Father Xmas

Obviously either your character's name, appearance and/or bio was a little too close to a trademark or copyrighted character. You should receive a notification email at the address you have listed in your account about steps to getting a new name and costume. Don't let that stop you playing.

Curiosity causes me to ask what was your character's name and/or appearance that may have set someone off this early in the morning.

They don't enforce rules about avatar file size as it is. Most recently came across a 2.2MB avatar, not bad for you all with broadband but I'm still on dial-up. Fortunately only need to find them once and then BAM, Adblock Plus.

You don't get to choose your broker, one is assigned. If Mikey tells you to buzz off then your contact list should have Drea in it. Once you see the "right" broker you should have a newspaper as a contact. The newspaper will give you a choice of three missions. Do three of these and your broker's contact bar should be full and then they will give you the bank heist mission.

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How is this a technical issue or bug?

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Hey, when you get as old as I am, believe me you acquire numerous "technical issues". I swear sometimes I can hear my joints creak.

Thanks Houty. although I'm particularly partial to this happy birthday song. Was fortunate enough to her (Megumi Hayashibara) sing it live at the very first anime con I ever went to back in 1993. But Weird Al is always appreciated.

Thanks Mid. Hugs back.

Thanks to everyone else who chimes in later.

Hated the trial account on WoW way back when I tried it (it was version 1.x at the time, 1.4 I think). Couldn't ask for help unless I could find another play within ear shot and there were very, very few players rolling new characters at the time I was in the trial and the ones who I did see were either trial players themselves or to busy trying to level to answer a question.

3 SOs that is. Enhancement Diversification uses the total value of individual enhancements and then adjusts them as you close in and exceed what three +0 SOs provided as benefit. Nice chart at the bottom of that page shows the effect most clearly.

Depends if you find an application/game that won't run under Windows 7 that you got to run.

Read and decide.

Not as complete.

ParagonWiki: Auras

Not sure if these still work. It requires DivX or Xvid codec to play and these are just the original auras in the game.

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I'm also an ex-WoW player, and have been playing CoV (no Heroes for me thanks) for a couple of months now. My highest character is a level 30 Mastermind, with a handful of other chars in the teens.

I'm really torn about this game. First, the bad...

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CoH

- Three types of zones. First original open game zones with numerous contacts. Usually two zones for every 10 level range. You can get up to five contacts, one for every origin per 5 level range, each with at least 6 or more missions. Fewer story arcs in those areas at lower levels. Often send you to another zone for the mission.
- Second original Hazard zones. Gated with minimal level range to enter. One per 10 level range. Usually don't have any contacts, stores, hospitals, etc. Meant to provide a target rich environment for street sweeping teams. Missions given by contacts in the first type of zone may send you to these zones.
- Third are story zones for lack of a better term. They may or may not be gated by level. Contacts in these zones lead you collectively though a story that is centered around the zone. All missions given here are within the zone. Again missions given in the first type of zone may lead you here. You could only do story zones only from level 5 to 50.
- Contacts will automatically direct you to another contact if you have out leveled them.
- Another way to get missions and contacts is through the "police scanner". Do a fix number of those missions (short and random type) in a particular zone and do the "stop the bank heist" mission. This is the CoV way of getting contacts, added to CoH after CoV came out because the bank missions include destroyable outdoor objects (cars, lights, bus stops, etc.).
- Virtually impossible to not have at least one active contact. Relatively easy to find one if you don't (simply start back at your first contact and follow the chain).

CoV
- Basically one type of zone once you are out of the new character zone. Zones are smaller with a greater range of size and level for mobs. Much easier to turn the corner and find yourself over your head. Contacts are "unlocked" by either going through your "broker" and doing a number of missions for them and then a bank heist mission or by defeating some number of a particular critter group. These contacts may tell you about another contact once you finished them or not. Because of this there are times in CoV where a Villain may be forced to street sweep or do their broker/bank heist chain of missions again to get another contact.
- Usually only one zone per level range but some zones overlap slightly in level ranges.
- Missions rarely take you to another zone to complete. Rare compared with CoH.

Because of the very different ways to unlock contacts in CoV and CoH, CoV players usually have no idea how to get the standard contact chain going if they try CoH. They tend to stick to the "scanner missions/prevent bank heist" method to get contacts and may not ever stumble upon a story zone initial contact or even hazard zone.

There are PvP and Co-op zones and hubs that both games can get to. PvP zones do have a limited number of non PvP missions there but you are fair game when in those zones. The Co-op zones are story zones like in CoH. There is one hub zone that allows you to "travel back in time" to do story arcs you missed. Not all missions are available through this zone however.

There are almost no "raids" in the WoW sense of the word. There are a number of special mission chains that may have a party size minimum to run but still a max size of 8.

There is one large raid, max 50 I think, on each side against the same critter and it's minions that use to be the only source of loot in this game. Once crafting and the consignment house was introduced, as well as alternate ways to get similar loot to what it dropped, this raid isn't run as frequently anymore.

There are also zone wide events that are open for all, sometimes verses a "Giant Monster" sometimes versus alien invasion or zombie uprising. Sometimes simply an outbreak of one type of mob. Standard random drop rules apply for loot during these events.

Mateo, NETBOOK. Not really the most upgradable thing on the planet unless you mean buy a real notebook computer. Also his settings are pretty much safe mode already.

They might be able to upgrade the amount of memory however they may need to take it apart to do it.

It's an Intel integrated graphics solution. Their, Intel's, ability to run this game is normally glitchy at best. Try to see if Acer has a newer driver.

And yes, shut down everything that isn't absolutely necessary before starting the game. This includes all the Apple stuff, all the "helper" apps like the Java quick start, Adobe Reader quick start, Bittorrent DNA, WinCinema, etc. Your system tray should have as few things in it as possible.

No actually this game is horrible and we are here trying our hardest to hook people on it as part of our evil plans, because that's how we roll.

As others pointed out your look has nothing to do with your character's stats. Entirely separate. You could on day 1 of rolling your character, have it look exactly the way you want. However that said there are some costume pieces that are only available to players based on time played, some available based on mini expansion packs, by an in game achievement and a few that can be crafted. You can't tell how powerful or what level another player is by simply eyeballing them.

You improve each of your character's powers through enhancements (bought or dropped) that allow you to modify attributes of your character's power. You could improve damage, reduce recharge (cool down) time, reduce energy used, improve accuracy, etc. You can have up to six of these modifiers per power but there is a maximum number of modifiers you can have on a character based on level. Modifiers don't alter your character's appearance or the power's appearance.

No Philly. That crude guesstimate was made with a bucket full of assumptions and without checking to see if there was a correlation between my method and 9 quarters of actual hard data I have. Then if there was a correlation, whether it was biased consistantly high or low or if they fell in a rough plus/minus range.

Frankly I'm not that curious to crunch all those numbers.

Processor: 2.4GHz in the MSI Vs 2.13GHz in the Asus. Same FSB and L2 Cache size so at worse case the Asus is 11% slower. However the CPU in the Asus doesn't have Intel's hardware virtualization support (VT), which is what Windows 7 uses for it's "not emulated but virtualized" Windows XP ultimate compatibility mode (because you will be running an actual copy of XP in a window).

Display: 1680x1050 16:10 in the MSI Vs 1366x768 16:9 (same rez as a 720P LCD HDTV) in the Asus. Asus uses 40% less pixels and therefore 40% less memory for all the display buffers, overlays, Z buffers and possibly AA mode. How much actual memory savings that may be I don't know but it certainly isn't anywhere near 512MB.

GPU: In theory the same but we don't actually know if they are clocked at the same speed or if the video memory is clocked at the same speed. All things equal and as long as the video card isn't running out of memory for textures, then the Asus could have frame rates up to 1.7 times due to it's lower resolution, likely less.

GPU Memory Size: As for the 1GB Vs 512MB, it depends on the game (looking only at the advantage between the 1GB and 512GB GTS250, the green bars, solely as a rough estimate on what extra memory gets you in performance). Note that 1280x1024 has about 25% more pixels than the 1366x768 of the Asus (which should mean even less difference) and all games are run with their texture settings at their highest, which may be overkill at lower resolution. Only a few (Crysis, Fear 2, Farcry 2, Red Alert 3) did the extra memory help more than 5% at 1280x1024.

I seem to remember that this had something to do with a mismatch between the resolution and the 3D scaling not being the same. Obviously it's not affecting the 2D overlay.

I don't have anything more specific than that, it's been a long time since someone stated that as a solution for a similar recursive scaling problem but that time I think it was an nVidia 6150 integrated graphics and not Intel's.

The only other thing, as suggested by several people is updating the graphics driver, Intel's OpenGL support isn't the greatest in the world.

Also your texture settings are to high for only 96MB of "video memory" (in quotes because it's stealing it from your system).

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Don't forget that this most likely includes purchasable extras like character slots, server transfers, and booster packs. That would make the subscription amounts less.

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Philly, those are based on NCSoft's actual "players on servers numbers" and not my crude attempt to guesstimate based on the 1Q2009 income numbers (from a previous thread about this).

Don't see anything wrong with that. Fast hard drive (sort of a premium feature in a laptop), powerful (for a laptop) GPU with 1GB of dedicated memory, 4GB of main memory and a powerful (again for a laptop) dual core processor. The Blu-Ray player/DVD burner is a bonus.

I wouldn't expect to run any of this for long on battery power, even an entire DVD/BR movie, but you accept that right?

NCSoft use to publish two numbers for this and most of their other games in their quarterly financial reports.

Max number of concurrent users online in a quarter.

Number of unique accounts that logged in at least once in a quarter.

The first number can be spiked due to new content coming out or simply a game wide event (2x XP weekend, Rikti/Zombie Invasions, Holiday Event)

The second number doesn't count subscribers who for some reason paid for but never logged in during the quarter (which should be a low number).

They didn't report any numbers with any of their games in their first quarter 2009 report that came out in May, now they simply report income for each game. And since NCSoft is a Korean company, that income is reported in Korean currency. Exchange rates between the US dollar to the Korean Won fluctuate greatly month to month, quarter to quarter. A weak dollar makes this game's income go up in their quarterly reports, a strong dollar has the opposite effect.

The last time they published both numbers, for third quarter 2008, the max concurrent users online was 13,443, unique access was 124,939 across the 15 (including Europe) game servers.

They did release max concurrent numbers only for fourth quarter 2008, 13,823.

Not new servers per se but hardware updates to the servers.

Also not all game servers use the same amount of hardware. When Issue 14 was released the explanation to why Freedom was the last server to come back online was there was physically more equipment the Issue had to be installed on.

No, PhysX is a CUDA application. It's software running on the graphics card while the original PhysX PPU was an actual processor designed to do specific physics motion calculations in hardware.

Well technically the GTX 295 is SLi on a single card. Each "half" of the card is an lower clock version of the GTX 275 (or the GTX 275 is an overclocked half of a GTX 295, depends on your POV).

Supposedly the GTX 295 is undergoing a redesign to be a single card instead of two cards sandwiched around a central cooler, which is why it's next to impossible to find one now.

Way back in the early days players would go into perma debt to slow their leveling. That was blunted some when the devs reduced the debt cap at the same time they bumped introduction of debt from Level 5 to Level 10.

Before that the devs were kind enough to direct Level 5 characters to the newly opened Hollows so everone could hit the debt cap immediately.

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Okay, this is a list of all contacts on the CoH side (looks to be missing Croatoa and the Midnight Squad contacts however).

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You probably meant to say Cimerora instead of Croatoa.

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Brain fart.

Do you mean server info as in PvP, normal and RP servers as in WoW?

In this game all the servers are the same, PvP are located in certain zones and RPers are on all servers but Virtue has the highest number of them.

For more info on the servers in general, ParagonWiki: Servers.

The video settings are stored in the Window's Registry. They won't be copied when you copy over the game files with the current files. They will be set to their default settings anyway when you installed for the DVD. Worse case, check the "Safe Mode" box in the updater before you continue to the EULA page, that will temporarily default the graphic settings to minimum again.

It'll eventually have an XP compatible mode, by running XP on a virtual machine. This requires CPUs that can handle virtual machine emulation in hardware, not all Intel CPUs have this, and it will be a download from Microsoft and not come on the install disks.