Bindweed

It certainly does appear, as Diggis says, that he was using TP Foe to drop villains down in front of Drones. The stupid point he's making is that this sort of action is "as the developers designed it" and is therefore an appropriate course of action. He seems genuinely surprised that he should become so reviled after breaking social conventions and defending his actions with the excuse that he's not breaking any laws.

Shouldn't an academic whose specialty is social gaming be a tad less dumb? Maybe he's never seen a movie where a villain escapes prison because the judge has thrown the case out of court "on a technicality" and has never given thought about the public's horrified reaction to that kind of injustice.

Apart from his academic thesis, intellectual integrity, and even his common sense all being seemingly borked, how on God's Green Earth do you get funding to sit around and play CoH every day? I want that job. Just not the lobotomy that apparently goes with it.

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... PS - make sure the current forum name is the one you want to keep as Avatea said it won't be changeable in the future...

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I'm changing mine, then. I'm no longer all that Happy...

You said "Bay"..! I'm telling!

Miss! Miss! Alpha's swearing! He said "Bay"

Will this mean that anyone (like me) who HATES WITH UNENDING PASSION the hideous and eye-meltingly big armour auras (yes, I'm looking at YOU, Invulnerabiility..) will have the tools to turn the stupid big shiny gloop down to (near) invisible? Please? Please? Pleeeeeze?

On another matter touched upon here...

Please leave Fire/Kins ALONE!!! I've had mine for almost 3 years, still only 38, never farmed at all, and would like to enjoy the AT that I made to PLAY. If the mentality here is to Burtonize (see how I tap into the neu-jargon to refer to the old-jargon of "re-imagine" ) perfectly good AT sets simply because a minority have employed a tactic that does no harm to yet somehow drives an even smaller minority into getting their knickers in a knot, then... well... I'll just have to whinge and moan and stamp my foot and hold my breath 'till I'm blue.

So LEAVE 'EM ALONE! Most of us play 'em and like 'em as they are!

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Still can't beat Pez.. Havn't seen those in years

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The last places I saw them was Tesco & Asda. You couldn't buy refills, but you could get Looney Tunes character dispensers. I got Daffy Duck and Yosemite Sam with a nice selection of teeth-rotting goodness in lemon and cherry flavours.

But Pez does still exist - you can visit The World of Pez, where you can find Batman and Star Wars dispensers. According to the Pez site, the GB suppliers are these guys.

There. Don't say I never do nuttin' for ya!

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I miss proper sized penny caramels not those stupid little ones you get these days

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Dam' right!
Not to mention proper sherbet fountains and almost everything listed here!

But I think this just means I miss being a kid

How odd. But from what I've heard in the past about possible occasional problems with Vista and NVidia, if that's the worst that happens I'll be happy!

Thanks again, folks! Karma is in the mail

Thanks everyone!

I love the way people here are so free with their help! If I had a virtual cake I'd give you all a virtual slice

My old pooter has finally slammed the door and walked out on me in a huff, and next week I move in the new one. I'm currently arguing with a Radeon X1550 card in a 3ghz machine running XP. It's been fine until recently, when the CoH graphics seemed to get too hot to handle... The new machine is running Vista 64 Home Premium with (and I quote) NVidia 9400GT 1GB PCI Express DDR2 graphics card.

My question is: how would you go about porting your CoH game from one to the other? Is it as simple as dragging and dropping the folder onto a DVD, then dragging and dropping them back into the new directory on the new machine after installing from the ancient old disk?

Please bear in mind that I just search computers in abandoned warehouses whilst looking for Crey secrets... IT Skills were not included in the M.A.G.I. training and acclimatisation courses...

Indeed he is. And it's interesting, in light of what's been and is being said here this week.

Given the tsunami of passions crashing upon the forums right now, it seems this Jack Emmert bit from just over a year ago has a curious hindsight/foresight groove. Note the bits about rehashing old stuff, revamping existing zones, retention of regular players, and p***ing off the PVPers...



The house that Jack built...

Whether through preference or circumstance, I find that the much greater part of my time in game is spent soloing. So TFs & SFs are largely things of mystery to me. New ones don't exactly sparkle for the primarily solo player. What with MA containing haystacks full of pointless muck and very, very few needles of style & wit, I'd be horrified if the Devs were counting on players to create mission content while they just worked on TFs that solo/pick-up-and-play players can't easily access. What with the anniversary event being a complete washout for part of the playerbase thanks to the servers being incapable of handling player traffic in Atlas that I'm sure was less dense than at launch when my old and inferior PC managed quite happily, I'd say this has been a very disappointing few days.

I'm not canceling or crying "Doom", but I certainly think some employment of common sense, due care and attention, forethought and competent management would have solved, or at least assuaged, most if not all the problems - which in some instances may have been fostered within the playerbase but not without seeding and teasing by Devs and Mods.

CoH has done really well to survive with a steady playerbase for 5 years. I don't know what percentage of their active playerbase is made up of veterans at any one time, but surely there's a tremendous risk involved in any reliance on a flighty market providing passing-trade subscriptions to keep making up the monthly numbers, especially for an ageing game with very tempting competition launching which, in some cases, already has name recognition and heavyweight pop-cultural clout.

I keep making dumb analogies in these posts, so here's another one: Players left in droves after ED, and as far as I know CoH may have replaced them. But they didn't have the same fight on their hands back then. And it was a leaner, fitter, younger and hungrier game. Like Ali toward the end of his career, CoH is old and showing signs of flab - which means it'll have to train harder and harder to get back that muscle-tone and handspeed, or some ripped young punk is going to come in and embarrass it with a career-ending hook we all see coming. My worry, from what Positron appears to be saying and has said yesterday, is that the Dev's don't see it, and if they do, they may have waaay too much misplaced confidence in their own jaw...

Very disappointing. I logged in with different alts at different times of the day, but was lagged out of Atlas each and every time. With other alts, in none of the other zones blueside did I see any GMs, and redside I saw no sign of the anniversary events at all. Didn't even get a badge for trying to take part.

I'm sure those that could get past it had a decent enough time, but otherwise once again another well-intentioned event is ruined by lag.

I'd be curious to know what has to happen before the server indicator moves out of the green "light load" mode...

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... apart from bragging rights, the badges themselves have no significance.

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I dunno... I have an Ice Tanker, an Ice Controller and an Ice Blaster, and none of them have the Frozen Fury badge, which would look dead good on 'em in-game.

Not that it matters, since the lag is once again so hideous there's no way I can get them on one, let alone 3, characters

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here what's with the Mondeo bashing? Top Gear car of the year I will have you know.

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Apologies! I have nothing against Mondeos, per se, but I was and always will be a Cortina man. I disliked the Sierra because it replaced the Cortina. I have no real opinion on the Mondeo. It did replace the vile Sierra, but it's not the Cortina

I despise Clarkson, though.

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They have the MA tool now, so no longer do they have any excuses for content light issues.

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Maybe theirs is as buggy as ours... And perhaps what we're getting for i15 is all they could fit in the 100k memory capacity

I've tried building a playable, interesting, novel arc and it takes aaaaages. I've still not managed to publish one. I doubt I ever will. I still have an uneducated suspicion that creating the player (reasonably) friendly front-end is possibly an offshoot of other projects, quite possibly to make mission-creation less of a chore for Devs; although I've known programmers who can type away in some arcane computer language more happily than many of us can make it through Word, so perhaps the phrase "script missions manually" might actually be less horrifying than it reads?. Given it's bugs and breakages and other grumbles that I keep hearing about, could it be that there's something in the idea that the MA is somewhat less of a colossus than first seems, and has been construed as something so fabulous because it's quite unique amongst MMOs? I still think it's a great tool, and one that other games' players should envy (and possibly do). I'm just not convinced that it's such that we can take it as a sign that the old game engine isn't going to be rebuilt/replaced. On the contrary, it may even herald a replacement.

It's perhaps too early to speculate, though. And until Positron opens his forbidden closet of mystery tonight, though, it's all speculation. Once he does, however, it will be too late to speculate. But at least then we can begin speculating on the impact his revelation may have. Unless Positron's going to be speculating too. But I don't want to speculate about that.

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Of course my hopeful thoughts then turn to the idea of developing a new game engine, strip out the old one, it's good but there's too much stuff bolted on to it however if this had been the case, why release the mission architect if they're going to gut the game and build from the ground up...so that's a no...

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I know it's not quiet the same, but back in the day, when Core were revamping the whole Tomb Raider engine, they released a big ol' mission editor with TR3, the last to be released using that engine. Could it be that there's a similar logic at work behind the MA? I know that that's the parallel I drew in my own little mind when I heard that the MA was coming. Not being any more technologically apt than the gerbils that run around on the wheels that make this game work, I can't know without asking; is it possible that for all its fanfare the MA is a resprayed, truncated model of a Dev tool that may actually have taken less resource to produce than we might otherwise imagine (because it looks big) because many of the ingredients were already available? Could it also be the basis of a tool for some future player-hosted version of thegame that will become available to players when they cease supporting CoH and turn instead to CoH2?

Don't be too quick to mock, I have no idea of the tech here, but to me the notion doesn't seem entirely unfeasible.

Good grief, where did the underlying optimism come from? Who's stolen my Grumpy?

OK, here's a little shiny optimism! Could the following be possible?

NCSoft has been thinking for over a year about the new issues they'd like to schedule, and they've done their best to spread out as much of the available content as possible, so that the players get at least something new every few months.

The reason that the content of all these last few Issues is very thin compared to earlier Issues can't be that they haven't got the resources or an eye on the long-term. The recent restructurings, relocations and hiring, together with the slightly less recent acquisition of the CoX franchise from Cryptic, all suggest a commitment to the game for the future that includes long-term development and innovation.

So maybe, very possibly, there's an excellent reason for the paucity of glittering shiny in these recent Issues: the Devs may have had something better to do: You wouldn't pay £500 for the necessary welding to get your old Astra through it's next MoT, for example, if you knew you were taking delivery of a new Bentley before then...

Consequently I'm expecting Positron to include something big in his announcement. He may not mention CoH2 specifically, but I guess that's the root reason for this comparatively underwhelming update release, and its announcement would almost certainly spray mud on the sparkly bodywork of CO's new Mondeo...

(OK, OK... enough of the car analogies... I'll never do it again...)

I did try logging in, but everything froze solid. Not the best time to have the uber-lag.

I was hoping to pick up something like the Winter Event badge you get for knocking over a Winter Lord - can you get those badges, or just more of those puzzling Merit things?

I think it speaks volumes that I had to scrabble around amidst threads that are several places down the list before I found the details of I15 linked to here.

There's NOTHING official either announcing or linking to an announcement anywhere on the EU forums. Either the company just doesn't care enough or they can't remember where all the non-dollar subs are coming from.

So... who's remaking their favourite CoX toons on CO later?

Without any real engagement of Brain, I've just bought a new PC that comes with Vista Home Premium 64 and the nVidia GeForce 9400 GT GPU 1GB card. Now I know that some people have had problems running CoX with some nVidia cards, and I know that some people have had problems running CoX with Vista. I've trawled the forum for past postings on all this but... well, you know what the forum software's like for running searches...

Anyway, I'd like to tap the expertise of the forum's mightiest brains and try to anticipate the kind of issues I might expect with this combination of possibly deadly technology, and hopefully receive some advice on how to carry on playing CoX in spite of nVidia and Microsoft

Or should I start making arrangements to cancel my subs now and go back to pinching my son's DS?

These slipped under my radar, and then when I found the post I forgot to make time to respond - so apologies for that but now I just have to say THANKS!! I like 'em! Libby looks good without the belt and shoulder armour - which I bet would be awkward to replicate in Daz. I know that the last few times I doodled her I dropped the belt and shoulder pads because they cluttered things up.

And she's been working out, obviously After all that Up-N-Away junk food, she probably had too

Thanks Birdy!

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Dude... are subs are about even, given that the dollar subscription is a more in pure numbers terms ($15 afaik)

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Indeed. I had my head on backwards. The sad truth is that a UK sub is now worth LESS than a US sub (about $13.50). Now I'm bracing myself for an increase in UK subs if the pound doesn't recover...

It's been one of those days... Why can't days just be happy places filled with sunshine and bunnies? Instead they seem to be relentless abattoirs of the soul...




...still want my shiny box, though...

I, too, want a box with a nice new disk and goodies etc. etc. Later on this year, if I have to choose between a shiny new box full of CO or DCUO and a multi-gig, soul-crushingly unending download full of CoH...

These guys can't keep repeating the line that we in the EU are considered equally as important as their North American subscribers when they repeatedly pull this kind of malarkey.

Especially these days, when our subs buy many more of those crumpled old US dollars than they ever have...

I've had some loopy crazy bizarro shenanigans with MA too. I too hope that this afternoon will stabilize the whole shebang, and that future issues can be released to Live after transferring from Test without the assistance of Mr. Mxyzptlk...

It's the first bank holiday of the Easter weekend, and the first day off work/school for the gaming proletariat - does Sod's Law mean nothing anymore?