Miss_Cataclysm

Sorry for the rather coarse analogy, but let's talk porn. Once upon a time, pornographers tried to pretend that they were legitimate filmmakers. That didn't work, and the result is now that cinema and pornography are two separate industries.

I wonder if there's some way we can likewise separate the "industries" of farming (but not exploitative farming; that should still be hammered into the ground) and story-based MA arcs.

The first step is obviously having different lists for either. That way, the farmers won't low-rate the story-based arcs for poor rewards because the farmers won't even look at story-based arcs, and likewise the people who like stories can find stories without having to wade through farm arcs. Just like going into a DVD store, you first go to the section you're interested in; you don't have to look through the ones you're not interested in.

The second step, which is more complex and controversial, is that maybe story arcs and farm arcs should have different rules. I have no idea how the rules should be different, so I'm not going to comment on that, but perhaps rewards appropriate to player-type or something.

Just want to drag up the issue of randomly generated maps, because I think that was mentioned. On the whole, I'm against them. The thing is, if they're randomly generated, the differences between one map and the next are not meaningful, and without meaningful differences, it's just as repetitive as having static maps (ask anyone who's done the token grind in AO even once).

Dynamic generation that has some degree of randomness but also factors in rules to make the map engaging (and, perhaps, believable, but even the existing maps aren't really believable) would be better, but that's, of course, a much, much bigger task.

A certain website that I will not name for its potentially inflammatory nature did this in about February last year, and it was, it has to be said, a really great idea.

There needs to be a weighting, though. Up or down ratings need to be weighted inversely to the number of votes the arc's got, otherwise established arcs get an undue advantage over new arcs. (Though obviously a new arc with one up vote shouldn't outstrip an old arc with 900 up votes and 5 down votes; the weighting would need to be a bit more complex than that.)

Act fast.

My friend currently has me on a forced programme of not-rushing-into-anything (a long and not terribly interesting story). Which seems like a good idea given past disasters, and would be great if it didn't mean the few people who do interest me all get boyfriends before I can get anywhere. Stupid friend. (I love her, really.)

So, yeah. Don't waste any time. And good luck.

Only problem I've had with Windows 7 was the "fullscreen CoH won't take focus and hide the taskbar" issue. Works for me if I make sure I have no maximised windows on other programs before running CoH (though I don't know how many others have this problem).

Then again, I never really had any issues with CoH on my other computers, whether my Vista laptop or either OS on my previous XP/OpenSUSE desktop.

Ok, that's a partial success (sort of). If I have my Firefox window set to maximised (even if it's minimised, if you see what I mean: if the window size is maximum, whether or not the window's actually visible) then I seem to have this problem. If I'm running Firefox in a window smaller than my desktop, it doesn't happen.

I kinda like having Firefox maximised, but not doing so while playing has its advantages, too.

Oops. I probably should have mentioned that. When I click the mouse, the screen flashes black for a moment then goes back to the way it was (taskbar in front, no sound, no input, etc.)

Well, it's a bit different. England has three years between finishing Primary and starting GCSEs, whereas Scotland only has two years between finishing Primary and starting Standard Grades, but has an extra year of Primary. I think that's how it works, anyway... But I think Scotland also starts school a year earlier, at age 4 rather than age 5?

Thanks. I have tried running it in admin mode, but that didn't seem to make any difference.

I'm sure I wouldn't have this problem if I ran in windowed mode, so that's one workaround, but... I'd kinda prefer to have fullscreen :P

When I start CoH, after agreeing to the ToS and it goes fullscreen, CoH doesn't take window focus: the Windows 7 taskbar is still visible, I hear no sound, and I can't do anything on the screen (i.e. enter my password). Sometimes I can force CoH to take focus by alt-tabbing away then back, but sometimes that doesn't work.

I imagine it's something I need to change in Windows 7. I've only been using Windows 7 for about a week, so I'm kinda new to all this. Any ideas?

Everything Ravenswing said, plus the fact that roleplaying means stories. In story terms, your bio is expository material, and there are only two types of story that put a whole clump of expository material together like that: old ones and bad ones.

Ideally, exposition should be woven into the stories, not set apart like some chore everyone else has to undertake before getting into the story proper. I haven't roleplayed much in CoH (yet), but I have roleplayed extensively in games that didn't even have bios/descriptions, and were no worse off for it.

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Secondly i'ld like to add a relatively new arc created in the same issue. Now im not sure what the arc name is but its the one when you have to recover a magical artifact the warriors have stolen and hercules wants your help in defeating the guys who have took it.

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I loved that one, although I have to say I did it as a solo cloaked sniper with super jump to get into places they couldn't reach me, so there wasn't so much "how did I survive that?!" but even without that, the finale was a great mission.

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Also, the arc name was Crown of Glory, and it was Odysseus, not Hercules, that wanted it back. And the mission with all the ambushes was the second of three, not the final one... I wonder if we are talking about the same arc, here

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Valiant Red my stalker is hydrophobic

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Small matter of pedantry; she's probably aquaphobic. The rule for phobias is usually that you use the Greek root rather than the Latin root, and in that case 'hydrophobia' would be correct, but hydrophobia was already the name for a symptom of rabies, so they had to call a fear of water aquaphobia instead.

On the topic at hand, yes, I do that. I often type IC threats to the mobs in local when I'm soloing a mission >.>

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However, as you said, MA does massively up the likelihood of players that have no idea how the ATs work. That, and it results in none of the rest of the game content getting played. Which im pretty sure the Devs dont want, seeing as they keep adding more of it

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Yeah, I guess. I don't know. As a newbie myself, I'm finding I've made a conscious decision to play fewer MA missions. I think that's because I care about story, and want to see the canon stuff before I see the... er... 'fanon' (how I hate that word) stuff. (Which, I hasten to edit and add, doesn't mean the player stuff is bad. It just means it's either not relevant to the main story or... spoilerish. Granted I probably shouldn't hang around the forums so much if I care about spoilers, either, but too late now.)

So I'm living proof that the MA isn't stopping the other content from getting played, and I haven't had any trouble getting non-MA teams (though admittedly the same players keep cropping up in all my teams, so maybe there aren't that many doing it :P ).

I have to say, though, even as a new player, it wasn't the MA that attracted me to CoH. I hadn't even heard about it until I went to the online store to buy the game, at which point I kind of thought "oh, that's pretty neat" but it wasn't really a dealmaker for me.

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Secondly i'ld like to add a relatively new arc created in the same issue. Now im not sure what the arc name is but its the one when you have to recover a magical artifact the warriors have stolen and hercules wants your help in defeating the guys who have took it.

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I loved that one, although I have to say I did it as a solo cloaked sniper with super jump to get into places they couldn't reach me, so there wasn't so much "how did I survive that?!" but even without that, the finale was a great mission.

My favourite, though, was probably the quadruple Striga Isle superarc from Stephanie Peebles, Long Jack, and Tobias and Lars Hansen. If I only get to pick one, I'll pick Lars' 'A Madman's Council', because I loved all that super-spy sneaking into the Council base stuff, but really I'd like to pick the whole thing.

I've played a few MMOs by now, and what I've learned is that there are always players (and I use the term loosely) who don't know how their class works. I've actually heard someone in another game advise a new player not to choose the healer class because "the healer class is [censored]. Whenever I team with a healer on my tank, the healer always dies real quick."

MA farming is a very high-profile road to not knowing how to play, yes, but let's not pretend that restricting MA is going to suddenly make clueless noobs disappear.

Okay, here goes.

Global Name: @Miss Cataclysm
Server: Union
City of Heroes RP Character: Miss Cataclysm; sarcastic, Scottish, short.
Type of RP: I love in-depth storylines and all, and I'm a fairly experienced roleplayer in other MMOs, but I'm slightly more comfortable with casual just while I try to learn more about the CoX lore.
Can be contacted: Any way you can find me, any time you want. I'm always up for RP. I'm never up for being a fill on a farm team.
Times on: It's been mornings recently, but that's subject to change.
Timezone: UTC

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No. It isn't. Technically or otherwise. It's a compatibility layer, providing DLLs in the place of the Windows ones Linux doesn't have. Nothing is being emulated at all.

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DLL's which translate calls to Windows drivers into ones which the Mac can understand. Whilst it may appear to be a compatibility layer, if it's translating one thing into another, which it IS doing, then it's implementing a form of emulation.

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No. An emulator would copy the internal implementaton of Windows. Which would be illegal (except in borderline cases like VMWare, which require the user to own a legitimate copy of Windows they can use). Wine is an implementation of the Windows API, which is an entirely different kettle of fish. Microsoft provides the interface, but not the implementation. It's quite common in computing science to have several implementations for a single interface, and implementing the same interface does not in any way imply any element of emulation.

Oh, and...
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Having lots of experience with various types of emulation over the years, I can tell you that it will NEVER run as well as running it natively, not matter how good the emulator is.

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If Wine, Cedega and Cider were emulators, this might be true. But they're not, which is why it isn't. Microsoft's DirectX implementation is badly bloated and performs poorly, so a reimplementation of the same interface actually has a lot of scope to perform better. Which is why I get a better framerate in a lot of games (including CoX) on my dual-boot system when I boot into Linux than when I boot into WinXP (though admittedly the other half of games are unstable or don't work at all - which is another thing that wouldn't be the case with an emulator).

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And whether CoH is a next or last gen MMO will determine it's survival compared to other MMOs that compete to steal it's fanbase, so i am sure the devs are interested in keeping up.

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And the distinctly gen-before-last Anarchy Online did have voices ages ago, and one of the updates deliberately removed them.

Course, that may have been because only a few NPCs had voices, and they realised that adding full voices was overambitious. But that actually does bring up a pretty good point, if you want to talk about competition: competing does require not being frivolous with the game's budget just as much as it requires keeping up with the competition technologically.