Father Xmas

Somebody thought that /help or /h should bring up the ingame help faq. Thus access to the help channel became /hc.

No, it sounds like he simply didn't know why anything would have been changed in that TF. You have to remember Castle is the powers guy. Other people are in charge of mission development, map making, etc. Not everyone in a large project are aware of every change being done.

Perhaps Hess was scheduled to have it's maps freshen up, reskined or customized in looks only. Changes that shouldn't have affected the TF at all. Castle may have been aware that kind of work was being done. We don't know.

There's a procedure to follow when fixing software. You can't let individual developers fix whatever they want, when they want to.

1) Bug is reported.
2) Bug is verified and reproducible by test department.
3) Bug fix is prioritized, scheduled and assigned by boss of developers.
4) Bug is fixed and files submitted for the next internal test build.
5) Internal test build is tested to see if fixed bugs are truly gone.
6) Build is published to the test server.
7) Build is published to the live servers.

Now imagine a handful of builds moving through 5-7.

Software is complected and emergent behavior caused by the interactions of numerous subsystems can lead to unforeseen consequences. Bugs happen. If you didn't expect one to pop up on a mission that nothing was supposedly changed in, it's not surprising that it wasn't caught. The shear number of missions, powers, animations, costume pieces, sounds, textures, etc. makes full coverage testing impossible on a game software budget and would require months of testing for every test build made.

The cry of undocumented nerf and the attribution of malicious intent on the developers followed by indignant outrage by some players when a bug rears it's ugly head and breaks their favorite mission/power/costume piece is just too common.

Not every change you encounter is an evil plot to deny you your enjoyment of this game.

I thought that was added last issue.

Nah, she couldn't be Winnie, could she?

Since the Athlon II X2 250 is listed at £54.32 from the retailer linked to in the bit-tech.net guide. At the same place the Phenom II 955 X4 is £142.48, I would say that kind of blows their budget.

First the Athlon II X2 250 only "officially" supports DDR3-1066 (PC3-8500) memory, so you could shave a few pounds off by looking at DDR3-1066 or DDR3-1333 (PC3-10666) memory. Any loss in performance will be slight. Note the site used in the bit-tech.net guide now lists the G.Skill Ripjaw 4GB 1,600MHz Cl9 DDR3 memory at £73.59.

Second you also don't need to get the CPU cooler. The included cooler in the retail box edition of the CPU is more than adequate for stock clock speeds. If you have no interest in overclocking your CPU then it's simply an added expense. Anyways to get an idea of the kind of performance improvement you'll be seeing going from a single core 1.8GHz Athlon 64 to a dual core X2 250, here is a comparison between a 2.0GHz single core Sempron LE-1150 and the dual core Athlon II X2 250. Note: the game benchmarks are done with a much more powerful GPU than you have and those games are run at much lower settings to highlight what the CPU brings to performance.

You should see if the pricing for all the components you are buying are competitive from a single site instead of the hassle of buying them from individually from different sites. At the very least you may get a break on shipping and the likelihood that all the parts will be delivered on the same day.

Fixed