort of manifest of every single trade carried out by a player but I doubt it.

So really neither of those objections are tenable.

[ QUOTE ]
I sent him some abuse.

[/ QUOTE ]

Thank you. He's ignored me. Although please don't get yourself banned or disciplined over my foolishness.

Recently on Union server I needed to transfer 344 million infamy from one of my characters to another. Now as I'm sure you all know this requires a third part to basically be the 'mule': the person that stands still in a certain location and takes the currency off one of your characters and gives it to the other. Usually this system is (if a little annoying) at least unproblematic. One can usually ask their friends or those in channels/Supergroups they're a part of.

However, when there's nobody to ask but a stranger complications can arise. Now normally (since Union is a pretty brilliant community) strangers will help for free, or tiny amounts of infamy, with complete honesty. Yesterday however I picked the wrong stranger (@blazo just so you don't make the same mistake: mods, if that's 'naming and shaming' feel free to edit it out) and found myself 344 million down.

Now this could all have been avoided if the in-game email system had some sort of rudimentary trade functionality (much like Lord of the Rings Online) through which I could simply send all of my infamy from character to character. If the developers feel this wrecks the lore then perhaps we could have some sort of account-wide storage centre like Guild Wars?

Thanks

Ben

Mystie and I are sitting around chatting at the moment. I'll try and hit you guys up on your globals!

I like that plan Prime. We'll move in on Faultline next week and get that hilarious mission with the three archvillains. We'll also hit the secret Cryptic Lounge whilst we're there and get the Egg Hunter badge ... Yeah I'm a badge [insert impolite name for a lady of the night that would otherwise be censored by the forum] >.<

Also, those of you that couldn't make it last night please provide reasons. If you've done so already (as both Stovokor and Miss Appear have) that's fine. I'd love it if we could get a full team next week. Great teaming to those of you that showed!

UnionHeroUK-ML-1333111-ML-

Witty thought you guys clearly are, SingStar has a fair point. If someone with moderator privileges wishes to move this thread then by all means do so.

The team was brilliant guys, this Thursday at 7:00 PM GMT. Be there or be square.

This tell went out to all of you today at roughly 17:40 GMT:

Greetings! @Atonement here on his brand new Fire/Rad. We'll be meeting by Ms. Liberty in Atlas Part at 7:00 GMT tonight for our first FRAD superteam!

So see ya then!

PS: You'll probably notice we've got a few spaces (I make it two) free. So we'll be letting friends and whatnot come along to fill those spaces.

Yes tonight is good. I'll email all of your toons in game with instructions on where to meet and whatnot!

Awesome, I'll start sending you guys tells to see who's ready for what date.

Okay, great, proposed time:

7-10PM GMT Thursday!

Any objections?

Sweet, since everyone wants to hear a sample time I'll suggest something (feel free to knock it out the park because I'm just making a shot in the dark). How does 7-10 PM on a Monday sound? If the devs are adding a 3+ way levelling pact this update then the whole playtimes issue is null. But is there anyone that couldn't make 7-10 PM GMT Mondays?

Thank you! If you'd like to join one on Union here's your chance! ;D

Great, good to hear from you. I'm fairly easy on playtimes for anything after 7PM GMT on all days. I can do earlier on most days, but not Tuesday.

What is a FRAD team?

This is a team consisting of 8 Fire/Radiation Controllers. To quote ParagonWiki:

[ QUOTE ]
Frad - a shortened name for a Fire/radiation controller. Usually, a Frad superteam consists of 8 of these trollers, built so they can stack 8 AMs, leaderships, and basically plow through the enemy groups, leveling fast. If they all 8 did Choking Cloud, Cinders, and Char, then they could hold an Archvillain while the Purple Triangles are up!

[/ QUOTE ]

It sounds like insane amounts of fun to me! So I thought I'd offer the fine people of this board the opportunity to help create one!

What are the restrictions?

Language: English only

Playtimes: This is up to you guys, whatever is most comfortable for all, we can discuss it but we're going to be sticking to a GMT schedule.

Team Objective: To have fun! We're NOT going to farm. Ever. I'm making that clear now. We can do story arcs, missions, Task Forces, trials, whatever! (I'd quite like to see the hilarious carnage of a FRAD STF)

Server: Union preferred but it's a 'whatever is easiest for everyone' thing again!

Method of communication: Personally I'd like to keep it in game, but I appreciate that not many people type as fast as I do so if you'd like to hit Ventrilo or Skype then that works for me too.

Gee Atonement, this sounds super swell, how do I sign up?

Here! Register your interest here and then /t me in game at @Atonement for a little chat so that I can see what you're like before accepting you.

What's the policy on teaming outside the SuperTeam?

It's not allowed until everyone in the SuperTeam has hit 45. At that point go nuts! If there's something you desperately need to use your FRAD for then you may, but be prepared to exemplar until we've caught up to you!

Maybe, I haven't really checked - but the chat definitely is funky. I'm getting and sending many many corrupted tells.

There's an even better solution - for me at least. The Hotfix flying around the forum solved the entire issue.

Nope sorry for the false hope. It just crashed.

Seem to have found a solution. The new 180.84 driver at:

http://download.nvidia.com/downloads...glish_beta.exe

Let me play for two hours so far without a single crash.

Any help at all is appreciated.

So here's the issue. We all know Nvidia's latest batch of drivers just don't work with CoH. I used to be able to resolve this issue by using the 16x.xx batch but it seems that is no longer possible.

Could anyone else with a 9800GTX link me a driver that won't cause my game to crash continuously due to driver failures?

Thanks in advance!

No, this isn't happening, but thank you for the suggestions. My card is nearly always at a very safe 70-80 degrees. Also, I was getting a very similar problem with City of Villains on my old system back when I had completely different everything; router, ISP, machine, so a hardware fault is very unlikely.

This is certainly a real pickle of an issue, it's a true conundrum.

Hm, this gets more confusing by the post! I presumed you lived abroad in mainland Europe, as it would be closer to the server. Since this is not the case (and since your internet must be miles from the nearest exchange) I can think of absolutely no reason for our performance differences!

I'm flummoxed.

Ha, yep I agree. Abandoning reason does seem fairly tempting at this point.

I have two hard drives. Only one is currently in use and that is a '7200RPM 750GB NTFS Drive'. I defragged fairly recently; in the last 3 months, many many months after I installed CoX.

I'm glad to hear you have no issues with the game as it gives me hope. May I ask where abouts you're situated?