Leandro

Avast AV lets you disable all its modules from the system tray with one click. Give the free version (home edition) a try and see if you like it. I personally don't use any AV solution because I do a lot of active monitoring on my computer to make sure nothing gets through (autorun disabled for all drives, using virustotal.com on any download that looks even slightly fishy, I know my normal process list from memory, etc).

99% resistance to Hamidon damage, and 100 mag protection to all status effects. Then I'd head into the Hive solo and go nuts.

I'm assuming you updated all the drivers at this point? If so I'm not sure there's much you can do. All the Windows registry settings will change things that are available from COH's interface by selecting advanced graphic options. I'll mess around with Ubuntu later and see if I can reproduce your problem, even if the chip is not exactly the same.

I don't have COH in recurring billing (can't, since my credit card is worthless outside Argentina) but as soon as they announced the Loyalty Program, I went to the brazilian distributor (only way I have to get time cards lately) and got enough time cards to keep the account active until December. Time cards are your friends when the billing system hates you.

You should also set all the graphics options to the bare minimum and see if that gives you a viable image. If it does, add things little by little until you figure out what's causing the "noir effect". I tested with an Intel 82945G graphics chip in Ubuntu 9.04 with the latest drivers, and it does work on the lowest settings; I didn't fiddle much around with it though, as I just wanted to know if it would work at all with that card or not.

After having listened to all the sides, I finally decided which is the only one I can support. All the others are nuts.

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Actual information: we don't know.

Speculation: Praetoria is probably a no-fight zone, since Tyrant would want his utopia to have no apparent fights going on. They may have an arena, but I highly doubt there will be a Player vs. Player zone (or content) set in Praetoria. For that you probably will have to pick a side and "exit" into our universe (Paragon City/Rogue Isles.)

The improved graphics are so, so awesome. I hope we get the actual screenshots from that slideshow posted once HeroCon is over.

When you exemplar down, you lose the set bonuses of regular IOs. However, PvP IOs work like Purple IOs in that you don't lose their bonuses when you exemplar down. This is not stated in game anywhere, as their description (at least the ones I checked) only mentions getting the second set of bonuses while in PvP, and nothing about their exemplaring bonus. That, combined with the fact that they drop from PvP kills only, sets them aside from other IO sets, and as such I think they should not share the orange color of the rare sets that drop from critters and missions.

I suggest they get a new color, for example red. That way, we can clearly distinguish them from the other rare recipes, and also know that red recipes behave like purples, in that their set bonuses stay with you when you exemplar down.

Has anyone stopped to think what little sense those alerts make?

10-23-2009 12:18:55 ALERT CANCELED: The zombies have disappeared from Dark Astoria.

10-23-2009 12:52:55 ALERT CANCELED: Supernatural activity no longer present in Croatoa.

Short version:

The banners are too hard to defeat without debuffs. Resetting the timer to 20 minutes when they become vulnerable would fix this, while not adding time to the event if people have no interest in it.

Long version:

Now that the craziness of release has calmed down and there's not 100 people hitting the banners every time they appear, it's becoming very apparent that the event relies too much on debuffers being present. This was not evident in the Training Room runs because we all brought our "main and best" character there, so there was no shortage of debuffs. On live, though, even two teams are not enough unless there's at least one rad present.

The first phase, defeating enemies at all 4 points at once, works fine. Even when it was just one team, we managed to do it within 6 minutes, leaving 10 minutes for the banners. It's the banners themselves that are proving a problem.

I ran the event in Peregrine Island 2 with my Radiation/Sonic defender, a debuffing beast. I had one full team, and there was another team with 5 people on it. I did not see other debuffers. We destroyed the four banners incredibly easy, and had time to spare.

Then I changed to my Claws/Willpower scrapper and ran the event in Croatoa, Peregrine Island 3, and Independence Port. Every time, we failed to defeat the banners in time. In Croatoa, there were no debuffers present, but we had two full teams dishing damage. In Peregrine Island 3, we had a Sonic Resonance character using Disruption Field on me, which is a 22.5% base resistance debuff. It still was not enough, and we only got two banners down in time.

Finally, in Independence Port, we had 10 people; one full team and a duo. The full team had a dark defender and a kinetics controller. We destroyed the first 2 banners very quickly; however, I made a massive error in judgement: because the final banner was very very far from the first 3, I asked if anyone had the Team Recall power, and asked the person who said "yes" to head there and port us when blue (the third one) was down. That person, I didn't realize, was the Kinetics controller.

So after defeating the first two banners in a minute each, we spent 5 minutes on the third one, and that was still with the Dark Defender on the team. The Kinetics controller was making a huge difference with Transfusion and Fulcrum Shift.

Since the problem is that we simply ran out of time, after making the banners vulnerable, I suggest that the solution is to give us more time. When the banners become vulnerable, we usually have less than 3 minutes to defeat each banner. Resetting the timer to 20 minutes, givin us 5 minutes per banner, would make all the difference. And, if players have no interest in the event, the banners still go away, undisturbed, after the first 20 minutes.

Note: I got the badge for the Aspect without having any other badge associated with the event, or even doing any damage to it. I just joined a team that was already fighting it, and they killed it while I was en route. That got me the badge.

PVP recipes are the new purples, when it comes to price. I paid 2 billion to get two sets of Panacea, and I have plans to slot 3 more. They really should be purples, considering their scarcity. Keeping those bonuses when ex'd down would be more than awesome.