Hugginator

Well its clear yet again that you are choosing to argue for argument sake, you have tried to brand me with a fanboi moniker, you have tried to pretend that I work for Compustore(generic) and now you have nothing constructive to say again.

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What, you disagree with something I said? There's a shocker...

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I gave clear reasons why I disagree, anything else is your prejudice.

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So because you did it, the entire industry will follow suit?


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I gave 1 example of many, and yes sure, I call it the thin edge of the wedge when regular businesses are considering alternate solution providers from the mainstream ones.

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10 years ago the linux/mac fanboys were saying the same thing.

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I wasn't, I have started to predict this trend about 1 year ago.

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The speed of Windows 7 has nothing to do with marketplace changing, it has to do with the crap OS that is Vista. It is not a full release, it is only an incremental one, despite what MS will tell you. There is not enough changes or differences of the 2 OS's to be called an entirely new OS.


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It was 1 example again, please feel free to pick it apart in a vacuum. I think the rapid release schedule for Win7 is significant in the marketplace, people were/are looking for alternatives because Vista is such a lame duck.


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You are only speculating anyway, history supports what I said.

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I am speculating, have been for my 20+ years of paid computer work and 10 years of hobby computing before that.
I started paid computer work when the adage of the time was "you can't go wrong with IBM" and I have seen every company, Symantec, Microsoft, you name it, wear that badge. MS has made me buckets of money I have promoted/installed/supported/sold their products non stop for many years now.

I owe my 6 figure working half time self employed income to the computer industry and I have been very very happy with my history of speculation in the same.

I am a computerist and i'll use anything by anyone if it gets the job done.

I disagree, I have seen fantastic penetrations into the business market of Linux installations.

For example I recently replaced a $100,000 plus support vertical market CRM product with a completely free web based GPL package, where the complete costs were $1000 consulting and the hardware which they would buy anyways.

Windows used to be 5% of a computers cost now its approaching 25% as MS has refused to lower their cost to OEMS.

Its hard to find an OEM now that does not offer some kind of factory Linux installation or bare bones PC.

I think the marketplace is poised to leapfrog MS and the other old institutions, 5 maybe 10 years at most.

I think that for the average user Cloud computing and becoming untied from a particular OS will be the future (why pay $200 for an MS license when linux or GoogleOS or other are free), Google for example is pushing the cloud and web based apps, this all ties in nicely as HTML5 nears completion.

Apples fantastic advertising campaign is working inspite of Macs being significantly more expensive, people like the ease of use whether its mythical or real.

The marketplace is changing. The very fast release of Windows7 is evidence of this, if MS doesn't get it right there is serious risk of them losing significant market share in the next 5-10 years.

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64bit doesn't offer anyone anything unless they have an application that is going to use more than 2GB itself, or multiple apps that will genuinely consume more than ~3.0GB.

[/ QUOTE ]Computationally heavy applications (such as encryption and video encoding) will also benefit massively from moving to 64bits (assuming the algorithms are also optimized for 64bits), both because of it being 64bits, as well as x86_64 having additional registers and a few other nice improvements. But yeah, for the vast majority of applications it won't make them faster, and it may even make them slower due to 64bit pointers and the like (which'll cause an increase in cache misses).

(moving to 64bits is still good for the long run, even if in many ways it doesn't help too much in the short run... just like how going multicore only benefited home users in a few situations when they first started coming out, but now more and more software is being designed to take advantage of the the extra cores)

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I agree, but even in those cases unless you are doing that all day long for your job its no big deal if your 1 time encryption/compression/encoding takes 7 minutes instead of 5 or visa versa.

But I completely agree that 64bit is the future, 'everyone' will be on a 64bit OS, I wouldn't be surprised though if in 5 years many/most of them are Linux or Mac though

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Sorry, my statement was ment to get into a pissing match =)

Windows XP is old technology plain and simple. Does old technology work? Yes, of course. But, if you want to future proof yourself a bit more get the upgrade OS.

Having a 64bit OS allows you to increase your ram size and I have to disagree withthat not being a very viable option. I agree that this game and other aps may not use 2gigs of ram but don't forget we are talking cumlative here. Have a bunch of programs running at the same time and that 2-4 gigs of ram gets used up pretty quick and your only option to increase it is to have an 64bit OS running.

Also [referencing the 32bit or 64bit comment], not many apps use all the cores in multicore CPU I agree but, if you REALLY want to get into tweaking your system out for the use of cores you can set the affinity of certain programs to use certain cores and free up others.

For example, you could theoretically set most programs to use the first 3 cores of a quad 3gHz and set CoH to use the forth core.... that would dedicate most all of the 3gHz of the forth core to CoH!

If you spend the time tweaking Vista or Windows7 turning off features you will never need, tweak the Services.msc, tweak the gpedit.msc and tweak the Task Scheduler; they run great.
Like I said vinyl LP and cd lovers =) We are both right in our own ways, it's all up to personal preference. Just FYI, I have XP Pro 64bit, Vista Ultimate 64bit and Windows7 RC 7600 on three different systems and I will more than likely upgrade to Windows7.

But I digress, the OP is fine using XP64 bit in their new system for use with CoH and perform most all of the same options I just said above.

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Any performance gains from tweaking Windows have seriously diminished since Windows 2000, the only notable exception is possibly Aero, otherwise there isn't much to be gained by disabling the WirelessZeroConfig for example, yes there are some 3rd party addons that can be good to disable.

I'm not here to stop anyone from upgrading to Win7-64, I will recommend vehemently against anyone 'upgrading' to Vista especially with the short timeline now to Win7.

I just want people to be informed about the choices they are making.

64bit doesn't offer anyone anything unless they have an application that is going to use more than 2GB itself, or multiple apps that will genuinely consume more than ~3.0GB. My assumptions for this statement are that they already have a computer with 32bit OS and 2-4GB physical installed depending on the instance above.

If you are playing CO* and you have 32bit with 2GB installed there isn't much performance to be gained by going to 4GB, the benchmark differences are puny/insignificant.

Maybe you consider an upgrade if you want to run multiple sessions, maybe there are a handful of other exceptions, but I doubt that they apply to more than 5% of the general computer users including gamers.

Again, if someone wants to get 64bit XP or Win7 then great, just don't think that its going to make your game of Solitaire or Email or web browsing faster.

Same thing with future proofing, computers are very inexpensive now, use what you have for as long as it does what you need then upgrade to whatever the next best thing is.

Quite frankly there are no line item features in Vista or Win7 that interest me in the least, the only one that had promise was axed in 2006 after the rewrite of Vista.

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Will it improve your systems performance? NO

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If this is in reference to XP 64bit over Windows7 64 bit I would have to disagree somewhat.

XP 64bit just doesn't have the proper architecture to handle todays 64bit processors efficiently. Maybe performance is considered better due to the lower overhead requirements of the OS. If you know how to tweak and turn off all the glizt and glamour of Vista or Windows7 they run very well.

These debates are similar to the vinyl/cd debates way back when and even today. One is an older technology with followers that swear it's so much better sounding where as the latter is new technology and more efficient and better sounding.



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Proper architecture? Provide a reference or something, XP64 benchmarks very well against anything out there, in the most general terms its faster than Vista and slower than Windows7. On top of that the trickle down of drivers from Vista has been great, there is fantastic support for XP64 driver wise right now.

Its also interesting kernel technology wise to note that XP (all variants) has shown to be faster running heavily multithreaded apps on current 2 and 4 core CPUs than Vista or Windows 7 as those kernels have been optimized for maybe 8 but certainly 16 cores in the future, and at that point they both run away from XP in performance.

Its faster because the code is in relative terms much much smaller/tighter than either of the 2 newer OS.

Sidetrack:
64bit is not inherently faster than 32bit (with caveats, AMD cpus can use more registers in 64 mode, if your app has a 64 version and will use more than 2GB memory itself, etc etc) , the primary reason to use 64bit is the HUGE address space. In fact 64bit versions of some programs will be slower than 32bit because the dwords etc are twice as large reading and writing to memory.

For your average desktop today, there are only a handful of programs that could possibly use more than 2GB of memory, gaming could be one of them, but I am unaware of any game that uses more than 2GB at this time, video/image editing perhaps.

Server side I use 64bit for VMWare, SQL Server, Exchange Server.

I even have 1 8GB physical VM system running 32bit Linux in PAE mode and i'm very happy with that, its almost too bad that MS had to tie DEP mode with PAE on XP instead of increased memory use, that system benchmarks very well against a similar one running 64bit.

64bit client side I have people running Solidworks/Maya/3DS, I have 1 solidworks user with a model that is 3GB in memory to start, plus edits plus undo etc etc.

This game peaks at about 1.3GB of memory use for example, 64bit offers CO* nothing at this time.

In a nutshell, if you are using regular desktop apps don't expect 64bit to offer you anything special over 32bit at this time, so don't feel like you are missing out or something and if 'things' change you can always reinstall/upgrade later.

And finally all that being said I have 64bit Windows 7 running on a 4 core 8GB system right now and I think Microsoft has a hit.

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I am also on satellite internet and i most times leave my updater open over night so i can play in the morning, and as soon as i click next on the first updater i open a second one to begin the process. My updater has reached Connecting #386 at its highest.

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The trick for sat is to open 5-10 updaters all at once. One will connect relatively quickly then you can close the others as they error out.

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What do we do about the people who got to 50 the traditional way and have been playing since beta and suck?

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We'll always have those, its not like they have gone away or will go away. I'm worried about all the good/great/amazing players who are getting a poor start in the game and have no clue there is much more to it.

I agree, there are textures in the wrong places, verify the game files and turn off any overclocking etc, get things down to bone standard.

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If AE XP get's nerfed the only reason will be all the forum cryer's.. whaaa he levels too fast.. he farms.. whaaa!
That's what get's the game nerfed.

Just like how pvp was ruined but the ultimate nerf hammer, it's because of all the noobs whining & crying they get killed so fast in pvp.
Not because it was unbalanced but because they don't know how to build a pvp toon & prob don't but io sets to make it better.
End result....
PVP nerfed into garbage.

THANKS FORUMS CRYERS

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All the 'forums cryers' have been doing is pointing out the obvious, then making it clear who is really responsible.

You want to know who 'caused' all the PVP and AE nerfts? All the game mechanic exploiters should just go look in a mirror.

I get a laugh at all the 'just let everyone play the way then want' nonsense, go ahead, exploit, farm, PL. Just don't cry when the nerfs come.

Do what this post says and everything will work great:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat....e=0&fpart=1

houtex caused the

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As I said in the other threads, removing AE will kill the game. It's one of the game's biggest selling features. The devs won't be removing it or removing xp from it.

A lot of the issues with the AE were brought up during testing. The antifarmers on the forums haven't come up with a single idea that wasn't presented during testing and turned down by the devs.

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Of course its not going to be removed from the game thats just silly, but its a certainty that all the farming and exploit abuse are going to bring many more nerfs to AE.

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Just saying the XP reward ratio in the MA compared to regular content is completely out of whack whether its Solo or on an 8 man team, the bubbles just fly

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Again... this simply isn't true.

XP gain for soloers and small teams is much slower in MA than it is in regular content.

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Maybe if you live in a happy little bubble where people only do 'regular' AE story based content sure.

But by all indications the bulk of AE people/teams are doing the exploit based farms in which case it doesn't matter how large or small your team is, the XP and rewards are far and away better than anything else in the game.

There are multiple farmers who have confirmed this to be true here and in other threads.

No, I don't think removing XP from AE is a good idea.

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And which "exploit based farms" are you referring to? Do you run them yourself? If not, where do you get the basis for saying there are exploit based farms? The only thing close was the Comm Officer farm, and that has been fixed. Making an all boss spawn is not an "exploit" nor is it easily soloable except by the most overpowered powerset combos and/or most IO'd out characters. Perhaps that is the real problem.

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There are 3 or 4 exploits still active, they are not hard to find, I have played them and reported them. The most recently fixed one was the stacked defendable buffing object multiple ambush farm. The biggest one going right now is baddies that don't attack at all, and give GM level XP. If you don't already know one or have one that you publish temporarily, it takes me less than 2 minutes to find one on the list there are so many new ones.

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Just saying the XP reward ratio in the MA compared to regular content is completely out of whack whether its Solo or on an 8 man team, the bubbles just fly

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Again... this simply isn't true.

XP gain for soloers and small teams is much slower in MA than it is in regular content.

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Maybe if you live in a happy little bubble where people only do 'regular' AE story based content sure.

But by all indications the bulk of AE people/teams are doing the exploit based farms in which case it doesn't matter how large or small your team is, the XP and rewards are far and away better than anything else in the game.

There are multiple farmers who have confirmed this to be true here and in other threads.

No, I don't think removing XP from AE is a good idea.

100% CPU is normal for this game on your average PC. Nothing to fix here, nothing is wrong, don't waste any time on it.

For example I have a fast multicore CPU and the game uses about 65-70% on 2 of the cores.

I have no idea what AV engine Spysweeper inserted into their package, but Trendmicro has been doing AV for quite a few years now.

For a free package i'm recommending AVG or perhaps even Microsofts Security Essentials.

Lots of choices on the paid side of things, but most of them revolve around the management tools, not necessarily better protection.

I think you can get much more tangible protection from people changing their awareness level regarding everything internet.

1. Use Firefox and the noscript plugin.
2. Don't trust anything on the internet.
3. Don't open that link your best friend sent you in email until you double check the destination.
4. Don't open that EXE your best friend sent you in email.....
5. YOU ARE NOT GOING TO GET 10M FROM A LONG LOST BUT RECENTLY DECEASED RELATIVE IN NIGERIA.
6. Lots more you get the idea.

My email is scanned at the server level, I don't run any realtime AV on my PC's, I use a 'command line' scanner to scan any downloaded files (ClamAV portable).

I would drop both of those for AVG free for home use. But if you want to keep just 1 of those 2 then I would choose Trendmicro.

Having more than 1 realtime AV is a bad recommendation IMHO.

On top of all that i'm actually of the opinion that desktop AV is seriously depreciated ever since the last generation of polymorphic zero day exploits and social engineering. I have seen too many active AV packages completely rooted for the last year or so to feel actually protected by them.

Are you sure that they are not in your profile instead of the game folder?

Yes they originated there, but Vista has a 'nasty' habit of defaulting to the current profile MyDocuments folder or subfolder.

Its normal, beyond a certain point llnw.net (Limelight Networks) and the game servers etc block ICMP (ping, traceroute etc).

No idea, but its the first voodoo I apply, because there isn't much that can be done if its a problem upstream, most of those things get fixed without any input by an end user, just never on the schedule you would like.

I had terrible lag last night so i'm in agreement that there is a problem upstream.

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Actually, in this case..I'm not too sure about that. *IF* what the AE whiners are saying is true, then that must place them in the minority of players in CoX. If they can't get parties to do "real" content because everyone is in AE, then that means the majority of players wouldn't want to nerf AE.

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The 'everyone is doing it, so it must be true' fallacy aside.

If we assume that 'everyone' knows that AE farms especially exploitative farms are not allowed, its more likely that the average player especially new ones in AE are engaging in human herding/crowd behaviour and not an actual considered choice.

There are many examples of this on every level, a few angles of the ~1999-present housing bubble are interesting, and there is lots of reading on the subject otherwise, but this Ted talk is one of my favorites:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/da...oral_code.html

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Google "social proof" for how stupidly people make decisions in any given social situation. Its absurd how irrational humans are, and what judgments they make with almost zero data.

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Cool, thank you, I have always been aware of the behaviour and have done a lot of reading about it the last couple of years, but believe it or not I have never heard it called that till today, now I have found a whole other body of information!

The game is on Limelight networks and they don't allow ping or traceroute (ICMP) so and 'lost' packets at the game server end are normal.

If i'm having connection trouble I try /neterrorcorrection 1 or 2
first, then I troubleshoot my local network, then i'll try to figure out if there is something going on with my ISP.

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Do Luck Charms have any broad effect on the game economy? Would buying up all the LC's over an extended period have any knock on effects with respect to price or availability of other items?

Conversely, would flooding the market with cheap LCs over an extended period have any effect?

What about regularly "flopping" LC's? That is, regularly buying up LCs and relisting them at 1 to get rid of standing bids?

Fulmens' inf destruction project has got me thinking about other ways to indulge in macroeconomic chicanery.



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I have done that a few times where some abnormally high priced salvage bleeped me off and I figured that a few million spent to trap someone in their position would be fun.

What I have done is to buy up and sell immediately whatever is required to see the selling price has dropped back down to 'normal', then buy up enough to fill up my slots on 1 character and list them for normal -some% and then let the normal production rate run away from the original flippers price.

I have been successful at this 2/3 times, with the 3rd costing me about 15M to ultimately fail, but it was fun.

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The game crashes and this is the message I receive.


Assertion failed

Program: C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\CityOfHeroes.exe
Time: Thu Jul 02 10:05:24 AM
Process ID: 4056
File: c:\src\utilitieslib\utils\superassert.c
Line: 1857
Expression: 0

Error Message: CRT abort() called

ERROR: swDumpStackToBuffer - timeout (258) waiting for dumpHeap is NOT corrupted
Last windows SYSTEM error: Not enough storage is available to process this command.

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In this thread the removal of the Nvidia network LSP fixed his crash which was similar/same as yours.

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat....ue#Post13666435

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Wrong, they have nerfed regular content and AT's over and over again, content that on average was an order of magnitude less reward/time then what MA allows people to do (with the notable exception of pre agro cap/aoe cap herding), they will nerf MA down to regular content levels then probably below.

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Wow. Way to miss a point. FYI, MA rewards are ALREADY below regular content. It's simply that the rewards system is more flexible than the myriad random drops.
And it's merits that are factored on reward/time. Not exp/prestige/inf/tickets.

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Did you hear that whooshing sound? That was the point flying past your head at mach 6.

No one is talking about 'regular' non exploitive MA content, which is indeed less than the regular game, its the farms that give 2-10X or better the rewards/time than anything else in the game that needs the urgent fixing.

Pay attention.

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Do you somehow read it otherwise?

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Again, if the devs had meant for the MA to be a solely story-telling mechanism, there would be NO rewards. PERIOD.
And, unlike you, I have a strong enough command of the language to understand "not intended" is not the same as "not allowed".
And, unlike you, I don't see this as a black and white issue. I agree that, beyond a certain threshold, farming and power levelling are detrimental to the game.
And, unlike you, my threshold isn't set to "zero tolerance" and all the idiocies that sort of policy engenders.

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How about I quote Positron directly:

"This Mission Architect primary purpose is for telling stories. We do not want people to spend days making a great story only to find it shuffled into a list of missions with titles like "Get your Rikti Monkey badge here", "10 badges in 5 minutes", "Down on the AV Farm", etc. etc."

Its obviously not black and white, I have made no zero tolerance statements, and yes by any stretch of the imagination, "not intended" does mean "not allowed" when read in the original context.


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If all the MA nerfs were caused because Positron got some personal opinions from some vocal players, its still all his decision, no one water boarded him or anything to force him.

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Again, I didn't say anyone FORCED him to. The word used was "influence".

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Influenced him to do what? Something they have already been doing for years now and explicitly warned against in MA? I can't argue with pure fantasy, if you want to pretend that some players 'influence' was somehow a factor, knock yourself silly. The truth is that farming has been nerfed and discouraged over and over in every way shape and form, I just don't see how this is any different because some players pointed out gross abuse of the MA system and the devs reacted accordingly. No mystery there.