GadgetDon

I'll agree with all of the above, but I'll also add how great the system was at allowing communities to flourish. As I've tried Brand X and Brand Y, that was what I missed most.

In City of Heroes beta (yes, before the game launched), I wanted a punchy set for scrappers. The answer was "you've got Martial Arts". For seven+ years, I still wanted it. Eventually there were alternative animations for MA but it felt like alternative animations. Superstrength was available to tankers, but not scrappers, and superstrength was, well, super.

Come Freedom, and Street Justice was released. It feels punchy. It's a lot of fun. Because they could put a dollar figure on it, the economics of "hey, let's create it, even though there's some overlap with MA and SS but create a new type of fighting" was easier to justify.

And yes, I feel like a VIP, very much so.

Just if anyone is interested, I've been Using this computer for almost two weeks, very happy. Run all the iTrials at least once on Ultra mode without a hiccup and many hours during DXP weekend.

This was the Dell XPS 8500 with a GT 640 video card, on a monitor running at 1920 x 1080 resolution.

One of my best online moments also goes back to BBSes.

I'd written a free game series for the Apple II, "The Wonderful World of Eamon". It was free, people could make copies as they wanted, they started to spread.

Got the address of a new BBS dedicated to fantasy gaming. Logged in, it asked my name, gave it as Donald Brown, started to look around.

Interruption from the sysop. Slowly came the question: "Are you THE Donald Brown"?

There's something kinda cool about being asked that question, particularly when it's completely out of the blue.

My dad was head of the computing center at Colorado School of Mines, sometimes he'd bring home a terminal and let me play games. (Was not amused to wake up one morning and find I used a whole roll of paper playing Star Trek.) In High school, was in the computer club and we got to use accounts on the county computer, writing software, games, even multiplayer games.

Dad got interested in microcomputers, he got a Kim-1 board with a whopping 1K of RAM. We built a case for it, wrote programs using the 16 digit hex pad. The summer before I left for college in 1977, he got one of the early Apple II computers and had me set it up. I was hooked.

Did grounds crew work for Mines in the summer of 1978 and earned enough for my own Apple II. Splurged and got 16K of RAM. Over time, expanded it with a Applesoft BASIC card and floppy drives. I've owned an Apple computer ever since.

It arrived today (yup, 1 day later) and while I'm still figuring out parts of Windows 7 (just jumped from xp), it's up and running. Took it on a Lambda trial and and ITF, and Ultra added no lag. So, looks like there is no real need to upgrade the video card.

Incidentally, was having problem that the trackball connected to the KVM (a wired Logitech Trackman Wheel) wasn't working and would shut off soon after boot up. Then I moved the KVM from a USB 3.0 port to USB 2.0 port, and it worked. Not sure why the keyboard also connected to the KVM would work but not the trackman, but at least glad that's solved. I may also need to upgrade my Nostromo n52 to a Razer n52te - the former's drivers aren't rated for windows 7 but the later is.

Oh, and let me put in a plug for gog.com. The second game I play most on the PC is Zeus/Poseidon. gog.com has a copy for sale that's drm free and updated to work under w7.

So, end result, gonna put my gadgetdon seal of approval on this box.


*edit*

And whaddya know, tonight sellout.woot has the razor Nostromo refurbished for $36 (plus $5 for shipping).

Nice rig, I'm jealous.

I might suggest Getting the internal expansion with Bluetooth and wifi. Even if you don't see the value now, there are some nice peripherals like headsets using Bluetooth and more coming, and wireless makes a nice backup from time to time.

Went ahead and placed the order for a Dell 8500 with the GT640 video card. i5-3450 processor, 8 GB RAM, 1TB Hard disk. There was a sale for $699, though I splurged $25 for overnight shipping once it's built. I'll keep an eye out for a deal on a GTX 550 ti card, the power supply is 420 watts and that should handle the 550 from what I've read.

Did I go cheap? Yeah. But compared to my current core2duo, it'll rock. And I've had good results with Dell.

One possibility, did you return as a VIP player paying the $15/month or as a freemium player. If the later, is it possible you don't have access to the Invention system? If so, all those IOs you have slotted might as well be empty slots.

You say one tf and one arc. I'm going to be greedy, but I'll only take half of a zone.

An area in Boomtown/Baumtown is being rebuilt for inter dimensional refugees (mostly but not limited to Praetorians). It won't go so far back as to interfere with Kahn. A wall gets built to separate the rebuilt area from the unreclaimed areas. It's a coop zone in the sense that both heroes and villains have access (throw in a black helicopter), joint project to keep the refugees safe and frankly locked in until we're sure of their loyalties. (Praetorians go to this rebuilt area as vigilantes or rogues as opposed to heroes or villains into separate zones.)

At launch, there's a brief task force (think the size of the Penny Yin TF), coop, dealing with someone trying to sabotage the project. There's also an incarnate task force (8 members) dealing with the flood of refugees fleeing Praetoria before it's Devoured, also coop.

There also is a hero arc 20-25 and a villain arc, 20-25, heroes trying to stop some bad guys from stealing secrets from the refugees, villains stealing them. And hero and villain incarnate arcs.

If it proves popular, over time, mini-task forces and mini-arcs fill in the ranges of 25-50. But four arcs and two task forces seems enough for launch

I'm in a similar situation as you are, though apparently with a slightly lower budget.

One of the things I was advised was to look at this thread and fill out the answers in your thread:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=253272

Many of them are specific to "building your own", but even those get to thinking what you need. Specifically, answering the questions of what you'll do with the PC, budget, your location, and monitor will help the experts in this area (of which I am not) give you a better answer.

Edit: Actually, though not an expert, a few comments.

In the past I've bought from TigerDirect and NewEgg, and the vast majority of the time, everything goes right. On those rare occassions when it hasn't gone right, NewEgg was very proactive at making it right. TigerDirect eventually made it right but it wasn't easy. That was over a year ago, so TigerDirect may have gotten their act together, but I've never heard anyone do anything but rave about NewEgg's service.

Also, do look at the CyberPowerPC site and see what happens if you order it from there in terms of price and delivery. You definitely will be able to customize it in a way you can't from a retailer.

I have ideas, sometimes. This is usually the point where sane people run. But I managed to join me in this one.

In the last hours of the summer event, we abandoned the concept of the Sly Stallone Movie Event, the Bruce Willis Movie Event, even the Eddie Murphy Movie Event and ran the Chris Farley Movie Event. Objective: Fail every badge objective.

First Time Warrior. In this case, failing may have made things easier. Taking down the angels first helped keep our squishies alive. Similarly taking out the bosses against the God Champion as they spawned limited the number of random shooting going on.

Then came the Heist.

First part - hacker tried to shut down the generators, hitter tried to install the old OS, no luck. So we just took out the wandering guards there. The Grifter tried to bribe Sylvia. The Thief saw something pretty and looked at it.

45 thugs showed up, then Sylvia. Yes, Virginia, your success at the heist does affect the number of thugs.

Second part, the hitter tried to teach the honest looking professional to count cards, the hacker remembered he was supposed to update the os but was locked out, the grifter flubbed her lines but did manage to get the words by improvising something about some greasy duck. The thief tried charging through the lasers and was two steps away when time ran out.

Another 45 thugs showed up, then Ted. Apparently we did not get Johnny's attention.

And then we did get the normal reward screen. So you can succeed by completely failing.

Been in since beta, bought every pack or box that CoH came out with and got every "exclusive" thing out there except the giveaways at conventions and meetings.

Sell it all.

I suspect one reason that, generally speaking, there's less "yes I got it and it's exclusive and I want to keep it that way" is that there are so many costume pieces and sprint alternatives and whatnot, of really high quality and high impact, that these things aren't heads and shoulders above other similar things and really stand out. Yes, they're nice, most of them, and there are some costume concepts that they'd be really great for, so you have friends who notice and say "hey, that's a cool aura", but it doesn't scream "Look at me!"

I don't know the law well enough to say if there are legal issues in offering for sale again things that were listed as "exclusive", I suspect it depends on the language ("only for a limited time" might be troublesome). As memory serves, the price difference between collectable and regular editions wasn't that high, and came with a number of benefits beyond the in-game stuff. (I loved having a DVD install for the game instead of a couple of CDs) and it's been so long that the present value of that difference is pretty small.

If we had a vibrant PVP community and if these exclusive items provided a benefit in PVP, I can see why people might want to keep it exclusive. I can sort of see the show off advantages for a PVE advantage but on the other hand I want people I'm teaming with to be effective and efficient. (Nirvana is joining one of the old task forces as WTF and discovering many of us have team transporter.)

But for purely cosmetic - give a period of exclusivity, and then sell them all. The only exception would be if a part is actually tied to an event - say a chest design that's the logo for a convention you went to, I can see tying that to that event and forever exclusive.

This was tested during the beta period of CoH: Freedom of "what happens when the market server is down". Here's the rundown as near as I can recall:

(1) There's a backup flag for "this account is VIP", so you don't lose your VIP status

(2) Unlocked characters will continue to be unlocked, they will have access to any claimed items or powers they had before the downtime as well as any unlocked content. (Temp/inherent powers that don't represent a choice like the mission transporter are automatically claimed at creation, only when you choose between two powers like sands of mu vs. the ghost slaying axe do you need to explicitly claim them.)

(3) Claiming items will be down, so if there are any consumables you must have during those two periods, get them now.

(4) Creating a new character or unlocking an existing but locked character was troublesome. I don't remember if it completely failed or had problems, and in either case if you succeed you can't claim things on it.

Now, all this is what I'm pulling out of my swiss cheesed memory and could be wrong, plus there were fixes in the development process (originally, market server down, your VIP account just became a free account) and conceivably could have been more fixes since then. But I am sure that characters will continue to be able to use anything they've already claimed. So in prep, if you need to claim consumable items, create a new character, or unlock a character, smarter to do it outside of the down time.

I'm more curious about what's going to happen. I don't recall any announced maintenance periods for the market server, just the (rare) crash. Maybe it is just long delayed maintenance and optimization, maybe this is the start of fixing things that include parts of the market that drive us crazy like "doesn't show you've already unlocked something".

I'm looking for a PC with Windows, my business excuse is to see how websites look on IE and Firefox/Chrome on a PC plus the driver for my Belkin Nostromo doesn't work under mountain lion.

I'm leaning towards the Dell, under the "Devil you know" theory and I have had good experiences with them. The only nVidea option is the GT 640 with DDR5. I know it's not great, but is it acceptable for running CoH on a 1080p monitor. But based on NewChemical's comments may look at amd options! Choices are a 7570 and a 7770.