General_CoH

People have a right to complain when they feel they didn't get what they paid for. Complaining about not getting gaming time you paid for is no different than complaining about getting a half cooked meal at a restaurant or about having to pay for fixing a gadget you returned to the store under warranty. The restaurant can say "that's the way that meal is supposed to be cooked." The store can say "these were the last days of the warranty, and it's a manufacturer warranty, not ours; by the time it arrived at the manufacturer the warranty has passed." The game company can say "this is done for your own benefit and besides you agreed to the EULA."

These are legitimate responses, and it's also legitimate for the customer to get angry, vow he'd never set foot in that restaurant, store or game, and tell all his friends as well as the local newsreporter not to do that either.

That's just the way these things go. Being within the letter of the law doesn't mean that the customer can't feel cheated or even be cheated. If whoever is providing the service feels that losing some customers this way is okay then that's fine. If not, they can provide some sort of compensation. As I said before, I don't think that NCsoft is required to provide compensation, it would just be the nice thing to do.

Tons of posts on this thread, so I won't reply to specific ones.

My feeling is that considering that there have been almost daily downtimes and the total number of hours is 30+ (according to one post's count) it's understandable why people are annoyed. I don't think it would be a huge deal for NCsoft and the devs to compensate people for this annoyance. It's not a mandatory thing, just the nice thing to do. Adding a week to the subscription would be one way to do it.

The NCsoft account lists everything not VIP as "free", regardless of if it's premium or not. I also have 0 months paid time, and always thought the months value was low for my other accounts, but the 0 months account is still Premium (has two tokens).

The question that always should be asked first is: what will this PC be used for? Do you plan to play any games other than CoH? Do you intend to do anything CPU heavy like video transcoding?

If the PC is just for general purpose usage (internet, word processing and such) plus CoH then I'd recommend a low end Intel CPU such as the Core i3 2100 (even one of the new Pentiums should be faster than the AMD). It would be faster for gaming than the AMD (though I don't know about CoH specifically) and draw less power. (The AMD has more cores so would be useful if you intend to run anything which uses them, but per core it's slower.)

This one looks like a good choice, simply because it comes with a 480W PSU, which should be enough for immediate needs and probably future ones.

Problem is you're already spending $480 on that, which doesn't leave much for the graphics card (the most essential upgrade) if you aim at $500. Although your initial suggestion took a $500 PC as a base and added about $200 to it in upgrades, which makes your budget estimate suspect.

You can start with this as a basis if you want something cheaper. It would be slightly slower than previous choices, but should still be plenty fast for CoH. You'll still need a better PSU, but I think you could stick to the $30-$40 range (450-500W), which will leave $70-80 for the graphics card (assuming a target price of $500). You can get a Radeon 5670 for $70 ($60 after rebate) -- not optimal, but should be a good enough start. GDDR5 here trumps the memory size (only 512MB). You'd do better investing some more and getting a card in the $100-$120 range.

That's what I can suggest without knowing your intended use and real budget, and assuming you'd rather buy a pre-made PC and make as few upgrades to it as possible.

Then there needs to be a message. When a character is locked, there's a text "the character slot needs to be unlocked" when the mouse is over the slot, but it says nowhere how. That's unlike old locked characters which were moved off the database, where it specifically says that entering the game will unlock them. A message of this type will do wonders to clarify how the slot could be unlocked.

I don't know if this is a bug, but it's certainly unintuitive and a little alarming.

On my free but playable account I had a character I wanted to unlock. My first guess was that clicking on it would offer to unlock it and use a global slot, but that did nothing. I then tried the "Create a new character" icon at the top left, hoping it would offer to unlock a slot (I didn't really read what its text said until after I clicked it). What it did is unlock a new slot. At that point I was thinking I just used a global slot for nothing (not that it mattered much for this free account, considering I had only one character and 4 slots, but there were more characters or it was Premium I'd have been a lot more worried). I then tried to click again on the character, and was offered to unlock it. When I agreed the open slot was gone and the character was unlocked.

This is a pretty confusing procedure. It could also be problematic if all the character slots on the server are full (though granted that would be rare).

As I posted elsewhere, I just discovered that all my game accounts on this global account are active. One of them is a trial account from 2009, and when I logged into it I found that I have 4 global character slots. I expected to have 2. Not that I'm complaining, but this looks like a bug. My Premium account (created with the $2 special offer) only has two, as expected.

Edit: Should have posted to the Freedom/I21 bug forum, sorry.

My other game account (where I posted as Dark Sweater) has just gone Premium. I tried to log in and to my amazement I was able to do that without problem, and got what I expected: all character locked and two global slots available for unlocking. I tried an old trial account under the same global account, and was able to log in. I unlocked a character and was able to get into the game as a free player.

I guess the ability to log into the head start depends on the global account, not the particular game account. I wasn't able to log in using another global account I have, which doesn't have a VIP account on it.

I don't know if this was intended, but it's certainly an interesting experience.

I reactivated an old account from 2006, and went to the main character, General CoH (his bio explained the name CoH like this: from Pre-Cambrian Middle-Eastern Chinese 'he who helps others for nothing but the experience'). Upon entering I got the following:

[SuperGroup] Terminate with CoH's Message of the Day -- The General is back! Long live the General.

I must have at some point entered that, and it's just so fitting. I didn't even remember that he had that supergroup. (On second thought it's possible that it was someone else on the SG who entered it on some occasion -- there was one other person. That would still have happened several years ago, and it's still fitting.)