Bull Throttle

Why would that be relevant?

If for example, I want to play a blue-side Brute, I'll side with the resistance, because Tyrant is a CoH villain.

Am I missing something obvious here?

Nice theory, but it's a shame that my actual decision will be based on:

"Do I want to end up in Paragon or the Rogue isles?"

You've obviously never played on the EU servers then.

I thought 'Britain' was the name of the bigger island and 'Great Britain' the name of the collection of countries including Northen Ireland and all those piddly bits off the coast of Scotland...having just quickly looked at wiki, it seems there's no such thing as 'Britain', just 'Great Britain' - which has left me utterly confused and feeling stupid.

NCSoft Europe doesn't own any of my data - I do; I just allow them to use it. Give me a webform form with a tick box and I'll allow them to share it with NCSoft NA.

I really don't see the issue here.

I bought the booster packs without any NA links or URL-malarky.

It asks which account to apply the code to, I pick my NA one; they just work.


IP-redirects are the devil's work; redirects in general break all kinds of web accessibility/usability guidelines and shouldn't be used, ever.

My first half-dozen characters were Mutant for this reason; I forced myself to pick another origin - magic - and then the next few characters were magic; currently I'm in a 'tech' phase; all so I don't have to remember several different types when I switch characters.

The shop interface is terrible if you have a terrible memory like me and always has been, but at least they sell ALL the enhancements now.

I don't know about Euros, but I'm fairly sure I paid slightly more in Dollars last time than I was doing in Pounds on my EU account - but it fluctuates.

It occurs to me that on the French and German servers the number of players contributing to the upkeep on those servers is way below average, forcing the EU subscription per server ratio below average.

So you could make the argument that the NA servers are subsidising the EU ones.

It's a mystery to me too, although not having the opportunity to get the preorder stuff would make the collector in me itch.

That said, I never buy MP3s..I buy CDs and rip them; sometimes you want something on the shelf I suppose (or in the car in my case).

Very true and I've made good use of the /hide myself.

But unless you can somehow state that players on server x behave differently to players on server y, it can still serve as a very rough comparison; as can looking to see how many people are under the Atlas statue during prime time. Neither are scientifc but 'enough population' is pretty subjective anyway.

Personally I use the is it possible to join a PuG?* method; which is why I now play on Virtue rather than Union.
(*within the time I have available without having to form my own)

I'm not happy to see it coming back either, a toggle to auto-accept the buff would be great - I didn't know they killed ithe MF dialog to stop an exploit, I thought they killed it because it was so damned annoying.

This obviously didn't translate well; 'on life-support' means 'almost dead'; I was talking about the population levels - and you comparing prime-time EU population numbers with the non-prime-time NA numbers that you see doesn't really change the fact that the EU population is very low. If I log into a EU server in the middle of the night or early afternoon time over here I'll only see a handful of people on the entire server too - even on the most populated one.

There are people on the EU servers who see the population as 'fine' and are quite happy too. I'm reasonably confident that they, like you, are in the minority.

Insult away - it's perfectly understandable reaction and with the benefit of hindsight I agree it seems like a mad thing to do.

The explanation is pretty simple really. CoH was my first MMO and I didn't do much in the way of research. I'd never bought a game online back then - it was not common practice and I didn't even know it was available - the options I saw were importing a copy from the US (and paying import duty, yay) or waiting for it it appear at my local shop.

Back in 2005 I had dreadful internet access and my only experience of playing games across the atlantic was FPS games - the latency was horrible trying to play on US servers, whereas playing on EU servers was fine - why the heck would I buy the NA version in those circumstances?

I, along with a fair few other people at the time, did not expect to be excluded from the NA servers or forums and we were surprised to find ourselves in a walled-off EU ghetto. I was not in the EU beta so the first time I saw the server list was Feb 2005 when I bought my account; I found the forum a couple of days later. Those 16 english-server character slots seemed like plenty at first (what's an alt?), the population was great, everything was happy and shiny apart from the odd period of massive lag during the first few weeks. I wasn't expecting to play the game for years.

It's very easy to throw the 'Gosh you were stupid buying the EU version rather the the NA version' at me but if the EU version was so obviously a bad idea at the time, how did NCSoft manage to convince any NA players to transfer at all? The fact is for the first few years the EU game was great, most people were happy; our major complaints were 'not being able to post on the NA forums' and grumbling about how few character slots we had by comparison.

That was a long time ago.

This isn't about the forums, it's about the game servers.

The EU game servers are on life-support (if not actually undead) and a lot of EU players would be very happy to see them somehow rolled into the NA server farm.

Some EU players - myself included - have all but given up waiting for NCSoft to do anything other than wait for them to die and have simply helped that along by moving to the NA servers with a new account, leaving characters, vet rewards and paid-for booster codes behind.

Which is slightly annoying, given we're paying for the same game.

The most tragic thing for me is I waited the best part of a year for the EU version of CoH to arrive, thinking we'd have less lag and better service - I was wrong on both counts.

You may, if I can remind you that all the players on those small population US servers could easily move to one with more than a handful of people during peak time, without paying for another sub.

The players on the low population US servers are doing it through choice.

Then let me convert my EU account into a NA account, with all my retail codes and veteran time intact; stick all my characters in limbo and give me a transfer token for each one.

or

Let me transfer characters between my EU & NA accounts under the same Master Account - NA players transferred to the EU servers in the past, so this must be technically possible, surely?

or

Give everyone with a EU account a free NA account on the same NCSoft Master Account and make Vet rewards apply to Master Accounts - heck give everyone with an NA account a free EU one too.

or

Something else, anything. Just please stop ignoring the problem until all the EU players have gone.

I've enjoyed your posts in this thread and I see where you're coming from, but you're fighting a battle you can't win - you simply cannot use the word 'literally' to enforce an exaggeration (and be taken seriously).

If Spoony had said "Literally no-one saw this movie because it sucks!" then he'd have been ...inaccurate; without the 'literally' it's an exaggeration - there's an implied 'figuratively' in there, which the word 'literally' contradicts.

Even if the video had been 6 seconds of black, it would still exist.

It's a teaser; just because it didn't tease you doesn't really change that.

Yeah, he should roll his own.

You may be right there.

I'm not pre-ordering GR on either side; I want to see what it does for the EU population before I jump.

gasp...I've been outed!

- now I'll never be able to argue with myself on the boards!

Seriously though, having sent a couple of US trials to people and played with them, the trial restrictions are way over the top - unless they stand near other players spamming local, how are they supposed to get a team if they don't know anyone already?

Don't worry Carni, My Lovely Horse buys a lot of brownie points, you're still in credit...just.

I wouldn't have put it in quite those terms, but I share the sentiment.

With all respect Black Pebble, many of us in the EU had it up to here with vague promises of Jam Tomorrow; Personally all I want now is a way to move my EU vet rewards to my new NA account.