Part_Troll

Way back in 2004, I tried to communicate to the COH masses about -stuff-. That didn't go down too well. Eventually, the editorial policy on this forum drove me away; it became a read-only place. Way too many clowns with short choppy sentences as their tool of choice, and so very few people who were salient.

I paid for each and every upgrade to CoH. It has been my most valued game. It wrecked my shoulder (well, the stupid way I played, wrecked my shoulder), and I had to take 5 months off in 2005, but I was back in 2006, and played pretty constantly.

I saw much which I considered 'wrong', mostly along the lines of stratification; if you weren't in a clique, you were out of the running for lots of stuff, it just seemed wrong to me, I wailed about it, and was shouted down. <shrug>, the 'community' spoke, and they liked things as they were just fine, and the NCSOFT hounds moderating the forums were always ready to trim threads with any kind of ruckus; commenting more just made it worse, it was easier to stop.

Am I sad that CoH has been canned? Yes. Absolutely. CoH did so many things -right-.

The direct result of this abysmal situation, is me signing off from NCSOFT -forever-. I have a long memory, and this company has shafted a lot of friends with their business decision to shut down the game. It also hurt that I spent $$$'s in various Slots (maxed out Salvage, Recipe and other storage means), and that was just money thrown away in the end.

Anyhow, it's over and done with. I don't regret much from my many happy years of playing this game. The forum -- overmoderated tripe.

Oh, the one thing that really got my goat was Surprise Maintenance bouts, and the non-negotiable timeframe, right in the middle of Aussie Prime Time, grrr.

This too shall pass.

Vale COH.

Part Troll.
Excession

(cheery wave)

Hi, I'm Excession, aka Part_Troll.

Was on with Rishathra Robot (fire/dark corruptor, L50, Incarnate), and Tarot Tart, a random blaster who only just hit 50.

What I like about 'organised' ITFs is that There Is A Plan.

I like plans.

Even when the faceplant count blossoms, at least the team knows what to do next!

Lots and lots of my new characters (post 2010) are getting this bug, and it's very annoying. L50 incarnate having 7 power trays wiped out, sheesh.

Rush to get onto a Manticore, and all power trays zorched?

It's BEYOND annoying, it's actively retarded.

Also, I've had characters logon, been unaffected, and after the first ZONE, BANG! All the power trays zapped. Solution there is to use your two 'christmas' powers before zoning.

Gee, thanks

And what makes it worse? Self-satisfied apologists who actively berate the paying customers for their problems, "defending" NCSOFT/Paragon when THERE IS NO SOLUTION TO THE PROBLEM!

I have a hundred and thirty characters, each of them with a minimum of 5 power trays ... it's a huge deal to ahve them arbitrarily broken. At least with the window borkage, ytou could just reload the window settings defaults, this is just not easily fixable.

FIX THIS ISSUE.

The 'secret' command to open up the auction house (for those who have it unlocked) is not plain /ah, since that just throws up a message about not being available inside the base. It's a devious toggle command , and no, I'm not telling ya precisely what the secret is, because I don't want the developers to remove it, in-base market access is very useful for organising racks of salvage and enhancements within the base. Removing the functionality (even with the cited 'server load' problem that people parrot) seems to be another of those 'we restrict it because we can' moves.

I used /BuyCOH constantly. Whilst it opened up a useless (to me) web-page, it quit out of the game immediately, and let me logon again and select a different character -- when swapping items between character it was an invaluable tool.

It was also great for switching from one server to another within a few seconds, rather than the tedious 'wait for countdown' timer. My character was still able to be victimised by critters; I didn't care, I just wanted to logout and switch.

The SAME functionality is there already with Quit to Desktop. The overhead of restarting the game adds about 15 seconds to the process, but it's STILL faster to switch by quitting the client, restarting, and logging in again (macro keys for password entry, um ah!)

Coming back with 'oh, they don't sell the game anymore so the command is pointless' is a -useless- comment, and just the kind of narrow-minded contrarianism that this forum encourages, when customers are hell-bent on being unpaid apologetic forelock tugging company-line serfs, spouting the gospel to all who dare to question The State Of The Game. Which is to say, spare me the song and dance about a command not being 'needed' when in fact it WAS used, by many people, to serve a very valid and useful purpose.

A couple of points

1) SAVING your window settings from Menu->Options means that you can quickly LOAD your window settings when the UI gets reset. Earlier posts show the / commands to achieve this.

2) The various Veteran Award buff pets are now toggles, which is kinda cute.

3) They REMOVED the /BUYCOH command, now I can't almost-instantly switch characters

4) The new Physx drivers mean that those people with high end NVIDIA cards will now have access to the physx stuff -- however, by default the Nvidia drivers will show PHYSX -> CPU overlayed on the CoH screen, which is very very annoying. There is an option to turn this overlay off

... Nvidia Control Panel
... ... Manage 3D settings

... Menu bar now shows 3D settings, where you can uncheck "Show PHYSX visual indicator"

5) They removed the (secret-ish) command to use /AH inside the base and instanced missions. I don't know WHY they think /ah inside a base is something to DENY.

6) Why are emails mailed TO YOURSELF on a damned 15 second timer!

7) It was nice that this maintenance update was contained to a Thursday, although the six hour window was a bit of a surprise.

Overall, this update was not very well implemented/tested and this seems to be the NORM for Paragon Studios these days. Very disappointing that basic Quality Assurance and Regression Testing isn't done -effectively- when there is no pressing need to 'release something TODAY!'.

Far out.

They just WILL NOT STOP. Every week, most weeknights, zorched because they want to take the servers down. Yes yes, the Stockholm Syndrome Apologists can have their say 'oh, they NEED to do this maintenance, it's for your own good', et f'n cetera.



Publish, ok, publish on a TUESDAY, not a WEDNESDAY. Like you did LAST week, and then Thursday was MAINTENANCE, again. If you're going to publish EVER FRACKING TUESDAY then SAY SO UP FRONT.

And what's with this THREE HOUR chunks, and six, and FOURTEEN hours, huge swathes of downtime.

I can't tell my friends 'hey, come play CoH, you might like it, it's free', when it GOES DOWN ALL THE DAMN TIME in the evenings.

Thank goodness Daylight Savings hit here, so now the normal downtime window is 10pm local. And when the US ceases daylight saving, that will move to 11pm local, but I'm sure NCSOFT/PARAGON and their Apprentice Elves will adjust accordingly and have MONDAY and WEDNESDAYS as 'backup maintenance days' with every second friday being a 'power outage in the data centre due to casual friday getting out of control!'. or something.

Just leave the *&^%$#@ servers alone for a month, eh?

And now, ... A Walk in the Black Forest ...

And out come the apologists.

Nothing to see here folks. Same old, same old.

Friday evening, prime-time Australia, and unannounced complete server shutdown.

Remind me why I pay for access to a damn game that's RARELY playable by people in the Oceania zone, during the evenings.

Last week it was about 30 hours straight I couldn't logon. Today, who knows -- it isn't up on the 'announcements' page that the servers are even going down, never mind any estimate of when they're going to be back up.

Just more of the same.

Roll on Star Wars The Old Republic, that's all I can say.

Hey, Americans, welcome to the world of Extended Maintenance!

Us Oceanic-types get this ALMOST EVERY WEEKNIGHT. Imagine how *radically fun* it is to be a subscriber to a game which is perpetually 'in maintenance mode'.

Next time an Aussie complains about maintenance in prime-time, perhaps look back to todays experience you had, and nod sagely instead of snapping of Sharp Snappy Excuses for WHY maintenance happens SO often, and mostly in Oceanic prime time.

Of course, the apologists are just ready and waiting, with their 'logical' arguments about revenue bases etc.

I unsubscribed because of this B/S, I came back for I21 (which was supposed to be in August, silly me for believing the hype) and it's been weeks of 'sorry, servers going down' ever since I got back.

Not Happy, Jan!

Hello World.

I've rejoined CoX, for Issue 21.

With >100 characters sitting at 300+ days idle, the first thing I did was roll a new character on one of the 'new' European servers.

"Skylar Beretta" on Union. She's a Dual Pistols/Devices Blaster, and a Praetorian at the moment, and she's ok. (If Maintenance hadn't hit Every Single Weeknight, I'd actually have gotten to play her ...).

So why post a thread about a fairly ordinary name? Weeeeeelll, I saw someone elses extensive thread about their new name 'Llydia', and I know that many people have a great deal of difficulty thinking up names, or are disappointed when their name of choice is 'taken'.

Names can have 20 letters/numbers/special characters, even if you don't include CaSe ChAnGeS, the number of possible combinations is staggeringly huge.

26 letters 10 digits 4 special characters, thats 40 unique identifiers per character slot.

20^40. Twenty to the power 40.

It's a number so large, it is beyond reasonable expression. It is more than the number of stars in our galaxy (which is a mighty four hundred billion, or 400,000,000,000)

I think it's something like 1,099,511,627,776,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations (not including case-changes, which bumps it up enormously)

So when someone says 'oh, my favourite name Super Scrapper has been taken, wahh', I look at the possibilities, and their single choice, and shake my head in amazement.

Lets look at Super Scrapper.

14 letters. That gives us six more letters, or 6^40 choices to -modify- that name to something unique. thats over four thousand million different variants of "Super Scrapper"

Lets see, we could go with Colours.

Blue Super Scrapper
Brown Super Scrapper
Super Scrapper Black
Super Scrapper White
Super White Scrapper
Super Lime Scrapper

Or use the old CB Radio Alphabet

Super Scrapper Tango
Super Scrapper Romeo
Super Scrapper Abel
Delta Super Scrapper
Super Golf Scrapper
Super Scrapper XRay

How about Fast Food variants?

Super Scrapper KFC
Super Scrapper McD
Super Scrapper Wendy
Super Scrapper Macca
Super Scrapper TacoB

Or Devices?

Super Scrapper iPod
Super Scrapper iPad
Super Scrapper Phone
Super Scrapper Berry
Super Scrapper Cell
Super Scrapper Droid
Super Scrapper Nexus
Super Scrapper Palm
Super Scrapper Rolex
Super Scrapper Timex

The list is -literally- endless. And that's just for the 'one name you have to have'.

Pick something you like, and add a modifier to it, then it's easy to get a unique and interesting and -pertinent- name that fits the bill.

Enjoy. Make a game of it. Don't fret. And don't think that someone lucky enough to get Sundiver is somehow 'better' than your modified choice of Sundiver Prime, or Sundiver Omega, or Sundiver Aphex Prime ...

Damn it, still down FOUR HOURS LATER.

Great going. Monday, down. Tuesday down. Wednesday down. Thursday, natch, and now Friday down as well. Prime Time for Aussies = HA HA NO YUO.

American players, on the other hand, never know anything untowards happened, and they rain sunshine on paragon dev's heads "it's ok, your'e doing great, just keep doing it to -them- and not us".

I'm all for FAIR MAINTENANCE. Do it whenever. Especially at 9pm Pacific time. Lets see how many 'whiny people' we get posting then!

Grrrr

I find explaining things in /tells to people who use contractions like 'u' is always a waste of time and effort.

But then again, what I consider 'rude' or indeed 'appropriate' is way outside the comfortable zone for most of the posters in this forum. WAY outside.

Heh. The posturing is almost palpable. "Oh I've NEVER been kicked, nor would I EVER kick anyone from a team ..."

Uh uh.

Most of the people who have 'never kicked anyone from a team' have NEVER organised a team before, so they've rarely been in a situation for long enough, where they are the 'star holder' (see "star allergy")

As a 2004 Veteran, I've been kicked from many teams, sometimes because I was obnoxious, other times because others were obnoxious. Hell, I have friends kick me from the team because it amuses them to do so -- and I laugh too when it's appropriate and you get reinvited immediately anyway.

I've also done my fair share of kicking people. I kick people who behave -- oddly. The aforementioned 'petless masterminds' etc, people who just doorsit (enter a mission and go AFK). People who IMMEDIATELY 'afk' (unannounced) upon death, during team fights, when I try to resurrect them and they don't accept. Once, ok, fair enough, if it happen again they get booted, yes, even if it's a Task Force, unless they ANNOUNCE AFK first, if they get killed and don't accept my rez, I boot them. Aren't I the ogre!

I'm also know to kick people for being purposefully disruptive, included aggroing groups of critters alone then dragging them back to the team and causing unexpected team-wipes (scrappers are good at this). People who 'want to map' because they have invisibility, so each map they are off exploring rather than being with the team. People who die repeatedly, off on their own, because they think it's funny.

Over the years, I can remember a handful of instances of me kicking people, and dozens of instances of me being kicked. But that's very selective memory, because I don't tend to remember having kicked people from a team, and do tend to remember being kicked from one.

As for the innate purity of 'never been kicked, never kicked anyone', the more appropriate label is 'gutless wonder'. The big deterrent to kicking people is the pretence that if you're goodie goodie two shoes all the time, you'll be mercifully free of the ravages of leader rage. It doesn't work like that, and if you play in Pubbie Team, across most servers, you will certainly experience far more 'random and inappropriate team expelling' than you previously thought possible. Of course, the mind-expanding nature of random teaming is probably way out there for some people, comfortable only in their clique, or with their play mates who 'deeply understand their special needs and concerns' -- yes Athyna I'm recalling your ongoing bout of stranger-danger-OMG-They-Might-Be-Horrible-to-me fear of playing with 'unknown' people. Snort

This bug seems very prevalent today (Friday). I got my 69 month vet badge (not due for a while), and a heap of others logged on to be greeted with vet badges.

They kinda promised to stop the 'random weekday patches' and limit such publish sessions to Tuesdays.

Tonight is maintenance 'as usual' even though they shut the servers down last nigth for 2.5 hours. I can't work out why they cannot do both things at the same time, in order to reduce their downtime.

TheOcho made some announcement in Announcements that regular Thursday maintenance was definitely on. Which was, admittedly, nice of him, because of the expectation/hope that people had of not having two down-nights in a row, now we have confirmation and can do other stuff.

(Life, don't talk to me about life!)

Angry of Mayfair

Numina, Hunting Phase -- Council in Boomtown.

Everytime you find a crowd of council, there is an opposing crowd of Fifth Column, they are very evenly matched, and have a huge antipathy for each other, so they instantly kill each other. It's now quite difficult to 'defeat 20 council' because each spawn might only result in 2-3 defeats of council (and lots of Fifth Column, which doesn't count). This makes the Boomtown Hunt much more arduous than it once was.

qv Vahzilok in Faultline -- when the new faultline map was introduced, it restricted Vahz to night-time only, forcing a 20 minute wait for the Numina hunt. They fixed the night-time only part, but Vahz are now few and far between, finding 20 of them is difficult.

At least the Numina TF no longer features the dreaded Atrium (Cake, Pancake, Layer-cake, whatever you want to call it) and now has a Troll Cave for the end mission instead of the CoT cave with the Atrium. That level needs to -cease to exist-, it's just horrible when you get a 'defeat boss and crew' spawning in there, and you have to clear the -entire- Atrium instead of just the spawn the boss was in. GRRRR * 10,000,000,000

Angry of Mayfair

An annoying patch to fix up an exploit or something.

Annoying because 9pm local is PRIME TIME.

I bet we have scheduled maint tomorrow in addition to this annoyance.

Grr. They could have rolled them together -tomorrow-, they know the exploits and exploiters from their logs, vengeance could be meted, retroactively. This is just another 'quick fix' going in at any-old-time-that-suits-NCSOFT. Grr.

Angry of Mayfair

I thought this cr*p was over with? Tuesdays for publish, Thursday maint. Now we have a Wednesday one, screwing up the Aussie players at -9pm- local. SHEESH.

And the amount of warning? Less than 24 hours, so no plans could be made.

Just a little observance by the Admins to -warn- people of odd timings of publish/maint would be SO very useful.

You did GREAT with the reduction of maint to one day a week, but I bet you anything that this publish is in -addition- to maintenance on Thursday.

Please think about having a more cohesive announcment plan rather than 'oh, yeah, today we're having special super-duper-urgent-gotta-fix-a-hack maintenance'.

It would be hugely beneficial to the fragmented audience this game has left. (thinking about Graal, 69 month Vet Award guy, who left this week ... he was one of the truly good guys)

Sara Moore took 2:38.

DR Quaterfield will be about double that.

I'll try quite, er, hard to be there.

AQ_Excession

< derisively > SNORT. < /derisively\ > ( FAKE FAKE-TAG, BRO)

The people in the game, the people in the forum, the same bunch of ruminating sheep. I am not surprised. 100% unsurprised. You'll all go on 'congratulating' level 1's for dinging level 2 to 7 on the average sewer team. Every. Single. One. Every. Single. Time. And you'll probably take away from the experience a sense of worldly belonging, some kind of ersatz camaraderie based on the simplest of game-experiences, where the critters are woefully underpowered, presenting as much challenge as 'fighting your way out of a sodden paper bag'.

There is no kudos in going from level 3 to 4, or level 40 to 41. None. There is no need for the entire team to individually 'gratz' the team-member who just 'dinged', it would make zero difference to the gameplay.

The people who, in all seriousness, suggest that the occasional (or in some cases, constant) utterance of 'gratz' represents the 'only player interaction on a PUG team', I can tell you that your sense of perspective is flawed. Teams should be -actually- communicative, not mindless spam-a-ritualized-comment-at-the-required-juncture. Teams should talk about the mission at hand, the encounter around the corner, how to approach the gathering of the next missions, what arcs/tasks would be most appropriate for a functional team at whatever level they are at.

Mindlessly grunting 'gratz' does not comprise meaningful intercourse.

You people quite obviously have an unbreakable attachment to this stylized charade, and no amount of reason/logic will deter you from your -belief- that social grease needs to be applied -non stop-. It becomes a religious argument. And takes on a life of it's own, immune from logic, the antithesis of reason. I hope you enjoy the stigmata you so obviously crave.

Newsflash. Redundant utterances are redundant!

Get over yourselves.

Ah, and to the person suggesting a pogrom against a forum poster, not based upon content, but solely upon 'the act of posting', you're contravening the precious rules of this precious resource, precious. A tiny hint.

Take care.

Ex
[ who is way more interested in real conversation in game, rather than staccato shouts of faux bonhomie from a bunch of virtual sheep, on the rails, and unwilling to venture from the tracks -at all- ]