Father Xmas

Someone asked, I dug up the first quarter report from NCSoft and after it occurred to me about currency fluctuations (one of the reasons oil prices shot up last year, the dollar weakened considerably) and decided to take that into consideration when adjusting to US dollars. I was surprised at the results as much as anybody.

As for the advertising comment, I've been here since late Aug 04, and after CoV came out Oct/Nov 05, virtually nothing was done to advertise this game outside of the press release when a new issue came out. Then in a relatively short span we end up with CoH and CoV displays on the CBS sitcom 'Big Bang Theory', CoV in the BuyMore on 'Chuck', the 'I'm a Hero, I'm a Villain' commercials, an NCNC channel on YouTube, a Rooster Teeth Production live action series about Mission Architect, a Mac edition getting press, etc. It's not a 30 second advert on Sci-Fi channel with Ozzy but it's something. Now that may be because subscriptions are down, maybe it's because the demise of 'Tabula Rasa' freed up some advertising budget seeing that CoH/V is the only non-Korean, monthly subscription base MMO NCSoft still has left in NA. Maybe they are concern about the competition coming down the pike in the "Super Hero" MMO space. Who knows, don't care, just happy to see this game being talked about at gamer sites that aren't MMO exclusive.

The numbers are first quarter, ending in March. This was before the Magic Pack was even released. It arrived the same time as AE, mid April.

The Mac edition did come out 1st quarter.

Well MMO Charts is a bit out of date. Here is a rough back of the envelope calculation.

Looking at the first quarter report from NCSoft. First they didn't list number of active accounts or daily population of any of their games, just income numbers per game.

Looking at income from 1Q08, 4Q08 and 1Q09. The amount is in millions of Korean Won.

1Q08 -- 5,164

4Q08 -- 6,865

1Q09 -- 6,837

Adjusting the 1Q09 into US dollars that's approximately $5.5 million dollars for the quarter. At $15 a month that's roughly 120,000 accounts. Bulk time purchases being cheaper per month would raise that number, income from $10 add on packs would lower it.

Edit: Found a historic currency converter site. Using the average conversion rate for that quarter I get these numbers.

1Q08 -- $5.4 million ~ 120,000 active accounts

4Q09 -- $5.0 million ~ 111,000 active accounts

1Q09 -- $4.8 million ~ 106,000 active accounts

Well that isn't looking good. Explains why they might have started advertising.

I'm guessing that some new dev was given the task to add a filter to the text editor, meant only for MA, that strips out blank lines. Unfortunately he didn't realize that character bios were also affected by this because he didn't make it MA specific.

The game itself is currently around 2878MB in size, that's all the game files without anything in /DATA folder (vidiotmaps/icon pack) or screenshots. I have no idea how big AE specific data can get if you are writing missions and creating custom critters.

I thought the limit was 2 billion (2^31) for a single character.

Well, yes and no.

Start with my $600 build in my sig.

Before rebates it is currently $528.

You don't mention a hard drive or an optical drive, I'll assume you are pulling them from your existing rig. I hope one or both are SATA because modern motherboards only have one PATA (ribbon cable) connector and putting the hard drive and optical drive on the same cable isn't recommended. Eliminating the two drives from my build drops the price to $450.

You can also drop the two extra fans since the extra air flow shouldn't really be needed, which saves $12.

Dropping the RAM down to 2GB will save you another $16.

The big ticket item is the video card. You could drop it down to a 9600GSO for $80 before rebate or a 9600GT for $100. And while this is less than the $130 GTS250, you should understand that the 9600GSO is about a 1/3rd and the 9600GT is roughly half as powerful as the GTS250.

The CPU is as low as I would go. The motherboard is pretty basic. The case/psu is pretty basic however at NewEgg the all black version is on sale for $10 less than the silver.

I have a little gray bald alien that for some reason is always given hair when I stop at the tailor. Setting him back to bald fixes the charge back to zero but it's a little bit annoying that it keeps "Rogaine-ing" me.

I blame today's youth oriented culture with their hairless male torsos and perfect teeth and hair.

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I logged out at WW once and when I logged back in I popped out of a door behind WW.

[/ QUOTE ] that's probably the same door you come out of when you use the WW transport power.

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Yes it was.

I logged out at WW once and when I logged back in I popped out of a door behind WW.

Not sure if your system uses AGP or PCIe as a graphics slot. Depends how old the system is.

The 6150 is a very low end chip. Looking at your game settings I recommend disabling Depth of Field (which is a big GPU drag), lowering Particles to 10K and drop the general shader setting down a notch or two.

You can display framerate by using the /showfps 1 command (/showfps 0 turns it off). It is displayed along the top of the screen, right of center.

If you are playing CoV, you may also want to drop the World Detail setting which reduces the distance you see objects. CoV zones are considerably more "cluttered" than the majority of CoH zones.

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Tell him yes on one and no on two.

Which one was yes, go ahead and destroy Russia... or number 2?

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Been a while since I saw anyone quote from Buckaroo Banzai.

Well they are planning on three more super booster sets based around the remaining three origins they haven't done yet. Next is "Super Science". But that is a relatively small goal with minimal manpower requirements.

I'm sure they have an idea what powersets they have are still planning to proliferate. They never said all of them will be available to both sides. Power Proliferation is a "cheap" way to add powersets to an AT.

Brand spanking new Powersets take a lot more time to do, depending on how much animation needs to be done for it as well as tweaking of existing sets like they needed to do with shields.

New zones are also a big cost item. I'm sure that's why the "Going Rogue" edition is a boxed expansion. I'm sure they are looking at altering existing zones in this mirror universe other than simply new building skins.

There is always some new or modified group of costume parts get added into a issue. We had a big "hair" release a few issues back with a boatload of new hair styles for both genders.

Then there are the "big ticket" items. Things like MA, Ouroboros and the market which changed how the game is fundamentally played. These come infrequently, one every 2-4 issues as they can take a lot of resources.

Lastly the wish list of items like power customization, shardless servers and unified zones. There may be R+D going on investigating the possibilities but nothing ever concrete on how their research is coming.

Now take all these things and try to build a schedule around an ideal release schedule of three times a year. Because of that it's unlikely that you'll see a new zone the same time you get new powersets; power proliferation when there's new powersets; etc. We just got something BIG added to the game. It is unlikely we'll see something this big again for at least a year. What ever issue that "Going Rogue" is folded in from a game file standpoint, will include a few things for those who didn't buy the expansion but probably not anything beyond the new powersets and a few costume pieces (unless they're cruel).

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... or does everyone make their money from selling and Wentworths's?

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I do now.

Before the market I would be fortunate to get all my enhancement slots with SOs by the time I'm level 35 because of the difficulty in earning enough influence, and this was before they made it quicker to get to level 35 (quicker means less defeated critters which means less influence received). Now I usually fully SOed at level 22 and able to craft common level 30 IOs (about the as as SOs one level higher than you) for all my slots by level 27 as well as having common level 15 IOs back when I'm level 12.

Toggling of XP is relatively new and I've done this with one character so far so I don't outlevel the 25-30 content in Striga and Croatoa.

Not sure what you mean by the "commitment" part of your question.

As for the 2nd part I assume they all sit around a table and suggestions are made and shot down in a repeated cycle until something like a plan comes together. Then they don't tell us anything, because we hold rumor and hints as iron clad promises, until the current issue is done and released to us. They've already made some mention as to what is in Issue 15 besides continuing bug fixes in the Mission Architect. As for long term plans, like next year, I'm sure they have an idea or two but nothing in stone.

Or use TweakCoH to disable them. It's on the Graphics 2 tab.

The one other thing, Self Destruct rolls to hit at the moment you activate it, not when it goes BOOM. So plan your death blossom attack accordingly.

First, code tags and Hijack This/DxDiag output really messes up the forum, please don't do that anymore.

Second, if you could, give us a CoHHelper output which will include game settings. It needs .Net 2.0 to run BTW.

No, it's more of a cheat sheet nowadays with a quick outline of controls and ATs.

It's way to easy nowadays to shoot by a lot of standard story arcs. Between wanting the two temp travel powers in the first two safeguards, crafting tutorial, joining Midnight Squad and the first two contacts in Faultline, I haven't had the chance to do the Doc Vaz mission arc in what may be years. And this is soloing, God knows how much faster it'll be teaming.

Poof! I'm now level 20 and in Talos/IP/Striga/DA/Croatoa (at 25) before I know it.

That might be an issue with the graphics being OpenGL and not DirectX (since Quake 4 is also OpenGL).

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Maybe it's on purpose.

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Or on porpoise?

[/ QUOTE ]His dolphin was in the shop.

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No it's Barracuda was in the shop.

[;wave]Hi houtex!

Any edition can get you access to CoV.

Are you a costume buff or are you looking for 'useful' minor powers? Each 'box edition' comes with it's own set of costume pieces, emotes and minor power. Every character will get these bonuses.

The 'Good Vs Evil' edition, which you may still be able to find in stores comes with, in my mind at least, with the best minor powers in the game, the Jump Pack and the Pocket D Teleporter. The PDT does just that, bamfs you from wherever to the Tiki Lounge in Pocket D which now has a Tailor for costume changes. Since Pocket D has 4 exits on the hero side and three on the villain side, it can be a useful shortcut for getting around. The Jump Pack when activated gives you an extended vertical jump for 30 seconds. Great in some zones when you don't want to find the nearest pedestrian stairs when confronted with a 60 ft wall. It'll also boost your flight speed for those 30 seconds and it has a relatively quick recharge.

The 'Mac' edition comes with a Mission Teleporter that will get you to your selected mission but it has a long recharge, an hour I think. You don't need a Mac to use this, this was simply the edition that first had Mac support.

The 'Architect' edition comes with a way to get either the Cyborg or Magic Super Booster Pack. The Cyborg pack comes with Self Destruct which blows you up to do damage to critters around you. But it forces you to rez at a hospital or self rez powers (I think), teammates can't target you once you go BOOM. The Magic pack comes with a 20 minute duration, 'Deck of Many Things' style buff you can cast on others once a minute. The effect is random and one does do minor damage so the target is given a choice to reject receiving the buff before they know what it is.

Lastly there is the 'Game Card' (not time card). It comes with a jet pack that lasts 30 days of real time of the account. Every character will have it but if you make a new character on day 29, they will only have it for a day. This didn't come with any unique costume pieces.

For costumes, simply follow the above links to ParagonWiki, they will either have examples of the costumes or links to pages with pictures of them. That said the 'Mac' edition does come with two different bird wings that you can use right away on your costume.

Well crunching the numbers out of shear boredom.

+0 SO = 33.33% x 3 = 99.99% => ED => 94.99%

+3 SO = 38.33% x 3 = 114.99% => ED => 97.25%

Level 50 Single Aspect IO = 42.40% x 2 = 84.80% => ED => 83.32%

Which falls between 3, -1 SOs and 3, -2 SOs.

-1 SO = 29.997% x 3 = 89.991% => ED => 87.99%

-2 SO = 26.664% x 3 = 79.992% => ED => 78.99%

However 'Frankenslotting' 4 dual aspect IOs, for instance Acc/Dam can yield a significant saving of slots.

Level 50 Dual Aspect IO = 26.50% x 4 = 106.00% => ED => 95.9% for each aspect.

So for the cost of 4 slots, you could have the equivalent of 2 aspects each with 3, +0 SOs, a savings of 2 slots. The downside is 'Frankenslotting' makes it virtually impossible to get anything other than one, maybe two, bonuses from a set in that power.