Father Xmas

[ QUOTE ]
Okies.. Ill bite? WHAT if its players running the same old content they been playing for 4 issues? Not like its gonna take a team thats done Shark SF over 30 times a whoppin 2 hours + to complete the damn thing? WHAT IF... oooo GAWD forbid.... ITS not SPEEDERS or EXPLOITS but a lack of diverse playable content that penalizes REDSIDE? Ever think of THAT?

[/ QUOTE ]
See my previous post on forum drama.

One of the reasons they added merits was to help eliminate the difference between CoH and CoV, mainly the fact that CoV didn't have anything like a "speed Kate".

If your problem is that there isn't enough TF/trials in CoV so you can't help but encounter the diminishing rewards mechanism, well that's a different problem.

[ QUOTE ]
Ummmm who are you to say what type of playing is INTENDED

[/ QUOTE ]
Not him, the devs, it's their game after all.

It was they that decided that since not all TFs are equal in difficulty or time it takes to finish that it wasn't fair that the "special" reward at the end to be the same. This led to variable merits instead of a random roll.

So they set the merit amounts based on previous behavior for I13. Those trials and TFs that were being done at breakneck speeds had lower merit values and quickly became unloved by those players who farm them for the random recipes.

Now people being people soon other TF/trial missions, ones that the former recipe farmers had ignored, were found and strategies developed to boost those missions' previous acceptable merit/hour value to something that's not acceptable.

So another round of normalization occurs since this is easier to change the reward amount than revamping the TF/trial.

I see this happening every few months until all TF/trials have been attempted to turn them into speed ones by those players looking for a quick "special" recipe.

[ QUOTE ]
This isnt an Exploit, stop throwing Fingers. We want information and its information that would be nice to have.

What good does it to do have a lack of information?

And it could be something that impacts our play or something to discuss with friends.

Damn you act like asking for them to Fully post the changes they make to the damn game is blasphemy.

[/ QUOTE ]
First, did they ever publish a list of what the merits were when they first came out? I don't believe I've seen an official list from a dev. So officially publishing now would be a first.

Second, if such information did come out while the change was in beta, it would simply encourage even more farming of those missions. Since the purpose of the changes is to bring these statistical outliers but toward the median, the old "risk Vs reward", why would the devs wish to encourage even more farming of missions they are "fixing"? Remember, the whole point of merits was to normalize the reward so the merits received for an "average" TF/trial would be the same as the cost of a random roll.

Third, the excessive drama on the forums about what missions were changing.

No, the why was to having the merit changes posted back while it was still in test.

The devs have said that they base the merit amounts on their data mining of actual play plus what the missions in the arc are then feed it through their magical merit calculator and get the results. I'm pretty sure that nobody could make a legitimate case to blunt the changes in TF/trial/arcs than had serious merit reductions.

So I take it that she saw "The Water Horse"?

Let's first define the SYNC bug so we are all on the same page here.

The SYNC bug was when right after you zoned, you were able to move around but unable to interact with anything that wasn't within click range of your original position. NPCs may spawn within visual range but outside that range they as well as doors vanish. When teamed, your teammates don't see you move at all.

It's not generic rubberbanding or the market hanging or the occasional one time rubberbanding you get when you zone. I believe what most of us are complaining about is the repeated rubberbanding every few seconds (sounds like the "fix" doesn't it) back to our starting position and facing after zoning which a manual /sync usualy fixes. I've personally never needed to do more than one /sync to break this cycle.

Large amounts of rubberbanding while playing is a network issue usually seen when you get a flood of retransmitted or duplicate packets. If you have /netgraph up and the counts of those packets are ticking up, then it's a network problem. Whether it's you, the servers, all the intervening routers or the packets are going from the server to your system via Timbuktu who knows. But that isn't the SYNC problem being talked about.

Let's try to focus on this ONE set of symptoms instead of tossing in every network hiccup anyone every had.

Well I wasn't planning on an update this soon for the $600 build but like Humpty Dumpty, I was pushed.

Short story, NewEgg either stopped restocking the GA-EP43-D3SL motherboard or Gigabyte is phasing it out for this, the GA-EP43-UD3L motherboard. It is essentially an "Ultra Durable 3" version of the D3SL, same port arrangement on the I/O panel, same set of internal connectors but with a slightly different layout of the PCIe slots on the motherboard.

Didn't get in this time around and the patch notes were modified to remove this. Did they miss a reference to them somewhere?

The problem is that the 915GV and 910GL don't have either an AGP or PCIex16 graphics slot but may still have a PCIex1 slot. A 915G based motherboard may have a PCIex16 slot. These chipsets were targeted for business systems so video card expansion wasn't big on their feature list. Still, a CoHHelper report may help us give you a better idea of what you have exactly.

Onto the $1200 build.

I changed two things over my last build out.

First, I swapped the sound card to now use the new PCIe based Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium instead of the older classic PCI based Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer. No real reason other than eliminating another legacy interface requirement.

Second, I upped the drive from the Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB hard drive to the Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB hard drive. I've always had a bit of a problem recommending what to me are huge hard drives because it means you can lose more when the drive fails.

If there is one thing I wish for it's a permanent reduction in the list price of the Corsair CMPSU-650TX Power Supply. Since I cap my price based on the unit price at NewEgg, the fact it seems to always be on sale for $60 off is locking me out of $60 that I could spend on upgrading something else. It's aggravating, annoying and some other word that starts with A to complete the alliteration.

Well it's about two weeks after Christmas, start of 2009 so let's look at the $600 build.

Short story. Nothing's changed. The Intel E5300 is now out but $16 for a maximum 4% in raw CPU performance doesn't make my heart go all a twitter. Anyways I only have $11 till I hit my self-imposed spending cap.

I was forced, due to the model being discontinued, to change to a different model of 9800GT from eVGA. Same clock speeds so from a performance POV, again nothing really changed.

The new single platter 500MB Seagate drive seems interesting but I'll wait until I see some reviews on the 7200.12 drives first.

/em yata I think.

You can see most if not all of the game emotes in Mantid's Animated Emote Guide.

Very nice. Flashbacked to a mocking Spike from the first season of Angel with the "No, your thanks is reward enough".

You live on Youtube don't you.

There are companies out there, paid by the artist/labels, who scan Youtube and other video sites looking for infringing content. They then send the site, Youtube/Google in this instance a takedown notice and the site complies. The ball is then in the court of the one who originally posted it to present the argument that it wasn't infringement.

Because Dark_Respite is so straightforward in acknowledging the music, it simply makes such a search and take down request mission easier. Then once infringement is found, I wouldn't be surprised if all the videos that they uploaded aren't checked as well for infringement. If some are left alone, it's because the copywrite owners weren't clients of the company who does the scanning and reporting.

Slow night?

[ QUOTE ]
Folks... please remember if you want me to look at these I need your full reports.

[/ QUOTE ]
Don't forget Tease, there are others here who help and we also want to see those reports.

I would have to say QoL features. Including but limited to the new Badge list with a newly acquired category, the extensive real numbers in power selection/management, the mini status display, disabling XP, tear off power trays and saving windows and channels arrangement. Costume saving and loading should be tossed in there once it's fully debugged.

Tagging this thread just in case. Would be a shame if it got purged.

Updated $1200 build.

I wasn't planning I doing an update this soon but an e-mail from someone asking about this list made me think long and hard as well as making me notice an error in my previous post.

First, I inadvertently linked to the GA-EP45-UD3P instead of the GA-EP45-UD3R which was a few dollars more and didn't make sense because of my stated disfavor of multi GPU solutions, the UD3P has two PCIe video card slots, and that I'm specifying an nVidia card where the P45 is ATI Crossfire only. This in turn made me believe I didn't have enough money to upgrade any additional parts when in fact I did.

Second, while looking a bit closer over my previous part selection I became concern that the fancy OCZ Reaper HPC DDR2-800 CAS 4 memory with their elevated heatpipe to heatsink may physically interfere with the fan on the Freezer 7 Pro cooler I specified. It's difficult to judge scale and imagine the parts assembled.

Because of this, more money, possible assembly problems and that this is suppose to be an overclocking rig, I've decided to swap out the cooler and the memory.

For the cooler I'm now specifying the ZEROtherm ZEN FZ120. The review at X-Bit Labs showed that it was an impressive cooler with OC CPUs. It does use an included back plate to secure the cooler to the motherboard as oppose to the Intel cooler style push pins of the Freezer 7 Pro.

For the memory I've switched to the ordinary looking OCZ Platinum DDR2-1066 CAS 5. The CAS 5 DDR2-1066 is a little bit faster than CAS 4 DDR2-800 and should give an OCer some more leeway in setting the speed and timings of the memory once they've finished OCing the CPU.

Bye LH. Good luck on all your future endeavors.

Onto the $1200 rig.

Well it seemed that the Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R has been dropped from NewEgg so now this uses the Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3R. It is virtually identical to the old MB but is now full of Awesome Marketing Mojo™, an additional ounce of copper and 2 more SATA ports.

And I also spent $3 and switched to the Lightscribe version of the DVD burner.

And I've upgraded from the 640GB, 16MB Cache WD Caviar Blue (formerly SE16) to the 640GB, 32MB Cache WD Caviar Black hard drive for $10 more. No idea how much performance it will buy but the 1TB Caviar Black is currently the 7200RPM drive to beat.

The problem is I have around $40 and have nothing I can really upgrade.

• It's not enough to upgrade the video card to an eVGA GTX 260
• It's not enough to upgrade the hard drive to an WD Caviar Black 1TB or a Velociraptor
• It's not enough to upgrade to a "real" 12MB cache Intel Core2 quad CPU
• It's not enough to upgrade to 6 or 8GB of CAS 4, DDR2-800 memory

I could upgrade the memory to 4GB of CAS 5, DDR2-1066 which should be a bit faster than CAS 4, DDR2-800 but the question becomes is that worth $40 for a percent or two?

As for the less expensive Intel quads like the 2.4GHz Q6600 or the 2.33GHz Q8200 (the 2.5GHz Q9300 is just a bit too much) well... slower quads do perform some multithreaded applications faster than a higher clocked dual core. But since I'm targeting CoH/V in particular with these builds, a quad would only be faster if you virtual dual box, run two copies of the game at the same time on two accounts. I leave that decision up to you.

So until next update, which I'm guessing just before the New Year, have a happy holiday.

It's been roughly 6 1/2 weeks since my last update so let's look at the $600 build.

The three things I've changed from last time is the amount of RAM, the Motherboard and I've upgraded the DVD burner to include Lightscribe.

The DVD burner change is a why not? It's a $3 difference in price and maybe Lightscribe has improved since it first came out. I thought it was a silly idea when it arrived because it took several times longer to burn a label than it took to write a full disk of data. Maybe performance improved. Maybe not but let's still give it as an option.

For RAM I've bumped the amount up to 4GB from 2GB. Why not, it's only $20? In all likelihood you will be installing Vista anyways, hopefully the 64-bit version to take advantage of all of the memory. If not, you should be seeing more the 2GB and every bit helps.

As for the motherboard, well the P35 was so last year </em eyeroll> so I'm suggesting the Gigabyte GA-EP43-DS3L. The only difference between the P43 and P45 is the P45 ability to split the x16 PCIe graphics slot into two x8 PCIe slots for Crossfire. As for the difference between this and the previous choice, the Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3L, the major difference is the P43 supports the faster PCIe V2 (or Gen 2) spec for twice the bandwidth. It also supports 16GB of memory instead of 8GB, has 2 more SATA connectors (still no RAID) on the MB and 2 more USB connectors on the back panel (instead of an additional header on the MB). You do lose the old fashion parallel port connector on the back panel but it remains as a header on the motherboard.

Unfortunately like minds seem to have come up with the same idea as I've noticed this is being touted on other peoples low end rig parts list and is now on backorder at NewEgg. And I thought I was being original.

Sadly the rumored 2.6GHz Intel E5300 processor never materialized when it should have so we are still "stuck" with the now slightly cheaper 2.5GHz Intel E5200. Well the Intel i7 will hit next week and we may see other rumored CPUs, basically the next 1/2 multiplier step, come out before Xmas and push the current line down a notch in the pricing structure.

Yea, it's gone. Search shows Zloth only authored one thread in the Tech section in the last 3 years and that's his CoHHelper thread.

Edit: Looks like they unstickied this thread when Zloth created the new one and later appended Zloth's to the original, starting with this post so it's not lost to a purge, just merged and misfiled.

Good point, this is the original one. Maybe they merged them?