Father Xmas

MA is a prime example of "Idiot Proofing" Vs "Universe generating bigger idiots". Sort of.

It is simply unpractical for a small group of developers to out think 10000+ times the number of players. If there's a way to bend the rules of the system to take advantage, then given enough time and resources (players) the system will be taken advantage of. Once known, it will take a finite time to try with the limited resources they have to plug up those 'exploits' without significantly damaging the intended function of a system.

Unfortunately they were against a hard deadline for release to retailers. Now they may have been able to turn off MA until the holes they knew of were patched but then the major feature on the box wouldn't be true and that could cause all sorts of problems for retailers and reviews.

It's said that software isn't released, it escapes. Issue 14 was a prime example of idiom.

Considering there was a 110MB pre Issue release patch, a 90MB day of Issue patch and a 3MB hotfix patch, this issue does appear surprisingly light and fluffy in content.

There was also four new texture pigg files added to the piggs folder.

I have to assume that a lot of it had to do with MA again.

The rule of thumb is a Def Buff is equivalent to 2 times a Resist buff.

Reasoning - Assume 50% chance to be hit by critter doing 100 points of damage.

No buffs - 50% x 100 = 50 points of damage per attack.

10% Def buff - (50 - 10)% x 100 = 40 points of damage per attack.

20% Resist buff - 50% x 100 x (1 - 0.20) = 40 points of damage per attack.

Also numerous critters have attacks that debuf defense which leads to as someone put it, "cascading defense failure". The more they hit you, the easier it becomes to hit you again. Not bad against a normal single critter since they attack slower than the debuff usually last but in groups or by an AV/EB, it can hurt a lot, soft cap or not. Fewer critters have damage resistance debuffs.

Because a number of people have reported CoH/V freezing up almost immediately with them. When they back off to the 185 drivers, the game works fine.

[ QUOTE ]
Question: Does the forum stop loading because of this thing? I can't see it, because I don't have dialup.

What happens to the forums, Father? Isn't there a setting in the IE/Firefox/Opera/Chrome/?? browser where the rest of the page loads regardless of the pictures? Placeholders? Something like that? Wouldn't that help?

[/ QUOTE ]
Well it does chew up some bandwidth that could be used to download the other 6 pages I'm looking at, researching, replying to, etc. Also a browser doesn't open up an indefinite number of connections as it is fetching elements that make a page. If one of these connections is tied up downloading something that would take 7 minutes if it had the entire pipe, that's one less item the browser could be fetching to finish out a page. Some sites will simply timeout (was at one earlier today) if a page is taking to lone, in it's opinion, to download. On top of that I'm still trying to finish the 90MB download from Monday's patch.

The thing is I like avatars. It helps he recognize other people faster than their name. The vast majority of people on the forums either use no avatar or a small less than 10KB still. Those that use animated GIFs, a reasonably large majority of these have ones only a couple of hundred KBs in size. I accept this for the ease of recognizing fellow forumites. However there are a dozen or two people that I've come across in the forums I regularly peruse that have avatars larger than 1MB, maybe double that number between 512KB and a 1MB. The thing is most can be reduced to a more friendly size with ease but nobody bothers.

At 33 amps of 12 volt power is fairly good for a single GPU system.

Guesstimating with the eXtreme Power Supply Calculator Lite your current rig with the HD 4830 is around 310 watts. Going to a GTX 260/216 brings it to 333 watts. You will then be around 75% of your max 12 volt power output and I wouldn't go higher than that which excludes the GTX 275, 280 or 285.

This assumes you aren't OCing your CPU as OCing a CPU can significantly increase it's power requirements.

Now as to performance difference, that's tougher to say. The HD 4830 is in the same class as the 9800GT. The GTX 260/216 has around 60% more raw power than the 9800GT. How much of that can translate into actual performance is dependent on the game.

It's a slight mismatch between your system's clock and the time saved for that character on the server. Check to make sure your clock is up to date and not running slow.

Also this constant spamming from power usage gets old very, very quickly.

SiS isn't even on the supported GPU list. The reason it isn't supported is because SiS hasn't bothered to put out a driver that supports OpenGL well enough for this game (which uses OpenGL to do 3D, not DirectX).

Now Moldy, if that little movie playing as your avatar is you, then you are an attractive young women and your webcam antics are humorous.

However having a 1900KB avatar isn't, it's abusive. Please change it back to a still or scale the gif image down closer to 80x80 than the current 300x225. Some of us are still on dial-up.

So you normally download at 5 MegaBytes per second? That's some connection you got there sport.

You have not reached the psychic tech helpline. We are going to need a bit of info before we can go on. Also this is player helping player, actual support is found at support@coh.com.

Mac or PC?

I assume the Mission Architect box edition or did you find a cheap earlier copy?

So you get into the game, make a character, start to play and then it locks up or aren't you even getting that far? Please describe exactly when the game is locking up.

Take a gander at this thread, at least all of Zloth's posts linked in the first one, around 10 or 11.

If you are on a PC, a CoHHelper and HiJack This report would be appreciated.

Actually this section is more about asking if anyone else is getting this or warning other players about a bug but for the devs to find out you do need to do a /bug in game to report it.

This is mentioned in the description for this section of the forum.

[ QUOTE ]
Discuss technical questions and/or bugs here! This is NOT a forum where official technical/QA support is available. To report a bug use the /bug command in game. For technical assistance email support@coh.com.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well performance has more to do with game resolution and your video card. So at a lower resolution, you should see an improved performance as long as the game isn't being bottlenecked by a slow/overworked CPU, lack of ram, slow hard drive, etc.

What happens on the screen is the monitor tries to scale the image to fit the native resolution. Depending how good of a job it does, the resulting image may look a little blurry.

Never link to wikia, that's the old wiki.

Strangely enough it depends on your video card.

What has happen to people in the past is they get a new LCD widescreen monitor, and LCD monitors look best if a game is running in the monitor's native resolution, and find that there performance has dropped through the floor because that nice $200 monitor has twice the number of pixels that you were running before.

Here is some rough guidelines. Note originally wide screen monitors had a ratio of 16 wide by 10 high. I've noticed newer monitors stick with the HDTV ratio of 16 by 9.

If you use to have a 1280x1024 monitor, 1440x900 is about the same number of pixels.

If you use to run the game at 1600x1200, then a 1680x1050 monitor is fine.

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
I came in here expecting the usual complaints to why a free, player created tool wasn't up to date with all of I14/15 content. Whining about how "unprofessional" the Mid team was for letting it get out of date.

Glad to see I was wrong. But I'm still waiting for the inevitable thread(s) to appear.

[/ QUOTE ]

You haven't been paying attention, then. They're around.

[/ QUOTE ]
I mean the new ones now that I15 went live.

The OP made some valid points.

New and trial players pop into Atlas with their newly made creations and are drawn like moths, due to MA spamming, to the AE building where they never leave.

They don't learn about the contact/mission structure to the game.

They don't learn about the myriad of zones in the game.

They don't learn about the standard type of rewards and drops, only tickets as if the game is a big Skee-ball machine.

They end up like Barkley, trapped in their fantasy on the holodeck.

There are solutions that may reduce this newly learned behavior but the solution may be as equally painful.

As others suggested, get the AEs out of the lower level zones. This would, force is such an unpleasant word, encourage new players to learn how the game normally works. Talk to contacts, get missions, take the tram, buy and sell TO/DO drops. In CoV you tend to stay in a single zone for an entire level range but in CoH there are multiple zones per level range and learning to get to them and go though them on foot or temp travel power should be a rite of passage. We'll probably end up with lower level versions of TP requests to Portal Corp as in PI whatever zones MAs first appear but they won't be in the low level zones at least.

Another way is to XP cap each MA mission based on the level of the character. 2 bubbles, 5 bubbles of XP, doesn't matter much but a change like that should alter the general belief that AE is solely a PL tool. This isn't about punishing PLers but preventing incorrect behavior and reward reinforcement in new players. Why keep playing on a huge map that'll take 30-40 minutes to clear if XP and rewards stop for your character after 10 minutes?

Another way is to gate entrance to MA by vet reward. Been here 3 months, you can now do MA missions. Again my purpose is to train new players about the existing game systems and rewards and not just the MA arcade. We are suppose to be playing super heroes or villains looking to save the world or cause general mischief, NOT dressing up and playing a VR version of an MMO in an MMO. It's the WoW characters playing an MMO in game joke.

This isn't about level 50 newbies exactly. It's about new players never learning to play the game as designed but instead thinking the MA is the only way to play. And if that's what they learn, it's less likely that they will be long duration subscribers. And without subscribers, this game will end up in a subscription death spiral sooner than later.

Why do I get the inkling that someone pulled the trigger a day early?

And why after 5 plus years does NCSoft push out a release before a major holiday so if something goes terribly wrong there won't be a quick fix until after the holiday is over?

I came in here expecting the usual complaints to why a free, player created tool wasn't up to date with all of I14/15 content. Whining about how "unprofessional" the Mid team was for letting it get out of date.

Glad to see I was wrong. But I'm still waiting for the inevitable thread(s) to appear.

Happy "one year closer to death" BillZ.

[ QUOTE ]
O23 - Service: Stardock WindowBlinds (WindowBlinds) - Stardock Corporation - C:\Program Files (x86)\Stardock\MyColors\VistaSrv.exe

[/ QUOTE ]
There she blows. I don't use it myself but I suspect it's either accessable via the control panel, start menu or is found sitting in the system tray. You can tell it not to skin CityofHeroes.exe and then the game should start up fine. Check "Ignore this application and do not skin it" under "Total Exclusion" in the "Per application settings".

My problem is up to this point the extras you can get with the various sets and boosters are art/data assets. They are costume pieces (3D artwork), emotes (animations), auras (animations), limited use powers (animations as well as data base info describing cost, duration, recharge, range, etc. of the power).

The "Super Tailor" is a change in how a system that is available to all players work. It would be as if custom critter design in the MA was only available for those who paid extra. Or access to certain maps for real money.

Again this was a requested feature for almost as long as we could alter every body slider but height at the Tailor. The change in body type has been asked for at least as long. Wouldn't you be annoyed if say Power Customization wasn't coming in I16 but was only available as a $10 extra?

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
"Hey, you might not be aware, but you can't make clones or ripoffs of "real" comic book characters. As soon as a GM notices you, your name and/or look will be gone"

[/ QUOTE ]

And how will a GM notice the offender unless players petition them? It's not like GMs just roam around the game all day and all night, on every server, looking for violations.

[/ QUOTE ]

So, there are NO GMs in game, ever?

Is that what you're saying?

[/ QUOTE ]
Not unless they are summoned. I mean you won't find a GM standing around Atlas all day checking out new characters as the pop in for the first time. Since there is no zone wide PvP there is very little generic griefing you find in other MMOs so there is no need to have one one duty in any zone. Offensive language and such is mined from the global chat logs once reported. You can eventually get one to appear if you have a problem in a mission with unreachable glowies or last critter on clear all missions. Now there are stories about a GM showing up to help a team with a mission problem and end up genericing a player that happened to be on the team with an obvious violation but again, you aren't going to find them standing around at ICON or Atlas or reading random character BIOs if there aren't any tickets to handle.

That's why way back when, right after the Marvel suit, the devs through the community reps asked the players to report suspected violations. You report, they decide if it's a violation. If you don't want to police, you don't have to but keeping the "clones" relatively low in number tend to prevent more from being created. They don't need to get them all, just enough so the game doesn't look like the attendance at a comic or anime con with streets full of Goku, Batman, Naruto, Wolverine and Ichigo clones.

Oh yea, you'll see a quite an improvement in performance. The video card is at least 10x faster and with dual cores, each about twice as fast as your previous P4 (Core 2 cpus are roughly twice as fast at the same clock speed as a P4) that side of any bottleneck is improved as well.