Father Xmas

I use the GvE jump pack to SJ huge distances in a single bound. Okay the landing is a bit harsh for non-Tanks/Brutes but you get to ride on the ceiling.

It's meant to introduce new players, who are waiting for the F2P to come out, to a taste of what they will be missing when their account drops to Premium. The carrot is 400PP and Tier 2 access for $2.

BTW, Tier 2 grants the following

Paragon Reward Meter Tier 2 Permissions
Unlocked By: Earning the Trustworthy badge from the Paragon Rewards Program meter.
All Players Receive the Following:
• Join Supergroups
• Supergroup Chat
• Additional Chat Channel (Tells)
• Trading
• Increased Maximum Influence (500,000,000) from 25,000,000
• Increase Inventory Size (+2 Salvage & Vault, +1 Recipe)
• Email Access
• Play Mission Architect (no rewards)

Since the Freedom announcement, sites like Massively have already tagged this game as F2P when it still isn't. I would imagine that finding only a limited Free trial (until what 2 days ago) would be a bit of a downer since you can hit Level 14 rather quickly.

It also seeds potential use of the Paragon Market. How many characters can someone create in a month of play? Opportunity to sell them character unlock slots if they drop to premium. What if they fall in love with MM or Controllers? AT license sales. MA access? Inventions? Base Editing? If they find that they've accessed to many of the license/VIP features they may even subscribe.

It's tough to know what you are missing without experiencing it first. This is a way for NCSoft/Paragon to do this.

NCSoft isn't going to cut off any income from the store if they weren't damn sure that Freedom would be launched within days of that date, August 29th.

So I'm guessing the targeted launch date is Tuesday the 30th.

Personally I would hope that they try a soft launch for current and past (now premium) subscribers until that first big post issue bug patch goes live and THEN open up the flood gates everyone. Buggy launches aren't really attractive to new players, even if it's free.

FAT32 has a maximum file size of 4GB (32bits, funny that). Since the Beta downloads a 6GB file, I think I see the problem.

You will probably have better luck installing the beta on one machine and copy the beta folder, launcher shortcuts and then run a repair.

... and it should be powered by magical pixie dust with the keys carved from unicorn horns.

Throw us a bone, at least a maximum price. And dual sessions, it's tough to find a laptop that plays the game well (which means different things to different people) running one session at a time.

That was cute. It's good to see Sir Patrick looking well.

One person's heroic sacrifice is another's intentional suicide.

Well it's time again to tweak the low end rig, this time to prepare for AMD's next generation CPU and to deal with AMD video driver roulette.

I'm keeping the case, memory, hard drive and DVD burner from the previous iteration.

First off, I sort of side stepped with the CPU, going from a 3.2GHz Athlon II X3 tri-core to a 3.3GHz Phenom II X2 dual core. The reason is simple, 6MB of Level 3 cache will help this game a lot more than a third core. It took some PMs from interested parties to pummel me about the head and shoulders before I investigated further but they were right and I was wrong.

Second, I swapped out the AMD HD 6850 for an nVidia 1GB GTX 460 with a minor OC (720MHz Vs stock 675MHz). It's getting a bit tiresome to figure out which AMD driver works well with which card in this game. I'm not saying that nVidia doesn't screw up on a driver release but monthly drivers, each with a hotfix or three from AMD is just to much work to debug.

Third, I swapped out the Antec NEO Eco 520C PSU for the XFX Core Edition PRO550. It's built by Seasonic and the cable harness is a bit better thought out than Antec's. It also spits out 48 more watts at 12 volts.

Lastly, I upgraded the motherboard to one that is a socket AM3+ model, which is backwards compatible to AM3 CPUs. The old AMD 970 based MSI 870A-G54 motherboard seems to be slipping in NewEgg reviews anyways so I picked the AMD 970 based Asus M5A97 Evo motherboard. It's a bit pricey but I had extra to spend due to savings from the video card change and the slow downward drift of prices over the last few months.

The video card performance should be a wash and for our game the Phenom II dual core should give us a nice boost over the Athlon II tri-core because of the 6MB of additional memory cache. We'll see if the new socket AM3+ CPUs in about a month closes the gap with Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs.

Faultline story arcs; Freakolympics; farming the Ghost Ship; GM Lusca in IP; respec in TV; Hess TF on Striga; tagging Sally in Croatoa; Midnight Club arc. Probably a lot of good 15-30 content I'm forgetting, it's been a while since I've played those levels (but I've been running a new character, Level 21 now, so I should be running those arcs again shortly).

Basically it's a video card torture test written to use OpenGL. Review sites use Furmark to test out maximum power draw and heat production.

Since nobody started a thread or added to a previous one.

Eureka - Honestly I think Wil Wheaton is trying to damn hard to escape from his days as the Wesley. Not that I think he can't play the obnoxious jerk well, it's just getting to be his new stereotype.

Warehouse 13 - This episode is so full of cheese somebody needs to open up a wine shop next door. Original Star Trek battle music? Claudia as an Elf. Myka as a dominatrix. Wii controllers. Then you have the B-plot with Artie, Jynx and bad girl chick of the season. So who is the person pulling all the strings?

Alphas - Well it was OK. Basic odd couple/buddy cop plot. At least Gary got to drive at least once.

Yes the PSU is fine. The GTX 560 Ti actually uses less power than your current GTX 275.

As for the question about 1 or 2GB, pay close attention to type and clock speed of the video memory. In the past a lot of cards that doubled the memory from the nVidia reference standard were able to do so by downgrading the memory.

In benchmarks I've seen testing 1 and 2 GB HD 6950 cards showed little if no performance difference at 1920x1200 and only a few games at 2560x1600. Also in the case of AMD, the original HD 6950 had 2GB and the 1GB came about just to lower the price slightly to match up with the GTX 560Ti, not the other way around.

The i5-2500K is around $220 at NewEgg. Quad core, no hyperthreading. The K at the end signifies that the CPU has an unlocked multiplier (the only way to significantly overclock Sandy Bridge based CPUs as base clock tweaking is pretty much gone) only when used on a motherboard with either the P67 or Z68 chipset. The i7-2600K is the current top end, costs around $100 more but gives you an extra 2MB of L2 Cache, hyperthreading of the four cores, slightly higher base clock speed and slightly faster turbo boost when only using 1 or 2 cores which is pretty much the same difference between your i5-750 and the i7-8xx series. The i5-2xxx series is around 10% faster at the same clock speed than the older i5-7xx series.

The major differences with the Z68 over the P67 are the ability to use the integrated graphics side of the CPU to accelerate certain applications like video transcoding; a variation on the RAID driver to allow the use of a small SSD (under 64GB) to automatically cache often used files from the larger conventional hard drives in the system; and on most Z68 motherboards, output of the integrated graphics.

Building a new box or recycling some of the old one?

Here's a rough sketch, because it's late.

CPU - 3.3GHz i5-2500K;
Motherboard - Either a P67 or Z68 to allow overclocking of the K series CPU;
Memory - DDR3-1600 looks to be the sweet spot in pricing, around $10 a GB;
Video - I would say the GTX 560Ti has pretty good bang for the buck (around 30% faster).

Herbert West was here.

Well The Help had a bestselling book behind it. That always helps.

Heavy Metal (Takin' a Ride) - Don Felder
Radar Rider - Riggs

Done

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23
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when the first IBM PC was introduced.

(Someone else can write the Beatles Sgt Pepper song parody)

The only thing I remember a dev said about farming is that it's boring. There's lots of content in the game, running the same mission over and over and over again seems boring to them.

However they also believe you should have to work for your rewards (risk Vs reward) which has caused numerous changes with player designed missions to not make them insanely easy with enormously disproportionate rewards.

I never got the popularity of PKD. Maybe because I was force to read a boat load of his short stories in my College SciFi class. I like my SciFi a little more upbeat. Hollywood likes his stuff. Well at least the title and maybe a vague ultra cliffsnote outline of the premise of the work whose title they liked.

I little disappointed by the lack of Heinlein. I am glad that at least a few of the masters are represented.

Most everything looks good but I have two questions.

First, what's your plan for a case?

Second, what's the reason for the maxed out motherboard? If it's because of it's supposed PCIe V3 support you should know that you will need to use the next generation of Intel CPUs (current iX-2xxx series only support PCIe V2) and a video card that supports PCIe V3. The AsRock Z68 Extreme 4 is currently $65 cheaper.