General_CoH
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Posts
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Joined
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Forgot one thing in my previous post:
Quote:I think it's redundant to say that trolling is a form of trolling. Looks like an old mistake carried without change into the new rules. Sentence was probably meant to be: "Accusing someone of being a troll is also a form of trolling..."Trolling or accusing someone of being a troll is also a form of trolling and is not permitted. -
As someone who tends towards the scrappy side (currently trying Brute), I think I would have acted the same as you. That doesn't mean it's the best way to act though. I agree with The Spad that someone (could have been you) should have stopped for a moment and tried to organise the team, or at least understand what everyone was doing.
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Quote:I think the OP has cause for complaint, but still the claim he made was so ludicrous that I had to laugh. So thanks for the laugh.Originally Posted by Rodion
So I'm not sure what the OP has to complain about. -
Quote:IMO they'd make more money if they charged for slotting IO's, rather than for a license to use them, for one thing because that would appeal to all players, not just old ones.Originally Posted by Father Xmas
No, it's a disincentive to come back and play for FREE. Paragon/NCSoft isn't running a free MMO for people who had subscribed once. They want people to pay something if they don't want to pay $15 a month.
Such comparisons fail in the real world, since few people think this way. If I do any comparisons it's within the same category. For $24 a year I can buy quite a few low cost games or even within CoH Freedom I can buy content, powersets and whatnot which will be mine forever. This simply feels like bad value, even if realistically it's not such a bad deal.Quote:For the price of two cups of McD's coffee a month.
Edit: Let me try to explain some more why it doesn't work. I'm an ex-subscriber, and I've decided long ago not to pay for the game again. Suddenly I get an e-mail telling me I can play again for free. I go back and discover that I will have to pay (albeit less) to continue to play my characters. My reaction won't be to try to budget that money, but rather to go back to the decision I've already made, which is not to pay for the game. It's always easier to stay with an existing decision, and people tend to do it even when it's not logical (and in this case it can be the logical decision). The trick is to get people far enough into enjoying the game again that they will forget their previous resolve and decide it's worth paying more money, but the way things have been done a lot of people won't get that far. -
Quote:(1) If they knew how to fix it they would. The devs are annoyed by this, too.Originally Posted by quickfire
Sorry, one more post.
A few more suggestions.
1) You should have the ability to stay logged in by default for a certain period of time.
2) Clicking on my name other than in actual threads should give me the ability to see all of my posts. I shouldn't have to do a search or subscribe.
3) Players should be encouraged to post pictures of each market item, like the costume sets. Right now it seems it is a grey area, and I think official support should come out in favor of this kind of thing. This could promote market purchases...I would have already purchased a few costume sets if I knew what they looked like.
(2) You can go to your control panel by clicking your name, then the Statistics tab. There you can find your posts. It's a couple more steps but not a big deal, IMO.
(3) It's possible to see them from the character creator or costume editor, but I agree that having photos would be great. Another game has an in game preview of how the item in the market looks on your character, and I bought one thanks to that which I wouldn't have otherwise. -
I was intending to post a guide to playing on the E-350 at one point, and while I might never get to it (before I drop to Premium) I figure that's a good place to share my initial impressions.
I have a Thinkpad X120e, and my experience with CoH is that it's playable but at a low frame rate. At the lowest settings you get 15-25 FPS in Atlas Park (which I consider playable). Unfortunately I can't do more testing right now due to the downtime, but I'll check later how the game works at 1600x900 resolution (the native res of the laptop is 1366x768, and I played windowed), and in Kings Row (which in the past has given me a lower frame rate than Atlas Park).
In any case, the general idea is to start at the lowest settings and go up from there as long as you're comfortable. I found the increasing texture sizes (world and character) is free, that it's possible to get low quality shading with bump maps without penalty, and also low quality water. It's possible to go even higher than that (such as medium or high quality shaders) and still maintain playable frame rates most of the time. Indoor mission tend to have high frame rates due to the smaller maps.
Note that I haven't teamed while testing, and large groups could be a problem, but at least just watching some 20 heroes or so at the Atlas Park plaza didn't make a serious dent on frame rates, even with character details at max (but particles at minimum).
I will try to test some more when the servers are back up.
Still, as Father Xmas said, this could be slower for non-game tasks than the Pentium 4. Still, the hard disk and additional RAM could offset any CPU slowness, so it's possible that overall you'll be satisfied with it.
What kind of frame rates are you currently getting? You can use '/showfps 1' to see them. Does the game feel acceptably smooth for you on your current PC?
Also, how much are you willing to pay for a new PC? -
Some very good suggestions all around. Here's my take (based on several others, but I'm copying stuff from Zombie Man's).
News, Events & Announcements
- Announcements
- Announcement discussion
- Player events
- Calendar
- Paragon digest
- Live Servers: Bug Reports
- Technical and Computer Issue (Mac, Linux, Windows)
- Suggestions & Ideas
- Test Server: Bug Reports and Discussion
- Beta Server: Bug Reports and Discussion
- Player Questions
- Player vs Player
- Inventions and Auction House
- Mission Architect
- Base Construction
- Player Guides
- City of Heroes Freedom general discussion
- Roleplaying
- Fan Creations [Audio, video, images and stories]
- Comic & Hero/Villain Culture
- Forum Games
Servers - leave as is
A lot of the reasons for such changes have been discussed elsewhere. One thing I'd like to add because I haven't seen it mentioned elsewhere is that I don't feel there's need for a distinction between rednames, i.e., community vs. dev digests. The weight I give any of these redname posts doesn't differs, and the total volume of both digests together will create doesn't look like a problem, so I think it makes sense to merge them.
Edit:
I decided that it would be worth adding my personal impressions, as a player who hasn't frequented the forums much over the last two years or so, and just started using them seriously since I started playing again for the beta.
The thing about the redname posts is one of my impressions. I always open these two digests together. Oh, and I just remembered that initially I didn't open "community digest", because I had no idea a digest of what that was.
Finding the suggestions forum took some time initially, and frankly even at the second or third time.
The main problem with the AT forums is that they're in the middle, and you need to get past them for general discussion, which is a much more desired destination. Moving them after that section would solve the problem.
Otherwise I found the AT forums helpful as is, and would hate to have them changed. I typically decide that I want to try a certain AT, then go to look for guides for it. Or if I play an AT I sometimes want to participate in that forum. Any level of indirection would complicate things.
Never understood why "annoucements" and "announcement discussion" are separated, i.e., at the start and end of the category, instead of one near the other. -
If you want to upgrade, the video card upgrade makes the most sense, since you'll be able to keep that for a future PC. It will make the game look much better, since the lowest setting really looks quite bad compared to higher ones.
It's important to note, however, that new graphics cards aren't guaranteed to work with your old PC. I tried a Radeon 5750 on an Athlon X2 3800+ PC and it didn't work at all. I found out that a BIOS update should help (haven't tried it), but the short of it is that you have to be careful, and be prepared to return the card to the store if you can't get it to work.
System memory can help when you go in and out of the game, and perhaps level loading time, but it shouldn't affect the game itself much. It will however let you keep some other programs open. So it's a bit of a waste of money in the long run, but could improve quality of life.
Quote:300W from what I saw on the Gateway site, but the quality usually matters more than what's written on the PSU. I killed my wife's PSU (before she was my wife) the first time I tried to play CoH on it. That was with a Pentium 4, GeForce 5200 and a 300W PSU. In short, no matter how you upgrade it, it's risky. A new PC is the best course of upgrade (though of course the most costly).Originally Posted by SliceNDice
i am going to make a guess that the power supply is about 250 watt.
Anyway, I think I'll go back to the original post because of this:
Could you elaborate on that? What do you mean "play the game longer"? Do you mean that the game or the PC stop working?Quote:Originally Posted by Justice_Bringer
I'm looking to upgrade it now due to needing more visual memory to play the game longer. -
In the last mission on Aaron Thiery's arc I was supposed to save Matthew Habashy. Unfortunately when I defeated his captor he wasn't around to be saved. After a lot of futile searching I logged off and the next time I played the mission he was there.
I remember things like this happening in the old days, but I had hoped that the game would have a way by now to make sure all necessary parts of the mission are available. -
Quote:It's true, but sometimes giving more for free makes people pay more. That's the entire idea behind "free to play", after all. The only argument is whether giving certain things for free will bring more or less money, and that argument is completely speculative.Originally Posted by Father Xmas
Having more people playing the game for free isn't Paragon/NCSoft's goal here. The point is to have more people paying money to play the game.
It's easy to argue extremes, but the two extremes, either giving all the content for free (but leaving new costumes, powersets, story arcs, etc. at the store) or not giving anything for free (subscription model) are likely to make less money than a middle ground.
It's impossible to prove which middle ground is best. Even sales statistics can't prove it, since they can't compare to a situation where another choice was used.
Anyway, back to our scheduled programme about poop flavoured ice cream causing climate change, as the combination of cold ice cream and methane emitted from the poop flavour battle for climate domination. -
Quote:I'm in a similar situation on my main Premium account (just hit reward level 6) and have 9 slots. That was the number of unlockable slots I had as a subscriber. Yes, I expected 7, too.Originally Posted by CelticFist
Chatting with a friend who was back on premium account and looking forward to playing again. In talking with her about the token system she was one short of filling out tier 6 so I figured she would have about 3yr vet with 7 character slots.
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It's possible that one of the changes will be activating the "create account" button.
It's also possible that some premium and old free accounts will not become active by Tuesday. Conversion of old accounts and creation of new ones would be unrelated. -
Quote:Not true, but it requires a different model. The first major MMO to go "freemium" works like this and got more subs after the transition. But there content was gated behind a one time purchase. New content keeps being added and is available for free to subscribers. The price of all this content is quite a few months of subscription, and coupled with the hassle of buying it separately, a lot of people chose to go for subs.Originally Posted by Prodiguy
If there is nothing gated behind a subscription that can't be bought with a one time purchase, there is absolutely no reason to have a subscription.
Another alternative is to have things which need to be bought multiple times. Another game limits spell power and equipment, but allows you to buy the ability to equip or upgrade a limited number of them. You have to buy that every time you want to equip such equipment. People who don't like subscriptions can live with that, while people who want to use these things often and don't mind subbing can do that. Plus there's also a lot of other stuff you get.
There's no shortage of working models which don't completely gate abilities behind a subscription. That doesn't mean that Freedom's model is bad, just that it's not the only viable one. -
Quote:But much less so than on other games, especially now that travel powers are available at level 4. Some travel powers are faster than others, and there are various ways to enhance their speed. Plus there are mission teleports, Ourboros portals and other fun stuff.Originally Posted by quickfire
-Travel is a time sink.
Not at all. This may be true at low level, and would depend on AT, but at high levels some people like playing only against purples.Quote:-Purple+Solo=Death. -
One thing I think is important to point out to new players:
You can set the difficulty level. If you want to fight large groups that are 3 levels higher than you, no problem. Want to fight lower level enemies, that's not a problem either. Exceptions are the street level missions and playing on someone else's team. Most of the game however is instanced door missions. Since this selection is per character, if you feel the character is too powerful or not powerful enough, it's easy to fix that. -
I definitely prefer pink elephants to whipped cream.
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Quote:I'll never be Forum Cartel, but the first thing I thought was that I want to see those who are. On the whole I like the titles, and while I don't object to having the gold names, it would be nice if the titles were kept alongside the VIP.Originally Posted by Thor's Assassin
Forum Cartel for life!
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Quote:Right. Funny I didn't notice that. I guess it's because during beta I only played as Free and Premium, and haven't checked it since the Head Start started.Originally Posted by Jasra
Yes and no. When you're Premium, the "thermometer" will tell you what unlocks at each tier. When you're VIP, it lists only the VIP benefits, so there's no easy in-game way of telling what you would have access to if you dropped to Premium.
Okay, then there's definitely need for something to show these data. It's something you'd want to know if you prepare to drop to Premium. -
Quote:Not really. Many Premiums (the vast majority of them at the start) will be returning players. They've never used the store and while they have paid for the game in the past they have also stopped, and may not be willing to spend currently on the game.Originally Posted by MaestroMavius
Premiums however should have the option to remove it. They have already proven that they;
A) Know how to access and use the store.
B) Proved they are willing to spend money on the game.
I'm fine with most of what games do in this respect, some of it more intrusive than what CoH does, IMO. It's mainly a psychological thing to be able to turn that off, but it's a valid desire, so the devs might want to consider it.
One middle way would be to turn the icons on every log-in, but allow to turn them off per session (but not each time you zone, please). I'm sure this would still annoy many people, but it will still allow making them disappear most of the time. -
Quote:That's included in the game. Hover your mouse above the bar to the right of the reward shrubbery and you'll see what the different reward levels provide.Originally Posted by The_Spad_EU
I have to agree about the tiered unlocking; they need something explicit in game that says "When you complete this tier you unlock access to X, Y & Z".
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Just the thought I had today, that the game really could use a list of what's enabled on the account. (Well, apart from emotes and costumes, perhaps, as that would dominate the list disproportionately.)
I also agree about the in-game sluggishness of all web related stuff, either account related or the store itself. Quite a bit of patience is required, which isn't conductive to spending money.
I'm not bothered at all by the shop button. I just moved it to the top between the menus and I don't even notice it. Also kept the reward button near it. I haven't played a lot on my laptop yet (only 1366x768 res), but far as I remember it didn't bother me much even there, once I moved it out of the way.
Yes, reward level 4 is just 15 months of play, so it's not that hard to get. Me, I'm not going Premium, I'm going Free for now. I'm just curious how it'd feel trying to get a character to 50 on a free account. -
Quote:How many tokens you have to spend doesn't really matter. Do you have 7 tokens listed? If so that's correct. If you had another token at tier 4 already slotted, then your token count would be correct.Originally Posted by Nyx
I only had one token to spend, so I spent it on the shoulder cape. If there has been any downtime in my subscription it would be min a day at most because I pay through paypal not with a CC.
In preparation of going Premium. I.e., why not? You're just "renting it" as VIP. You should be able to buy it permanently if you want. Sure you could go Premium and do it, but sometimes it's just better for the book balancing to buy what you want up front. Granted there should be a warning that you already have it as a VIP.Quote:Originally Posted by DarkGob
2. Why should you be able to purchase something that you already have as a VIP? -
LOL. So true.
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I think that the inability to buy stuff available as VIP is a known issue, but it won't hurt if you post about it on the store thread on the bug forum.
It also looks to me like you're a token short. From your description it sounds like you have 6 tokens (5 to fill tiers 1,2,3 plus one to slot in tier 4). Assuming you subscribed continuously since your forum registration date, you should have 1+ year of veterancy, which would translate into 5 tokens (4 badges + yearly token), and together with the 2 you get for free that should be 7 (unless for some reason you didn't create the account from a retail code). There have been a lot of complaints about incorrect token counts, so I won't be surprised if it's a mistake.
Regarding the IO system, that would be 160 points, not 120. -
Okay, sorry, you're right guys. It's just my misunderstanding of the field's meaning. Perhaps a better name would help.