Father Xmas

This is players helping players. It's just nothing simply shouts out "fix this" in any of the data you provided. You've tried minimal graphic settings, with no UM features on and say it still fails. You do have a boat load of extras loaded up and running but none look bad on their own. You can paste your HiJack This output into the analyzer here to see if any of those helpers or services are potentially a problem.

Then there is always possible heat and power supply issues but I assume you've checked your temps and make sure the various heatsinks are relatively dust free. This game is OpenGL for graphics and it does tend to work the video card hard. You could try testing with FurMark, an OpenGL benchmark that doubles as a GPU stress tester and see if it also causes the video to drop. Note it will stress your video card and in turn your power supply.

As for a support ticket, I assume through the support site, if you don't keep engaging them they will mark it close after a few days. Yes the first few rounds may seem redundant and the questions stupid but once you're done with the "try latest driver" and "try in safe mode" you may actually get to someone who can help.

The market is a necessity when they added the crafting system with the assumption that there are players who enjoy crafting and would like to sell those items to other players.

This means recipes and salvage are no different than wolf pelts or iron ore in fantasy MMOs. Sure you can buy basic gear from NPC shops but you can buy better gear through the player driven market from those who craft.

You want standard SOs, go to an origin store. Common IOs, fine, recipes available at every crafting terminal and common salvage is plentiful if you know whose head needs busting. More expensive than SOs but last forever. But if you want something fancy, something not run of the mill, then guess what, you got to go to the market or bash heads and get lucky.

The one thing this game doesn't have a lot of, except for (S)HOs, are missions against big bads that are 100% chance that a particular awesome item is dropped. Yes in those other games that's the one way to guarantee you are going to be able to max out your equipment even beyond what players could craft. But here, (S)HOs are questionably better than IOs.

So to summarize, fancy equipment is only available through the crafting system which the market is an integral part of. So either get filthy wealthy by bashing heads at 50 or learn how to use the market and get paid by players already filthy wealthy because the really good stuff is never going to be available at a fixed price in an NPC store.

Well the entitlement comes from the "I've played this game for X hundred hours, why can't I max my character out?". Not sure if this is due to console games being only 5-10 hours of gameplay nowadays or that it is actually easier to pimp a character out in other games.

It also might have to do with the idea of a monthly subscription and wanting to max out their character before needing to reup for the next month.

Well in a game with a player based free market, economics happens. Don't forget it's a science with theories and laws first derived by observation of markets. You have an open market place, rules of supply, demand and inflation happen all by themselves.

Sounds like you simply want a classic RPG store where you can go and upgrade to the latest, bestest gear you can afford. Problem is the devs didn't give us that, they gave us a free market system, a method to obtain supply and what we are seeing are simply the natural result of a free market, a low supply rate and an every growing money supply.

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I think players coming from a WoW like MMO, where if you do raid X enough times you are going to get the epic drop that our purely random chance system is simply too tedious. Then there is the difference between the market systems.

WoW also uses an auction house. So while the seller may have a minimum acceptable price, it's up to the buyers to home in on the fair market value and pay no more. With a consignment house, it's simply the first bid meeting or is over the asking price that wins. And with only the last five transactions shown, which can be from the same one buy offer but filled from five sellers, it can quickly hide the fair price simply because one player is in a hurry, has a lot of inf and doesn't need to be frugal.

So the combination of how our "leet" loot is acquired and how our open market system works can frustrate those crossing over (or back) from other MMOs where the time sinks are reasonably predictable and the markets are more informative.