Mandu

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You guys are really unhelpful. How stupid can this company be NOT to run their patches on a bittorrent client, a solution that is universally known to work for everyone?

No I am not running on satellite, and the amount of people running on satellite is so small it makes your suggestion rather useless to most. I'm on cable, never ever had any connection problems to anything. Heck, I even run my own dedicated server for live video conferencing for my website so I know a thing or two about running connections.

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Must be an import from WoW where insulting other people and proclaiming your own skills is absolutely mandatory in the forums.

Did you bother to read the rest of my post where I mentioned reskinning programs or the graphics tablet?

Just in case you are using satellite, or for anybody who is, there is a workaround.

The solution to start the updater. Then once it is running start another copy of it, and so on and so on and so on. Wait till one of them connects then close down all the others and go ahead and play (after all updates are downloaded of course). While you are busy waiting for the updater to connect make a new shortcut. Target the cityofheroes.exe file, not the updater file but the cityofheroes.exe. Make the target look like this

"C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\CityOfHeroes.exe" -project coh

With of course any modifications needed depending on which drive and directory you have it in. Once you have completely updated the game you can then use that shortcut to play without updating. Any time the game is patched you will have to run the updater again to update your copy, but after that you can again use the shortcut.

If on the other hand you aren't on satellite then the most common causes for that particular problem are having a reskinning program (such as windowblinds or the default that comes with alienware computers) operating. In that case just tell it not to reskin either cohupdater.exe or cityofheroes.exe.

Another possible cause is having a graphics tablet connected. If that is what is causing the problem then the only solution found so far is to remove the tablet and uninstall its software and drivers. So hopefully it isn't the tablet.

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US accounts will not work at all on the UK client.
Since neither account works, I'm guessing you accidentally downloaded the wrong one.

Make sure the US client is the one you installed.

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And the way to tell this is the US client programs will be named cityofheroes.exe and cohupdater.exe while the Euro versions will be named Cityofheroes.eu.exe and cohupdater.eu.exe

Atlas should be holding a BRB in celebration of the release of the BRB expansion.

If it ever happens that is.

waiting here...

still waiting...

BRB now please.

Almost every single person who has reported frequent crashes lately and could not find a reason for those crashes has had the Realtek HD Audio. I suspect there might be some incompatibility issue here. You might try temporarily disabling it from devices and removing the drivers in order to see if that is what is causing the crashes.

I'm not saying to disable your audio permanently. Just long enough to run the game for a couple hours and see what happens. If you do stop crashing then at least the problem will have been isolated.

Happens to everybody with a buff pet. The pet generates aggro. The only way to overcome this is to get the attention of all the enemy with either a taunt, an aoe, or a ranged attack before closing.

Non melee types don't have as much problem with this because they themselves usually capture the attention of the enemy before the pet gets in aggro range.

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I tried both your arcs Thalomarre and had to give up because 5 defeat all missions in a row does not make an arc.

What's that you say?
They aren't defeat alls?

Neither is mine. Once again Stomphoof made an assumption that was incorrect. The first mission is click one glowie, defeat one boss. And the cargo ship is the short one with 3 and a half rooms and was picked specifically because it was the smallest number of rooms of any map with the exception of the casinos.

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*sigh* Once again? What once again? I assumed it was a defeat all yes, back when I PLAYED IT.

Mandu, I am going to say this in the nicest way possible: GO away.

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"Once again" is a phrase that is often used as shorthand for "I said this before but I guess I'm going to have to say it once again." I didn't even think of the other meaning of it.

As for going away? Nah. The only reason I'm hanging around here is to see if you do another review. In the mean time I'm responding to people who say that I shouldn't have complained about your review but instead just changed my mission to make you happy. Or people who are making assumptions about my arc that are just plain wrong.

Well, you are missing the first part of the CoHhelper which would show how up to date your drivers are and what kind of memory you have free. However with what is visible.

Turn off bloom. It sometimes causes interference with ATI cards.

Also you should switch to either AVG or Avira for your anti virus. Both are free and work much better and more efficiently than what you have.Symantec (ie Norton) is a bit of a memory hog and is also heavy handed with some files. This is especially true when it needs to do some background process. It will often steal memory and processor time from some other program. It's at it's worst when the other program isn't actually actively doing much at the moment. For instance if you should happen to be sitting in Atlas and just chatting or such.

Teatimer.exe has been known in rare instances to cause CoH to crash. That was a problem a long time ago and I haven't seen it crop up recently, but some recent change may have caused the bug to crop up again.

You have a few missing files in your Hijackthis report. Nothing important but you can clean them up by running Hijackthis again and checking those boxes then choosing to fix them.

Also, what brand and wattage power supply are you running? It may not be strong enough to handle your card being pushed by the CoH graphics engine and the file swaps to your drive.

I really wish you hadn't called me "Your Highness" by the way. I was hoping to keep my identity as the king of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick secret. Now I guess the mouse is out of the bag.

I tried both your arcs Thalomarre and had to give up because 5 defeat all missions in a row does not make an arc.

What's that you say?
They aren't defeat alls?

Neither is mine. Once again Stomphoof made an assumption that was incorrect. The first mission is click one glowie, defeat one boss. And the cargo ship is the short one with 3 and a half rooms and was picked specifically because it was the smallest number of rooms of any map with the exception of the casinos.

You win an internet.

So far as I know the only ones that don't convert are the Fiends because there is nothing higher to convert to.

Although it would be funny to watch a Fiend dive into the ground and 3 Rascals pop out.

This is my official petition stating that petitions are not allowed in the forums.

This is my official petition addendum stating that the devs have nothing to do with deleting missions, banning missions, banning users or setting the generic flag. That is all the GMs.

This is my official petition epilogue stating that you don't have to worry about missions being deleted because before too long all the people who keep recreating and reposting exploit missions will have all their slots filled with banned missions and be unable to create any new ones.

Well, I can see you are convinced that it can't be your system. Which means it's probably your system.

Those who are most often certain that the fault isn't on their end are most often the ones with multiple problems on their end.

So if your system is not a problem how about proving it to us by posting that Hijackthis and CoHhelper?

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Mandu should not have berated you for not finding it. he should have admitted that there was a problem with the map and adjusted.

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Although I'll admit I got a bit angrier than the review warranted, in this you are completely wrong. The glowie wasn't hidden. It was in fact visible and audible in the video multiple times. If the glowie had been in a corner or some such and never visible then I would agree and likely change the map. But it wasn't, and hasn't been in the various times that I actually tested and fine tuned the mission.

If instead he had gone in with his toggles turned off and been beaten by the Crey and then quit because the mission was overpowered then should I lower the difficulty of the mobs?

If I put it in one of the warehouses that has the bay doors that slide open and he didn't open one of those doors then is it a problem with the map?

A mistake made by a player doesn't equate to there being a problem with the mission.

I'll admit that having the review be a video one does have some advantage. If the reviewer complains about a problem with the mission then it's possible to see if the mission actually did have a problem or if the reviewer made a mistake.

And actually my going off on him like that will most likely prove beneficial to Stomphoof's future reviews. He's more likely to pay closer attention to the mission because he knows that his mistakes will be visible to anybody who watches the video so he will base his comments and reviews on actuality rather than assumption.

I offer up my apologies to Stomphoof though. I just got extremely angry that he gave my mission a bad review and rating based on his play style rather than on the mission's actual merits. Venture rated it 2 stars because he didn't get the humor and considered the parody of the Devs to be some sort of gaming blasphemy or something. And I don't care about that at all because it's his honest opinion.

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Diverting the joke... Its ROGUE. Secondly, its the same thing.. but we've all just about settled on CoX or Co*.

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But the joke is why the thread was created. Red side=Blue side gone rouge.

If you have any skinning programs running like Windowblinds or the default reskinning that comes with Alienware computers then tell it not to reskin either of the cityofheroes programs.

If you have a graphics tablet attached then uninstall it and see if that works.

If you have PeerGuardian running then turn it off.

Well let's go over a few things. One you are the only person who has started a thread about it. Two nobody else has spoken up and said the same thing happened to them. And three, every once in a great while a zone mapserve does happen.

Taking all that into consideration I would have to say that "a serious problem affecting many players." is a bit overstated. Somewhat akin to saying that boxer gloves, bunny ears, and robot feet when combined in the costume creator causing a problem with secondary colors is a serious problem affecting many players.

And the fact that you keep mapserving in Atlas indicates to me a problem with your system. Maybe if you posted some CoHhelper and Hijackthis results somebody might be able to tell you what was going on.

Can't recommend anything off the top of my head but I don't think I've ever seen a larger hijackthis with more unknown and deactivated entries and junk files.

Was this a clean install of Windows 7 or did you dogpile a bunch of other stuff on top of it? You only have 971 megs of ram left free out of 4 gigs. That's not exactly efficient.

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As for the "proof in pictures" of my being talked to there are none. I did not think to take any at the time due to the fact I was so angry. I am waiting to hear back in PRIVATE e-mail as to what was done with my character. I WILL NOT be posting anything since it is a PRIVATE matter and would get me kicked off the boards.

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Two questions which you don't have to answer but which will give you an answer.

Question one: Was the person who told you that your character would be deleted visible as an object or npc from the game or were they invisible or a normal character?

Reason for question. GMs never appear as a normal character. They can select any object or npc from the database to use (pretty much anything that we can use from the MA).

Question two: Was their name GM_(name)?

Reason for question: Only employees can have the underscore in their name, and the GMs always do. If the person demanding the deletion of the character didn't have the underscore in their name then it was another player pretending to be a GM. Incidentally a player who does that will be banned from the game themselves.

Question three (yeah I know I said only two but what the heck eh?) Do you have logs enabled? If you don't know, or even if you are fairly sure you don't, check anyway. It will be in your city of heroes game folder. There will be a subfolder called "logs" and then in that folder there will be one called "games". If chat logging is on then there will be a copy of the conversation.

Considering that there has never been a case of GM harassment like this, and considering that there have been cases of people impersonating GMs, I would say this is almost certainly a case of somebody who has your account information pretending to be a GM and then deleting the character.

This arc did feel like an epic space battle. Like Venture said, some things just happened. But that's more than acceptable in space opera, in fact you can pretty much expect it. Not everything has to be Law and Order.

I didn't have any problem figuring out why the Azeri didn't kill the scientists or destroy the artifact. The entire plot and the dialogue from the NPCs made it very clear that they were a peaceful race and primarily interested in scientific research.

Are you sure there are only 3 of the EBs in the last mission? I could have sworn there were 4 or 5 of them. And the two EBs that spawned together when I ran it were both in the first room, the same room where Venture said the artifact spawned for him. I'm guessing that particular map has bugged spawn points.

I myself didn't see any points where you could have cut out any dialogue in order to insert more explanations. The NPC chat is what gives you the whole motivations of the Azeri, and the contact dialogue gives whole flow of a storyline rather than just a series of missions.

The only thing you might want to do is in the arc description itself note that the final mission contains multiple EBs.

I just ran this arc because I saw you in VU complaining so much about multiple deaths and had to see the problem myself. I loved the dialogue and plot, it was classic space opera with an evil universe twist. It reminded me of the mirror universe federation from the different Star Trek series.

The only problem I had with it was the final mission having so many EBs and being a kill all. Still I'm guessing it was the fact you were only 34 that got you killed so many times. I went through on my 46 fire/dark scrapper and only died twice, both times in the final mission when two of the EBs were in the same room. I'm guessing the difficulty setting made a big difference too. I went in on rugged and virtually never saw any healing taking place, just a whole lot of robot summoning.

Oh, and also for me the artifact spawned in the final room of the end level. So it might be set for spawn at any location rather than back, or else that's one of the maps where the spawn locations are bugged.

I gave it a 4.

I've suggested this idea in the past. So of course I'm going to give it a big thumbs up. I hate when I've almost completed a mission and it suddenly resets. Especially on the large Orenbega or Crey Lab maps.

It was about as disturbing as an episode of Superfriends. None of the descriptions or villain speeches were anything more than you would see in a 70s cartoon.

On a disturbing scale of 1 to 10 I would rate it a 2. And that is only because of your finishing text stating you will pull it if anybody finds it too disturbing.

I would recommend arc 9744 Mender Stygian task force. Interesting time travel plot. A visit to Brass Monday. And a nice custom group. The first mission is a defeat all but it's an easy one.

And of course I have to recommend @gadgetdon's "Butterfly Effect" which did make dev's choice. Plus the two sequels 2974 and 88842

Over the top....
hmmmmmm..

I Married Myself

Stand And Deliver (The real version)

This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us

Bizarre but I love it
Alice

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