DeathAlchemist

There has been a slight change in the prizes awarded for this contest. In addition to the previously mentioned prizes, we will be giving away 3 crafted enhancements. One level 20 Miracle +Recovery, One level 30 Numina's +Regen/Recovery, and one level 50 Gravitational Anchor: Chance for hold. First place winner gets to choose one of the three, Second place chooses one of the remaining two, and third gets the final one. Hope to see you there!

Well hosting in Praetoria would be nice but some people have not bought GR. So I think hosting in Pocket D would be the best idea so that's where it will be held. Get your dance on.

Greetings fellow heroes!

At approximately 5pm Central time today, May 30th. I will be holding a costume contest sponsored by my new channel, Freedom Team. Information about this channel can be found below. The contest is a no limits competition. Powers, Auras, etc are all allowed. The eight finalists will be chosen based upon costume theme and presentation alone. However, the final winners will be chosen by the previous as well as their biography and how well it fits their costume theme. First prize is 50 Million, second is 20 Million, and third is 10 million. The remaining four finalists will each receive a runner up prize of 5million each. Hope to see you there!

~~~~Freedom Team Channel Information~~~~~

The Freedom Team channel was created to offer something that has been lacking lately on Freedom. A chance to play the game with a good old fashioned team. There are no limitations to the teams allowed to form or broadcast in this channel, however, farming related posts are not welcome. This is a teaming channel first and fore most. For good players who want a good time. Mixed level teaming is encouraged and players both new and old are welcome to join. If you are interested in joining this new channel and having a good game play experience feel free to join. The channel is open to everyone so no invite is necessary. Simply right click your chat window, click 'Join Channel', type in "Freedom Team", and let the fun begin!

If I was in charge of Issue 21.....

I do not have any major suggestions for game mechanics or exchange systems that would take a whole issue. Nor do I have any comments on powers or player versus player balancing. My primary concern at the moment is that Architect Entertainment is becoming an increasingly dominant source of game play. I have played City of Heroes on Freedom since the games release and I will be the first to admit that I have farmed people and been farmed before. Nonetheless, the level of farming occurring day to day is a huge problem. For one thing, new players are subjected to rampant AE farming messages the second they enter Atlas Park, which has always been a large gathering force for lowbies, both new and old alike. People are inherently lazy in my opinion, you throw them in a game and give them the option to skip all the work and go straight for the reward and they are likely to do so. Second is the appalling decrease in low to mid-level teams. Where once Sewer teams, Hollows hunt teams, and various other mission groups where only a click away I now find myself often soloing when, regardless of time, the average population of any zone other than AP and PD is below 20-30 when once it was not uncommon to see numbers of 60+ and even opening of clone zones to accommodate more people. So what would I do?

I do not want AE to be fully removed because it is a fun addition to the game, when used the way the devs intended. It is also true that I do not want to nerf the AE system beyond belief because it is not the system that is problematic but the players who decide to use it wrongly. If I had the choice, I remove the AE building building from any zone with a level range less than 28-30, excluding RWZ where it would also be removed due to its ease of access from Atlas Park. While this would not eliminate farming it would, in my opinion, heavily reduce the problem at hand. It would take a period of time of course because habits are not easily broken. However, eventually mass farming would eventually phase itself out due to the relocated farming hubs. Yet, in order to keep veteran players on new toons entertained we could place a sort of AE outpost in lowever level zones. The way these would work is exactly the same as normal AE, however, with one condition. Any Arc selected at these locations will be set at the level of the highest level person within a certain level range. For instance, Atlas Park has a level range of 1-7. So, If a team of 8 people formed with 6 people within the 8-40 range, a lvl 50, and a level 5 the mission arc would be set at level 5. If a team was formed of all high level toons in AP, the mission arc would be set 7, as is the max level in the zone. So, people would be Exemplered to the appropriate level with appropriate powers. This would still allow veteran players and new players to experience AE creativity, however, limit if not remove the farming potential from lower level zones.

As an added benefit the market prices, which have recently become extremely inflated and fluctuate randomly, would slowly begin to be more stable. Prices for mundane salvage like a common Ruby would no longer be 500,000 influence per piece as I often have to spend in order to get one in any quick amount of time. Recipes and salvage would become more common so to speak as more and more people played actual game content throughout the leveling process.

Please keep in mind that this is just a suggestion based upon my observations and opinion and insults against my knowledge, experience, or whatever troll technique is used on forums now days is not necessary. A simple ‘I agree or disagree’ followed by a brief or detailed explanation will suffice.
Thanks for reading!

If you have not done so already, make sure your copy of windows is up to date, someone had a similar problem and fixed it by updating their system and it hasn't returned thus far. As far as your graphics settings, if you could send me a message with your CoH graphics settings, When GR rogue came out I had trouble even making it past the load screen or 5-8fps until I tweaked my settings a bit.

I use to use IOBIT for the longest time, however, I don't like how it operates in the background and it is a pest on some systems. You can use a simple program such as CCleaner to clean up old space and scan for and fix registry errors. They also have a fairly good defrag program. Another thing to check would be your temperatures, since GR release I've had to OC my GPU fan to keep it under 75degrees Celsius -it use to run at around 58. Set your systems page file to a nice 2GB (2048MB) minimum, I'm not sure this will have any effect on your system but I do it out of habit. If you have not already, try using Microsoft Fixit to scan for common problems and it will fix them automatically in most cases, link below. Outside of that I'd say uninstall/reinstall drivers and recent software from when the crashing began, and make sure you're not using an OC utility with known issues for CoX such as EVGA's Precision. If all else fails then backup files and try a full Windows Reinstall. If the problem still persists then it's most likely that there is a problem or failure in your hardware configuration. As dor logs, most people prefer to use HijackThis by Trend Micro which provides an in depth look at your system, the link for this is also below. If you run it and post the logs, someone will be able to help you out, that is if I don't beat them to the *Punch*, har I made a hero joke.

http://support.microsoft.com/fixit
http://free.antivirus.com/hijackthis/

Since City of Heroes is primarily a graphics intensive game you would do best with spending the majority of your budget on a new GPU and PSU, unless you like to offload physics to your CPU then you want atleast a 2.5Ghz Phenom II. 4-6gigs of DDR2 or DDR3 running at 1066Mhz would be more than enough to rock the socks out of your CoH experience, however, if you can afford to go with 1666Mhz by all means do that. You can get a fairly good AMD Quad or Intel Quad for around $100ish. I run a AMD Phenom X4 at 2.4Ghz and rarely exceed 10% CPU load, maybe 20% if I have a ton of browsers open. So focus on RAM and GPU, Can easily get an awesome system going for $500. Spend $250 for a superclocked GTX460 and the rest you can spend on some nice ram and you'll be pwning your fps rate all over the place, unless you want to max out the Crysis physics engine, in which case you will still fail hard.

FelisNoctu,

Your problem is that you are running EVGA Precision. I was having the same problem a while back, you can use EVGA Precision with CoH, however, if you are editting your settings at the same time it is running your game or system will freeze/crash as you've noticed. Turn off EVGA precision before starting CoH, change your settings, and then you can turn it on. You should be able to find other posts in the CoH or EVGA forums related to this problem. If you want to OC, you can use a program such as Rivatuner, it works without a problem while in CoH. So just try not using EVGA Precision and see what happens. Good Luck!

This particular situation happened while clicking the mission door for the mission "Retrieve components from Imperial Storage" from contact 'Alec Parson' in imperial city. I do not have the coordinates of the door, however, I have had this particular glitch/bug happen on multiple toons in praetoria on multiple missions. Anyways, what happens in this glitch -in my case- is upon click the mission door the screen goes white for a brief period only to return to the outside area with a 'Mapserver Disconnected' message and a box saying "No mapServer connection. Try Again." With an ok box, clicking the ok box does not do anything and upon fiddling with my controls I realized that not only was the city upside down and my character not visible but that I could also navigate through the city upside down, including high past the sky limit and below the map itself. I hope I provided enough information. The system I was running durring this bug is running Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit.

It is a figment of your imagination Dro.

So....tell me Mr. Tv....do you get the SciFi channel? O.o

I had a similar problem with City of Heroes when I started using Windows 7 32bit Ultimate. The two things that I did was lower the resolution in the CoH settings and in the application properties I changed it to run in compatability mode for Windows XP SP3 and it's been working fine for me so far.

Let me get right to the point, I love the new Halloween event. However, for veterans who have plenty of level 50's and lowbies alike that already have the costume slot for the halloween salvage, I think it would be outstanding if there was a reward system through the same contact for the salvage. For example, [x] of halloween salvage can be exchanged for a certain rare recipe or rare recipe roll, etc. Another possibility could be exchanging [x] amount of halloween salvage for [x] amount of reward merits. In my personal opinion, this would give higher level characters more enthusiasm towards participating in the trick or treating durring the halloween event.