Mister Rik

As a refugee from that big game, I've formulated a couple ideas:

The School Uniform Theory

One of the arguments in favor of school uniforms is that they level the playing field by making everybody look more or less the same, reducing the possibility of the more affluent students flaunting their affluence (via more fashionable, name-brand clothing) over the poorer students. How well this actually works in real life is debatable, but that's the theory.

While CoH lacks "uniforms" per se, I think the same basic principle applies: In this game, there are no (or very few) visible rewards for success. With costumes being purely cosmetic, there is nothing to flaunt. With nothing to flaunt, there is less flaunting.


The Dodgeball Theory

Ah dodgeball. There are two kinds of dodgeball players: sadists and people who hate playing dodgeball. What is the one thing needed to play dodgeball? The ball. No ball, no dodging, no big red welts on the side of your face. Dodgeball fans were the original griefers.

Take away a griefer's tools (or don't give them to him in the first place), and he can't grief effectively. In CoH, you can't "steal" another player's "kills". You can't gank people. You can't "ninja" their loot. And thanks to NPCs being solid and impassible, you can't block them with your gigantic dragon or mammoth mount:

http://www.mister-rik.com/hosted/sw20101115.jpg

Just posting a link, since I'm not sure if I should actually post a screenshot from another game. But see that big cluster in the middle of the picture? That's almost 100 people with their ginormous mounts parked directly on top of the questgivers for some special "pre-expansion" quests back in mid-November, 2010. You couldn't even see the questgivers, let alone click on them. And it wasn't like these players were trying to get the quests themselves. They just thought it was "funny" to stop anybody else from getting them.

Don't see that in CoH.

I recently gained access to those buff pets that become available at reward tier 6. I have mixed feelings about them, but I'm leaning heavily toward "these things are useless". At least when playing solo.

The main thing is that these pets seem to have a big taunt aura/effect on them, judging by the way so many mobs will just completely ignore my big bad character in favor of running past me to shoot/smack my pet out of the air. I've actually had mobs that I've already engaged and hit disengage from me to attack my pet instead. The urgency the mobs feel to "take that thing out now!" seems completely out of proportion to the relatively minor buffs these pets provide.

On the other hand, if that Malta Gunslinger wants to waste a shot on my pet instead of shooting me with that ice block Hold effect, who am I to complain? (Though, seriously, I'm playing my fire blaster and I'm at maximum range, hit the Gunslinger with my snipe, taking off 75% of his HP, and his first response is to shoot my pet? Just how powerful is the taunt on those pets?)

Before I start complaining again, let me emphasize a couple important positives:

• I love, love, love this game. I came here as a refugee from the "800-pound gorilla" MMO after finally getting bored out of my skull with it. And I picked CoH entirely because it's the only other major MMO that runs on a Mac (well, and also because I'm a huge, longtime comic book superhero fan). I promised some friends in the other MMO that I'd be back when the next expansion comes out, but I'm loving this game so much that I honestly don't want to go back.

• The game itself performs well, at least once I've got the graphics settings adjusted properly for my 4-year-old iMac. And, aside from the still-not-fixed Paragon Market crash issue I've had since February (now a non-issue since I can simply use my Windows laptop to access the Market), I've had no major technical problems with the game. While the game is running, it performs admirably.

My current problem is what happens when I'm done playing the game, and I've logged out and quit the software. This is a new (for me) problem, the beginning of which coincided perfectly with the release of Issue 23.

What happens: I quit CoH and the NCLauncher. Then I try to launch other applications (e-mail client, web browser ... anything, really), and am met with a series of spinning beach balls. It can take up to five minutes of staring at the spinning beach ball before the application's window will even appear, and then several more minutes of complete unresponsiveness before things finally settle down and I can actually do something with the app I've launched. However, it often doesn't even get to that point - I'll just get a spinning beach ball that won't go away. While all this is happening, I can't even get the "Force Quit" (command+option+escape) window to come up. If I happen to have Activity Monitor already running I can kill the unresponsive app from there, but if AM isn't already running then trying to launch it at this point just gets me the same results - it hangs while trying to launch.

At this point, my only option is to manually shut down my Mac with the power button, and then restart it using the power button. And thanks to the improper shutdown (and possibly other issues), I'm looking at 20-30 minutes of staring at a gray screen before it finally gets to the login screen. Then it takes another five minutes after entering my username and password to finally be logged in, Finder up, and ready to go. Though sometimes the whole computer is still extremely sluggish after all that.

Even worse, sometimes the computer won't even get as far as the login screen. When this happens, I manually shut it off again, and reboot from my Mac OS X install DVD, which allows me to run Disk Utility to repair permissions (and it finds a huge list of incorrect permissions every time), and sometimes use the Repair Disk function. After doing all this, I can reboot from the hard drive and everything is fine. Until I play CoH again.

I'm strongly suspecting memory issues, both RAM and virtual memory/swap. That is, it looks like the game (or perhaps the Cider wrapper is the culprit) is failing to release RAM when the game is quit, and also possibly not clearing any VM/swap file data.

As an experiment, I took a series of screenshots of Activity Monitor's "system memory" info, to hopefully see some of what's going on. The only applications running during this were Activity Monitor, NCLauncher, and CoH:

After a fresh reboot:



After launching CoH and logging in, but no character loaded:



After loading a character into the game world:



And finally, after playing the game for about 30 minutes and then quitting:



The key numbers here, I think, are the blue "Inactive" numbers. As I saw it explained a few years ago, the "Inactive" memory is RAM that applications "reserve" over and above what they're actually currently using, just in case they need more at some point (I'm open to correction on this). And programs are supposed to release/unreserve that memory when they quit. As you can see, the "Inactive" number in the last screenshot (after quitting CoH) is almost nine times larger than the number in the first screenshot. And that's after only 30 minutes of gameplay. A normal game session for me is considerably longer than that, and I've found that "Inactive" number pushing 1.75GB - almost half of my installed RAM. That "Inactive" memory is RAM that is unavailable to other apps, and would explain a lot of the problems I'm seeing. It looks like the game, or possibly (more likely?) the Cider wrapper is simply not releasing its memory when I quit the game.

As to virtual memory/swap, I'm even less schooled. But I understand there is something wrong when there is a huge numerical difference between "Page ins" and "Page outs". As you can see in the screenshots, by the time I quit the game there had been 290.4MB of "Page ins", and only 212KB of "Page outs". And again, after longer, "normal" CoH sessions, I've seen that "Page ins" number go into the many-many-gigabytes, with extremely low numbers for "Page outs". This looks to me like the game (or Cider) is writing all manner of temp/swap files to my hard drive, and then just leaving them there taking up space. Of course, these invisible-to-the-user files aren't reflected in my hard drive's visible "Free space", but the OS knows they're there. This could explain some of the sluggishness when I try to launch another app - the new app is trying and failing to find some space to write its own temp files.

Anyway, as you can imagine, this is getting very frustrating. I mentioned Cider several times because CoH is the only app I have that uses the Cider wrapper. None of my other, native apps exhibit these issues. And I want to emphasize again that these problems started the day Issue 23 went live. My Mac exhibited none of these symptoms previously.

System Info:

Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac8,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version: IM81.00C1.B00

Video Info:

ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT:

Chipset Model: ATI Radeon HD 2400
Type: GPU
Bus: PCIe
PCIe Lane Width: x16
VRAM (Total): 128 MB
Vendor: ATI (0x1002)
Device ID: 0x94c8
Revision ID: 0x0000
ROM Revision: 113-B2250H-259
EFI Driver Version: 01.00.259
Displays:
iMac:
Resolution: 1680 x 1050
Pixel Depth: 32-Bit Color (ARGB8888)
Main Display: Yes
Mirror: Off
Online: Yes
Built-In: Yes

EDIT: Oh yeah, Mac OS X 10.7.4 (Lion)

Inspired by some comments made in another of my threads ( http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=291732 ), I decided to create a "Project Character" for myself. Okay, the character already existed, but was a recently-rolled character who had not yet moved beyond Atlas Park's starting quests and had not run any DFB/DiB/AE: Asa Castrelli, natural-origin, dual blades/willpower brute.

The idea here is that she's a "gritty street-crime fighter". Possibly with some sort of personal vendetta against the "Family" (haven't worked out her backstory yet - perhaps she's the daughter of a Family member who "swam with the fishes"). She's going to build her strength and gain experience by working her way through Kings Row, Skyway City, Independence Port, and Brickstown (the "gritty" zones). She's also accepting no financial support from my higher-level characters. She'll end up following the Vigilante path.

So that brings me to my question. My goal is for Asa to fully clear each zone of its missions/contacts, as best she can, before moving on to the next higher-level zone. So, after finishing the initial Atlas Park arcs (Habashy, Sondra, Thiery, and the first segment of the Shining Stars arc) she moved on to Kings Row. The first thing she did there was run radio missions and then a Safeguard, which got her introduced to her first contact in the zone. When her XP bar got to level 9.5, I turned off her XP gains so as not to outlevel the contacts before "finishing" the zone. As she completed missions for each contact, she of course got introduced to more contacts, but I only allowed her to do missions for those new contacts who were located in either Kings Row or Atlas Park, and all of the missions she got from them took place in AP, KR, or Perez Park.

Eventually, she appeared to run out of AP/KR contacts - her existing contacts in those zones had shuffled off to the "inactive" tab without introducing her to anybody new. So she did more Kings Row radio missions and a Safeguard, but afterward, Detective Frietag offered no new introductions. As new introductions to KR/AP contacts have not been forthcoming is it safe to assume that Asa has officially "cleared" Kings Row? That is, there are no new introductions because she's completed every mission in the 5-10 level range that KR/AP contacts have to offer.

Since she seems to have "finished" Kings Row, I shuffled her on over to The Hollows (she'd already done the "meet Sgt. Wincott" mission earlier), and while there I re-enabled her XP gains just long enough to bump her to level 10 so she could train a second defensive power. As soon as she trained up to 10, all of her Kings Row contacts became "active" again, but all of them had the same "mission" - go talk to the Steel Canyon Security Chief. Since I intend for Asa to skip Steel in favor of Skyway, she's ignoring that mission for now.

Immediate plans going forward:

Do as much of The Hollows as is possible for a level 10 character, and then talk to Twinshot to run through the second part of the Shining Stars arc, re-enabling XP only as necessary. Finish the Hollows, again gaining XP and leveling only as necessary. I want her to hit Skyway City as close to level 10 as possible to avoid missing anything.

Anyway, my tendency toward excessive exposition means that my actual question can get lost in the wall of text, so I've bolded the basic question and colored it orange above


*Yeah, the Shining Stars arc is ultimately more "shiny" than "gritty"; my rationale is that Asa's goal of taking down the Family is going to cost money, but she lost access to her own family's wealth. She sees working with these people as a chance to build a financial base for herself. Put another way, I'm allowing myself this bit of metagaming, knowing that there's a potentially valuable rare recipe reward at the conclusion of the arc.

Me!

IRL, I can pay my rent and electric bill online. In CoX, I can't even drop a check in the mail?

:P

Gotta say I disagree with CinnderScot's assessment of the Shining Stars arc (I already mentioned that I like it). I loved the reveal at the end. The first time I ran it, I started out naturally assuming Flambeaux was the traitor. Then I started to notice how frequently Twinshot seemed to show up right after the fight was over, instead of being there to help (she always had some excuse about "checking something out"), and that started looking suspicious to me.

As to the "caricatures", isn't that deliberate? I can't remember the thread, but somebody spelled it out. Each Shining Stars NPC is an intentional mockup of an "annoying player type". Grym is the player who simply "transferred" his character over from a certain fantasy MMO. Dillo is the over-the-top roleplayer who constantly talks in a made-up dialect that nobody can understand. Etc. They're the tutorial telling you, "Does that character annoy you? Then don't be that guy."

I love that stuff. Granted, as already mentioned, I'm very story-focused, and enjoy being part of an engaging (to me) story. I've never had much interest in making an uber-powerful, "badass" character, either in this game or in WoW, so I don't mind being "duped" if I think it's part of a good story. Heck, this is exactly why I named one of my personal SGs "The C-List". Many of my favorite comic book heroes aren't the big-name, "A-list" characters - I love a lot of the lesser characters, the ones who fill out supergroups as "support" around the big names, especially when they're written well and have compelling stories.

That makes sense.

This is an installer for the latest version of VidiotMaps, I assume?

I hit my screenshot key at just the right instant to get this nice shot of my fire/fire scrapper, Incinerata, unleashing her Fire Breath on a Lost:

Maybe it's my imagination, but since i23 dropped it seems as though the numbers of "panicked civilians" in mission maps have increased dramatically. They're so thick that just trying to navigate the map feels like playing pachinko. I've had a few occasions where I couldn't even get up/down a flight of stairs because the civilians were so thick. And in one unfortunate scenario, these civilians effectively killed my brute. I'd entered a small room, only to find it completely packed with civilians, and just beyond these civilians, just out of melee range, was a pack of gun-toting, ranged-attacking villians. And before I could do anything, some of the civilians got between me and the door — and of course, they wouldn't run out of the room, they just bounced between me and the doorframe — effectively creating a "fish in a barrel" situation where the villains leisurely gunned me down while I stood there helplessly, unable to either reach the villains or escape the room.

Probably not related, but while doing a villain mission that involved infiltrating an Arachnos base and stealing something or other, I found the Arachnos base full of panicked civilians. This was an actual Arachnos base, with the red and black and mesh walls, not some other type of map that happened to be full of Arachnos. The civilians weren't unusually numerous, but I thought their presence was really odd. There was nothing in the mission text to suggest why these civilians might be there.

On the upside, I rescued a hostage yesterday and he surprised me by actually running toward the exit instead of charging off deeper into the map...

Is this one of those things like the "run away mechanic" that goes in cycles where everybody thinks it's happening more often, and then it stops happening so often, and then the next patch everybody thinks it's happening again?