Father Xmas

Yes, it's a lot different from the days of old where street sweeping was common and crowds of players hung around the tram stations looking for teams.

Global channels and super groups have done away with crowds of players looking for teams standing around in one spot.

Super-sidekicking has virtually eliminated the need to find teams of particular levels.

Travel between zones, especially on the hero side now have multiple alternatives than simply taking the tram or traveling to a gate.

Power as well as zone changes have reduced hospital runs of old. For instance the Hollows now have it's own mini-hospital so you won't see low level players running from the Atlas hospital to the Hollows every few minutes. Same is true with the new Faultline which now has a great set of story arcs.

Low level temp travel powers have made it so the sub level 14 crowd no longer need to hoof it everywhere.

Changes that introduced halving of in mission debt coupled with mission completion bonuses moved the action from the streets into instanced missions.

The result of all this is a quite noticeable reduction of characters flittering from here to there. You can find some crowds in the consignment markets trading but the sense of a zone being chuck full of characters is now, sadly, a thing of the past.

Or they have the same number and the increase in player population means that on the weekends each has more to do and therefore less responsive.

Pretty much any AT while teaming. Running solo you need an AT that can plow through groups while not taking many trips to the hospital so Scrappers in CoH and Brutes in CoV.

The "new" difficulty settings allow you to spawn team sized mobs while soloing so you can maximize your XP per hour. Indirect adjustments to the XP curve, major reductions in debt and the addition of patrol XP for characters that haven't played recently has made leveling the lower levels considerably faster than the old days.

If you want help you need to file a petition. Bug reports are simply used to report a bug and no action is taken for you.

That's OK. I have a wolf boy who was featured regularly in a supermarket tabloid and on TV believe it or not series. He's a jaded teen looking to get back the stardom he had when he was younger. Sonic/Electric Defender, static charge from his fir is collected and discharged through his gauntlets. Problem is he's currently at the level where bosses simply kick his backside since his primary doesn't help him directly all that much. The updated Defender intrinsic helps a bit.

A G210 is so inferior to a 9500GT that it's not even funny. Here's a review that has both.

Edit: Actually what you list there as a Geforce 210 doesn't match the original Geforce 210 spec which is 16 not 24 processors and a 64-bit not 128-bit memory. I haven't found a benchmark that deals with this different configuration. However it still has fewer processors than a 9500GT and at a slower clock speed. I would still say 9500GT wins.

It's hardly a wall of text. You used white space, paragraphs, capitalization and punctuation.

Yes, that should go without saying but true wall of text posts rarely use any.

Plus parkways tend to have cultivated trees and flowers along the sides and median to make the drive "pretty".

Now if you want your battles to last longer than 3 seconds, I would go with a Tank. It offsets damage per second with somewhat better defenses as well as more HPs. Problem is once you go Scrapper, Tanks aren't as "fun" to solo and that's pretty much the two melee classes on the heroes side. Tanks are great aggro magnets but on a team with a competent Defender, one with good team buffs/critter debufs, being an aggro magnet isn't really needed as much.

On the villain side, Brutes are the melee damage dealers. I find Corruptors also fun but they are a lot more fragile. Masterminds are the pet class and tend to use their pets as aggro magnets making them more like tanks.

There is a parkway in Connecticut, the Merritt I think. No big trucks due to low clearance stone bridges (doesn't always stop them from trying). IIIRC the on ramps have stop signs and very little room to accelerate. Pretty though.

Happy B-day.

Don't forget it's a run of the mill Gateway system with sub-par power supply (~18A at 12V as best as I can tell). Also it's unlikely to have a 6-pin PCIe power connector and possibly doesn't even have enough spare 4-pin Molex connectors for the two, 4-pin to one 6-pin PCIe adapter.

Them some nice buns on that mousing mat.

Well either your video card drivers are messed up or you need to install a more recent driver or there is a chance your video card isn't supported.

Download CoH Helper, give it a run in admin mode and paste the results into a post so we can take a look at the state of your hardware and drivers.

Oops, my bad.

Then go ahead and edit it from magic to science and add a mea culpa note simply because someone is bound to stop reading at that point and not get to your correction in the later post.

If I had a dime for every player with a laptop driver problem I could retire to Aruba.

Sorry, the post was interrupted by the words thunder and storm. A pretty nasty one to boot (reboot actually, power blip).

<rant>

The game should still run, minimally, on a laptop with Intel 965 graphics or later. I understand the desirability of a laptop in college and high school. I understand the concept of hand me downs from the older siblings. But gaming and the laptops you find on sale at Staples and Best Buy for under $500 aren't going to handle a 3D game very well. Popcap games, flash games, sure. Farm in facebook as much as you want. Even play that other MMO, the 8 million pound gorilla because their developers understood it's better for them to aim for a small slice from a bigger pie than try to get a bigger slice from a small pie.

But this game has just gone through it's 2nd graphics engine revision. And while the devs should have a vague idea how many players are playing on laptops Vs desktops and on integrated graphics of various vendors and try not to do anything too cutting edge while the graphics are set at their lowest, this latest revision has tripped up Intel users as well as older ATI and nVidia integrated chipsets that have moved on past their prime.

This is why I cringe every time je_saist starts talking about OpenGL 3.1 and beyond because I know that the drivers from older generation cards aren't going to get updated to support it and that if a game developer, our game developer, ever starts coding with the assumption that everyone is going to be able to get supported drivers is wishful thinking at best.

I don't assign all the blame to driver writers or laptop manufacturers or even our developers. Intel has gone out of their way to make it attractive to computer manufacturers to simply use Intel's sub par integrated graphics because it's essentially "free". And Microsoft from Vista on considers OpenGL to be a deprecated graphics standard and only indirectly supports OpenGL 1.4 (IIRC), which came out in 2002, through emulation and passes the buck to the video chip manufacturers to support DirectX and OpenGL natively. Of course the chip manufacturers pass the buck for laptops to laptop manufacturers and we have the start of a serious problem with laptop gaming in general.

Do I think our devs should have anticipated the percentage of players in this situation and have spent more time giving them a better or at least the same experience as they use to have while reworking the graphics engine for ultramode effects even though their graphics wouldn't be able to handle it, sure. Ticking off your customers when you say all will be the same and then when it comes out it's not the same and your first line of defense is "update your drivers" when it's common knowledge that older hardware and laptops aren't getting driver updates on a regular basis is negligent at best. If you are going to, from a practical basis, obsolete support for Dx7 and Dx8 cards have the guts to announce that, change the published requirements and not simply continue to say they are supported and have tech support convince them to upgrade.

In short, if you are a gamer with a run of the mill inexpensive or older laptop, you are up a river without a paddle when it comes to video driver support for new or updated games. And if your laptop's graphics are Intel based, you don't have a paddle, the river is full of hungry piranha and your boat is leaking.

</rant>

Occationally I noticed logging out at the market will place you out back, with the door animation, when you log back in but it appears random. No big thing but it's a tad disorienting if I hadn't played that character for a while since I always park them somewhere to earn a day job badge before logging.

Personally I like Socket 1156. I'm not into Xtreme Gaming so the primary advantage of Socket 1366 motherboards, the X58 chipset with it's 36 PCIe lanes split up among three or four graphic card slots, is wasted on me. Also the requirement of memory in pairs instead of threes helps keep the overall price down.

As for CPUs for Socket 1156, the i5-750 is a $200 quad core that outperforms all but the top of the line older Socket 775 Core 2 based quads and at a lower price. The i7-860 bumps the clock speed up a notch, allows DDR3-1600 memory without the need of base clock overclocking, slightly higher turbo boost (automatic overclocking when fewer cores are being used) amounts and hyperthreading which can improve overall efficiency of the CPU in multicore applications. That's not as important for gaming but if you encode video or do 3D rendering it makes a measurable difference.

Note that both Socket 1366 CPUs (i7-9xx) and Socket 1156 CPUs (i3, i5, i7-8xx) are DDR3 memory only. So you will have to add memory prices into your upgrade equation as well. DDR2 is on the way out, prices of DDR2 and DDR3 are about equal now ($50-60 per 2GB stick).

Now I've seen nearly zero of Lost. I think I caught one episode of season 4 and it was confusing as all get out so I decided I couldn't simply "drop in" to the show and get it. But I did watch the finale and it was still emotional to me. The vision flashbacks to the island was enough to set into context the various relationships that had developed over the duration of the show. At the very least the finale was well written and edited to convey the emotional backstory for all of these characters and it was truly a pleasure to watch.

Well the question is defining "old".

First there is a lot of game assets that are reused over and over again in outdoor zones as well as inside missions. From street segments to lamp posts to skyscraper #2. It'll be a shame to discard them simply because you zoned. At the very least the game should be trying to get as many game assets from your current local as well as your previous one since there's a chance that you will be popping back and forth between the two (hospital runs, store runs, leveling runs). Keeping these things in memory means they aren't loaded every single time you enter and exit the same mission or run between the same two zones (DA and Talos for instance). Some it speeds load times.

Same is true with other players and NPC data. Back when I visited my folks and their machine still had 512MB I could tell when a new player would come into range by the sudden lag as the game needed to create that player from scratch.

Also assuming they are using simple memory allocation routines, like what you find in C/C++, allocating, freeing and allocating again can end up fragmenting the memory pool something awful and programs usually compensate by simply adding more allocation space with a call to the OS. You can, depending on the order of allocation and freeing, still have a lot of free memory, but none big enough for what you are trying to allocate so the pool is extended. You would have to use a memory allocator that's more sophisticated but usually slower or have multiple memory pools for commonly allocated blocks for certain size ranges to manage memory more efficiently.

Changes is sizes of data, even minor ones, could introduce inefficiencies where none existed before. If two of data B can fit in the same space as one of data A, then as you free up data A, Bs can easily fit into the "holes" A left behind. Now lets add a couple more bits of info the data B and two can no longer fit into a hole left by A. The second B as to be allocated somewhere else and a smaller then B hole left available. Sometimes this is mistaken for a memory leak by a user since now the app appears to use more memory for the same operation when simply the memory pool grew to accommodate what to the programmer was a minor size change in a data element.

The problem comes when an app starts to get close to the 2GB limit for 32-bit programs in Windows (I don't want to hear about PAE and other hand waving techniques to get more than 2GB for an app). From what I see, apart from the two monitor memory leak and a possible base editor leak, we aren't close to that yet.

Well Terry O'Quinn is a long time TV actor going back well before he got involved with JJ's shows. I remember him fondly from Millennium and Harsh Realm.

But you have to remember that shows with large ensemble casts, it's difficult for a single actor to stand out beyond the character type they were originally chosen to play. Terry O'Quinn tends to play authority types, a natural leader that people would choose to follow. Those are the rolls he played in the past, they'll be rolls he'll play in the future.

Did anyone else get digital break up during the show? Both video and audio distortions happened a couple of times.