Puppycrusader

I can't say for sure, since with how well-known the problem is, there're about a million and
one possible causes probably. I will say though, that the phasing tech is suspicious,
particularly in First Ward.

I really like the Shadowed Paths, but I've learned very quickly to never step foot into one,
because they will guarantee an out of memory crash in the next ten minutes for me
if I do, no matter what I do afterwards. If I avoid them like the plague, I can do whatever
I want in that zone and nothing bad happens client-side. If I start to phase into one though,
I may as well shut down and restart the client then and there, because it'll force it on me
shortly anyway.

AP too has been the subject of crashing for me, but I'm less certain about what the cause
may be there, with the drastic zone overhaul and all. But that's one thing you may try
avoiding and see if you get any difference.

Usually when it's a problem, it tends to be people bumping up threads that aren't very
relevant. Often in large numbers for trolling purposes, just to clutter up the board.

I think the 30-day policy is awfully overestimative of how fast things can move in some
boards though, particularly ones like AT boards that're more centered on information
rather than babble. I'd have that at 90-days at a bare minimum, personally. More likely
120-180. Chances are if noone's had a thing to say in half a year, there's no reason to
bump it. If someone's just going around bumping old threads because they can, let the
trolling rule take care of them.

A guide that "never needs updating nor response", frankly speaking, doesn't exist. Even in
the rare case that the information itself never changes or requires additions over
time in any way, people always have questions, comments, need for clarifications, etc.

If a guide recieves neither with as many users as we have in here, then it's fair to say
nobody gives a flip, and the guide isn't actually serving much of a purpose to begin
with. I'm not saying "go in there and clean out everything that looks useless by your own
arbitrary judgement!" of course - just saying that the board should decide. If noone cares,
let it die and stop cluttering things up. If there's a real need for it, people will step up and
take care of it.

Honestly, that'd probably be a good thing happen more often.

We have a lot of guides that are... "out of date" is a very kind way to put it. They need
to be updated, or purged. Since updating is less likely, I think they should go in the can.

Forum "natural selection" should decide a guide's survivability. If a guide post hasn't been
used in ages, and disappears, and then someone needs it, it sucks if it isn't there... but it
can also prompt people to get a current one put together, instead of hacking through all
the old info that may or may not be true today. That can only be a positive for providing
people with useful, easier to find information.

I really like this idea. A quick glance at the Player Guides section shows an incredibly wide
net of subjects - there's AT guides side by side with Trial guides, a guide on picking
computer components, guides to channels, accolades, system nittygritty, market stuff...
many of those even already have perfectly good sections of their own to be in as it is.

Though I'd make it more of a general "Content Strategy" board, so it could handle missions
and other content as well. Not that missions generally need as much discussion on how to
do them, but there's always room for it(Trapdoor, Spring/Halloween/Winter events, oddities
players run into that is or isn't WAI(There's a +5 Ballista in my mission and my settings
aren't turned up! Am I supposed to be fighting this, and if so, how!?)

A sticky with specific guides at the top, and discussion focused exclusively around content
beneath. That'd do me just fine.

Phalanx members seem to have a lot of money for good threads. Financed by Manticore
probably, but hey.

I think he's hoping if he plays hanger-on long enough, one of them will toss him a
bone and buy him some better threads.

I really wish he had a better pose in that promo art though. He looks like he ate some
really bad burritos there.

I never had problems with those other colors. Please attribute complaints to the proper
people.

I called it poo because I was comparing it to Stone Armor, which has the traditional
"Poo Armor" look going. They all look like they're taking their design cues from it in
that pic. Hence Minister of Poo and The Fecal Flock. Jokes, have to explain, etc.

Ah, hopefully that at least, yeah. I'll save further judgement for future patch developments.

Hm. That Madness Mage looks like the Minister of Poo preaching to his Fecal Flock in
that shot. That doesn't look too close to the promo shot, yeah.

Kind-of looks more like the CoT got access to Stone Armor's power customization menu, and
just went with the first colors it gave them.

Yeah, that's the first part of his post made me go a little "wut" when I saw it.

Coming from this team, that has made a LOT of incredibly awesome designs... I just
couldn't believe more than one or two people actually thought they were acceptable
for CoT. It just didn't make any sense. Artists tend to forget that "their" concepts are
adopted by the public mind when they get popular, so I could easily see Noble doing it
and just not realizing the trouble until people started screaming. But that the dev team
saw them and likewise went "BAM OUT OF THE PARK"...?

That's a creepy disconnect, unless they didn't ask anyone who wasn't new to the
company, and thus didn't have the attachment to the game and its intricacies that the
vet devs have.

Or the PR crew was holding them at gunpoint, and forcing them to voice their support
OR ELSE.

Hahaha! Yeah, the reverse-bait-and-switch happens here so often, I was tempted to
think that too. The PR guys here really seem to love that move. Though the pics weren't
released here officially this time, so I think it wasn't intentional. I'm more inclined to fault
insular artist-think than anything else.

I'd hope not, anyway. If it was intentional, they're getting a little too Nemesis for my tastes!

#1 best post on the entire Internet today. Made my night. *laughs*

That's one of the things that really bothers me about using the generic character
creator for NPCs. You're stuck with the creator's frame and build limitations. In some cases,
that's ok, but it really, really shows its problems here.

I'm with you visually.

But I swear, if they start making the Behemoths scream all the time like the DS demons
to, I will quit this game right then and there.

I think(he can obviously speak for himself, but it's what I read from it), that it's because
the "cultist" feel of the early CoT is pretty much... entirely gone, at least from the looks
of what you see here.

The cult thing is also part of the CoT mythos, in that they have and do go around trying to
pass themselves off to the normals in this way, rather than just going around kidnapping
people at random. A classic story example is Johnny Sonata, who was introduced to them
in much the same way as people wind up in creepy fringe cults in the real world. It just
happened that they showed him real magic, and when they asked him to ante up with his
chick in exchange for an introduction to Wailer Demon #5, he did it, and it worked.

You never really got that feel off late-game CoT of course. They all seem like demons,
combat mages, and gimmie your soul types. But the early CoT(the humanoids at least)
were much more cult-subtle. There's not really any trace of that left. If Mr. Pipes met
these guys in a back alley, I don't think the reaction would've been the same.

And then we wouldn't have that shiny pyramid in St. Martial, and it would've been ALL
YOUR FAULT.

That's been the typical progression for most enemy groups in the game. And it's a very
good point.

As it stands, it's not difficult at all, because(using current CoT as the example) you look
at a huge group of them, and it's immediately obvious after a few exposures who the more
dangerous targets are, without having to mouse/tab around to check what rank/con
everyone is.

The new ones... I'm not so sure that's going to the case either, as they look currently.
If players are having to spot-check the spawns too often to figure out who the priority
targets are, because it's not "user friendly" enough to tell otherwise, that's going to
cause problems.

Maybe that's why they stuck those fugly looking wings on the death mage. He needs a
better way to stand out in the crowd than a "Oh god why does everyone look like me
PAY ATTENTION TO ME PLEAAAAAASSSEEE!!" fastener on his back.

This is much, much better than the first take on them. Especially the choices of
color. I'd probably shade the Minions a little bit darker, but they look good.

The lts(Energy and Life mage)... I'm still down on these myself, I'm sorry. They look
like refugees from a WH40K Craftworld. The armor layer looks too thick and heavy,
particularly on the torso and arms.

The bosses I guess are alright now. I'd take those dumb wings off the back of the Death
Mage, but if they absolutely have to be made in the generic character creator,
rather than as unique NPC assets, they'll do OK overall. I wish to all holy whatever
that the art team wasn't so ThatOtherMMO about the direction of the design, but,
y'know. Whatever. Clearly this is a non-arguable part of the decision at this point.

I'm not completely happy with them still, but I'm sure I could learn to live with them. The
main problem I'm having with them right now, is I'm visualizing these guys in place of the
current CoT, in the various pre-set "spawn vignettes" in Perez Park and Steel Canyon,
and it's a tough nut to swallow. I think it's going to look incredibly out of place. Maybe
you guys already took that into account with new activities for them?

Probably no worse than seeing armless Hordelings reading books and attending
philosophical lectures in Cap though. I just hope you guys didn't mess up the ghosts
and succubi too much.

Somehow I completely blocked out the Casters in my critique the first go. I
think that's telling on how I felt about them - same problem as with the lts,
except their hats are OK. I can live with them, but for especially for minions,
they look too tooled-up and busy.

I do prefer firefox, but its memory use is one of those things that are hugely inconsistant
from system to system, setup to setup. On some people's computers, it's very efficient.
On mine, ever since FF3 came out and I upgraded to it, it's been a pig like it thinks it's
California, and memory is other states' water and electricity. And I run it very light
compared to a lot of other folk.

If I've had it running for awhile, it'll routinely eat up 3-500m just sitting there minimized on
about:blank nowadays, and nothing I remove, uninstall, or change has seemed able to do
anything about that.

It had a host of other problems relating to flash, but I was able to eventually rid myself
of those by disabling its "plugin container"(which, ironically, was tossed in there because
it was supposed to make flash run /better/ in FF, and isolate the browser from flash
taking it down. Neither of which actually worked.) Disabling that was easy, but required
actually deducing that the plugin container was what was causing the trouble, and then
finding out what to do about it, which is sadly too much trouble for some people(and I
don't really blame them on this count.)

Considering the other problems I've seen plugin container cause folk, I'm amazed they
got away with putting that thing in to start with. I wouldn't be at all surprised if many
of your FF-related problems rooted from it too.

While I like that, it means I no longer understand how the Tiers work exactly. Say you're
a veteran player, with quite a number of months behind you. Can you place them wherever,
at any time, and all the Tiers are automatically open to claim rewards from from the start?
Or do you have to fill out lower tiers to open the higher ones? Or do you "unlock" tiers
just by virtue of having a certain number of months behind you, like the current reward
system?

This also seems to imply that if you are a VIP player, the VIP Tier 9 may be open
automatically from the start to them. Is this the case, or again, do you have to fill out the
lower tiers to open the VIP tier?

The summary from the dev chat implied if you were a Veteran, you would have these tiers
auto-filled for you or tiers had to be otherwise unlocked in some ascending-order
way(Things such as "may start at Tier 7"), so I'd appreciate greater clarification on how
exactly this all functions.

I think the problem in this case is that even if the old CoX launcher is imperfect, it
still worked, and was an acceptable alternative for people that for whatever reason,
can't get the new one to work or behave. Now that alternative is being removed.

A lot of companies leave in "legacy" stuff as unsupported but "there" options for users
who used and/or liked them for whatever reason. In this case, I suppose I can
understand, since if the stuff about updating your game on the fly while you're still
playing it is true, there are undoubtedly backend changes going on that the old
launcher might not play nice with.

Whether or not you could tweak things a little bit to still allow the old launcher to
work, without really going out of their way(And thus "supporting" it,) I don't know.
I'd hope they at least made the attempt, but communication being the way it is
these days, I doubt we'll ever know one way or the other.

It actually is faster to update the game for me personally. But I believe this is because
of the differences in how updating is performed, which is itself its own problem.

The old CoX updater seemed to only need "duplicate" space for one pigg file at a time -
it'd dup the file, stuff its crap in, then remove and replace.

The NCsoft Launcher makes duplicates of each and every file being updated, and
doesn't remove these duplicates until the update process is finished. For most people
this isn't too big a deal. If you're a user playing on a system with a small amount of
disk space though, you may find this to be troublesome - updating from a new game
install, obviously requires most if not all piggs to be updated. Effectively doubling the
minimum space requirements of the game, since you can't update it(and therefore,
can't play it) without enough free space for roughly two game installs. 8-9GB isn't
any big thing for most drives nowadays, but again, it's a nasty and undocumented
stick in the butt for anyone hard up for space.

Actually launching the game I agree is much slower now on my machine as well, and
my copy frequently likes to get "stuck" on whether or not it wants to show the agree
to TOS insert, which slows it down further. That in-client overlay thing alone causes
me as much "Let me PLAY darn it!!!!" rage as the launcher seems to cause other
folk.

Not that any of this matters I guess, since the NCSoft Launcher Mandate is undoubtedly
being crammed down from On High, and they don't really care if it's efficient, clean,
safe, or even desirable. They want it, therefore we're going to have it, and that's that,
too bad.

I really, really wish people would find other wordings. In this day and age,
this is rapidly replacing "It was a dark and stormy night..." as the most trite
and overused turn of phrase in fiction.