Lily Inverse

To those claiming the new launcher is always always always faster....sorry.

I've actually had an opportunity to test some extreme and normal situations with the new and old launchers, and frankly, it's a mixed bag at best. The good news is that in most normal cases the NCSoft Launcher will have a fairly slight edge.

I don't have my actual timings anymore, but here's the cases where things choke:

2) Downloading the game: About a 10-15% loss of speed. I have no idea why DLing the game would produce wildly different results from simply patching it, but that's what happened.

1) On an outdated 360k DSL connection: This is the nasty one, and probably where a lot of the complaints come from: I experience about 75% slower downloads on this using the new vs. old launcher. I'm not sure how much of the US is still stuck on these kinds of lines, but it's definitely not ZERO and these are the customers who are really hurt.

As I understand it, the reason behind not allowing cross-side bases is mostly technical - the system makes an assumption that every character is a Hero or Villain, and this assumption is tightly woven into the base system.

IE, from the base system's perspective, there are no "rogues" or "vigilantes", just "villains" or "heroes" with an extra tag that means nothing. And that changing this requires throwing out the entire base system and starting again from scratch.

Not impossible, but not something that will happen except as part of a major upgrade to the system.

You know what? I've only seen one person demanding a solo-incarnate path that is the same as the group path, and later she pretty much changed her position to "As long as we start getting solo-and-small-group content again, the Incarnate system can just rot" (in essence.)

However, let's do some math.

First, I'm going to use the pre 20.5 numbers. I just don't have any of the new ones off the top of my head, but they don't work out in favor of the argument actually being made anyway.

Assuming the absolute worst luck in the world, let's say every iTrial drops one common, four astrals, and one Empyrean. Doing a trial takes one hour (including organizing) and you can do two per day for this.

Now, for the 'solo' path, we'll actually assume the slightly-above-average luck of BillZ's test. This nets you ten shards and roughly 0 influence for three hours of work.

As an iTrial player, playing the maximum number of trials per day, it would take playing (if my numbers are right) 47 hours over 23 days to acquire one V.rare. Remember, this is WORST CASE. Odds are really good you'll get at least one rare and cut five days and ten hours off of that even with lousy luck.

Going solo, it will take you over a thousand hours for the better part of the year for the same reward, assuming you actually fall close to the average (IE, you're doing MUCH better than the above worst-case).

FAIR might be closer to, say, being able to solo to very rare in 90 hours over 30 days with some reliability.

Objective feedback: The install instructions claim that the launcher will prompt for automatic downloads. It does not do this, but defaults to actually doing so.

Also, there doesn't seem to be a provision in place to transfer Steam client users to the NCSoft Launcher. This will be an issue attempting to bring this to Live since Steam seems to check whether the launcher you're using is the correct one and refuses to run.

Subjective feedback: One. I hate, hate, HATE companies that try to gather "usage statistics" and slap the 'recommended' label on the option. I don't mind that you'd like the information, understand that it's useful to you, but the mere fact that you're essentially lying about the reasons for wanting it by saying it's for MY own good immediately causes me to shut it off and strongly not want to do further business with the company.

Second, the NC Launcher uses five times the RAM and runs continuously in the background whether being used or not. Not an issue for me personally, but some people are still running on minimum specs and this will make the game fail to run at all, or run so poorly that it's not worth playing.

While I understand that this is an order from on high from the corporate overlords, I am going to make one last appeal to let those of us who prefer it keep the old launcher. Warts and all. I really don't give a flying leap about "those other games" and thus, having "all your NC Soft Games in the same place" is at best a non-concern and, at worst, an annoyance that makes me want to find an NC exec and make incredibly rude noises at them.

EDIT: Also, adding one last bit of Objective: Download speed is noticeably DEGRADED on my connection by the launcher (about 10k/bps loss.)

Does anybody know what names Kinetic Melee uses for the purposes of binds? I'd like to set some up, but just attempting to use the actual names of the power (sans spaces, yes) results in absolutely no response. If I use the same command with Brawl, Brawl goes off, so I'm not making that mistake either.