ShadowsBetween

So, is there some event going on that I'm not aware of? How come many (or even possibly all) of the Rednames appear to have turned into Rikti? Or is this just "one of those things" that'll never get an explanation?

As for the lack of personal SGs - a lot of people don't know you can, I think. And of those that do, many have heard that it's really difficult or that you'll never be able to gather the prestige to pay the rent. (I've talked to people that didn't know about the massive base price changes.) And then there's people that can't imagine being in a "guild" that doesn't include 30 other players.

As for being part of your own solo Coalition - I can honestly say that idea hadn't occurred to me. For RP purposes though, it would actually make more sense for some of my characters to be in a separate group. (Of course, it wouldn't entirely make sense for them to be allied even then, but I'm willing to overlook that in the name of convenience.) I may go ahead and set up a second group later, once my main base on each side is finished.

I still don't see how a heroic Necromancer is any more of a stretch than... say a heroic Defender who "arrests" people by blasting them with massive bursts of radiation. Or any of the heroes who "arrest" people with swords, assault rifles, fire, and rocket launchers. None of which are known for their generally non-fatal nature.

Actually, buying the Prestige can work well for a smaller base. 250 million isn't that hard to earn, and gets you 500,000 Prestige, which is almost enough to get over one of the bizarre pricing spikes in getting upgrades. The basic Combo unit is pretty cheap. The next two steps up for energy and control are incredibly expensive.

I think they wanted the purchased Prestige to act as a money sink. The trouble is, it's not a good way to remove money from the system if no one wants to use it. They really need to consider improving the exchange rate a little - at 500 to 1, most people won't even touch it.

I didn't know about an additional penalty for level 50 characters. The only thing I have to go on is the table from Paragon Wiki, and that simply shows that after level 29, you get 100% Prestige and 50% inf. My own experience is that with my level 50 characters, I usually get less than 10 prestige for a minion at level 50. It feels extremely slow. Since I haven't tried researching "farming" builds, my characters at level 50 don't kill things their level significantly faster than my level 25 characters do.

In any case, buying Prestige can help a lot. The exchange rate is terrible, but inf is easy to get. Especially if you play around with the markets - just selling stuff can get decent amounts, without figuring out how to manage crafting or flipping.

Which still leaves me as potentially doomed if the bug is real. I have a GW account, and I tried the Aion beta before it went live. The Aion account is therefore seriously dead, but there's no way to delete it or remove it from the rest of the account.

It's not impossible, but it will take a lot longer. One thing you'll need to do, is find a way to earn a lot of inf. Play the market, build a farm character, whatever, but you'll need lots and lots of money. Then just buy Prestige.

You should also leave all of your characters in SG mode all the time - leveling a character from 1 to 50 should accumulate about 500,000 prestige. If you *really* want to farm Prestige, get a character to level 25 or 26 and switch off XP gain, then join big teams doing missions. At level 25, you're awarded 100% of the possible prestige for an enemy and 90% of the inf. Below that point, you earn less prestige. Above that level, and you earn less inf. (It used to be that above level 30 or so, you got *zero* inf, but they changed it to make staying in SG mode somewhat more attractive.) At level 25 you can also start doing Ouroborus missions, so you could go back and do any content you missed or just run missions while exemplared, and set to divert XP to inf and prestige.

Out of curiosity, is there anything we could do to help bring this issue to the attention of someone that actually cares and can do something about getting it fixed? Since this is a problem with the NCSoft account interface, I don't think filing a support claim through CoH will really do anything - it's not a Paragon Studios problem. (Aside from the fact that it's not their job to handle rumor control, which probably all that this could be considered until after your account has actually been stripped.)

No, it's not. That's part of the bug. The problem apparently is that there is a tiny chance that instead of that page, you'll be sent to the account page of someone else. Where you can then do anything you want - copy all their contact info, change their email and passwords for everything, possibly even cancel billing on their games. (And once you've changed their passwords, you can login and strip all their characters of anything valuable.)

This is a major security hole, especially since it *doesn't matter* what you do about it as a customer. You can change your password to a 36 character monster that uses ancient Sanskrit instead of the normal alphabet, and it won't help. The bug *bypasses* the normal login. I enter my password, get glitched, and can access *your* account. If it happens, even if they don't touch your account they've got your name, email address, and physical address. All they need to do is find a way to phish a few other pieces of info out of you, and they've got everything they need for ID theft.

Try it again. The issue is that logging in is the buggy part. I was trying it earlier, and got three different results in five tries. Three times I logged into my account fine. Once it bounced with an internal server error, and once it gave me the same message.

I *really* hope they fix this. Like, now.

After just checking the info that *is* included in my Master account, I'm strongly considering removing my card info and deliberately messing up the contact information *until* this is definitively fixed. And as I said, getting told that I'm being punished for not doing anything wrong would quite likely costs NCSoft a customer and two accounts. I really like this game, but not enough to deal with even the *possibility* of ID theft.

I'm not a security expert, but if your login system has a bug this serious, wouldn't a possible course of action be to lock it down while you try to fix it? (IE, "We've discovered a bug that, if you log into your account, will randomly erase your account. Until we can track this down, we are taking the account system offline to prevent further corruption.") Yes, it would prevent new people from setting up accounts. And that *might* cost them a few new customers. On the other hand, if my account got compromised and all my characters deleted or something, even though I have done *nothing* wrong, I'd have to consider that might also cost NCsoft a customer.

If you're lucky it's just a rickroll. On another forum I read, someone started posting links to flat out malware sites. The first few appeared to be accidental, I guess (I never followed them, but according to the people that did the sties looked at least vaguely related to the subject, and might simply have been hacked.) The poster quickly escalated to actual drive-by attack sites though, and was banned once the mods checked into what they were doing.

To answer the original question - No. I don't PVP. Not now, not ever. Not here, not in Left 4 Dead. Not anywhere, under any circumstances, for any reason.

I would assume that the patch lock during events is to reduce the chance of it getting tangled up in the code that runs the event?

I'm still curious if the second piece is meant to be mostly to scale. If it is, the Assault Bot finally has competition for "biggest pet." That demon is huge.

I haven't seen it mentioned, but as far as I know, Global Friend has to be mutual - when you /gfriend someone, it sends them a popup informing them that you would like to be a Global Friend and gives them a chance to confirm/deny. If they click no, then you can't add them to your list either. Likewise, if someone deletes your name from their list of Global friends, it deletes their name from your list. So it's usually polite to ask first.

Some people will /gfriend anyone that they like, some people reserve it for people that they've met repeatedly and get along with. Personally, I have about five people on mine, of which maybe three are active players. (The other two have most likely quit for good, but I don't see a reason to delete their names just yet.)

Just for the sake of being complete, here are the prices for each game, taking the info from their *own* online store.

CoH - Architect Edition - $19.99 (Includes access to both CoH and CoV content)
CoH - Base Monthly fee - $14.95

Total for all game content and two months of playtime - about $35 before taxes. (One month is included with the game.) At this point, you have access to all areas, all ATs, and all powersets. The costume packs are extra, but are almost *entirely* cosmetic, and have little or no effect on actual gameplay.


WoW - Battle Chest Edition (includes base game and first expansion) - $39.99
WoW - Wrath of the Lich King Expansion - $39.99
WoW - Base Monthly Fee - $14.95

Total for all game content and two months of playtime - about $95 before taxes. As far as I know, WotLK requires that you have Burning Crusade installed, if for no other reason than that the base game does not include any content to level from 60 to 70. Wrath holds another ten levels, and you can't touch Death Knights if you don't own it. So the minimum to get access to all levels, powers and classes is the game and both expansions.

Now, for the extras. CoH has several costume packs. Excluding the temporary jetpack, there are seven booster packs. You get one free when you buy any current version of the game - Good vs Evil includes its own items, Architect allows you to choose Magic or Cyborg. That leaves six costume boosters, at $10 each. So to get the full game and every optional extra is $20 plus $60, or $80 before taxes. Add in one month paid time for a total of $95.

For WoW, the only cosmetic extras are the two mini-pets, at $10 each. (Everything else seems to be account services such as character transfers, renames, and a total rebuild that lets you reset everything but your class, including faction. None of which are any use whatsoever if you're just starting.) So for WoW, we get the needed game content for $80, plus two pets for $20, for a total of $100. Add in the month for a total of $115.

Unless I screwed up on the math (again) then the *only* way WoW is cheaper is if you get the game content and skip the pets, *and* are comparing it to CoH plus just about every available extra. If you're paying month-to-month, both games have exactly the same monthly fee. The only way I can see you paying a vastly different amount for either game is if you're doing one of them in single month payments, and the other at the six month rate.

This has to be a troll. No one could possibly be this stupi... What am I saying? This is the Internet. Of course someone could actually be this stupid. As others have stated, if you *really* don't feel that you should have access to level 50 characters after having spent months (or years) getting one, feel free to delete. After all, some people choose to play in a "true hardcore" mode where any defeat "requires" that they delete the character. (And as true zealots, every once in a while one of them will propose that this should be the default and required setup for every player in the game.)

If *you* don't want to keep a level 50 character, feel free to delete them. I'm perfectly happy with mine just as they are. (And in fact this is the only MMO I've played enough to even get to the level cap once, let alone repeatedly and with enthusiasm.)

Frankly, none of that is necessary. If you want to listen to something else, run Winamp or MS Media Player in the background. You won't be able to access the play and volume controls unless you alt-tab to out of the game (or run it in a window, blech) but you can listen to whatever you like. Streaming music from one player to another would open up all kinds of problems, none of which are worth it to be able to listen to the same song as a team mate. Aside from the massive bandwidth issues, there's the fact that the record industry tends to fire lawsuit nukes at anything that even resembles a P2P app.

And personally, I'm not sure what the point of having a shared music queue would be exactly. Of course, I utterly fail to see the point of MySpace or Facebook, so I freely admit that where social networking is concerned, I just don't "get it" at all.

Here's a thought from a non-PVP player (me.) If Stalkers are so awesome in PVP, why don't you roll one up and PVP with it? I can pretty much guarantee you'll find out *all* the ways that Stalkers can be countered pretty quickly. Especially once you run into a player that has a clue how PVP works, like MacSkull or Memphis Bill.

Agreed. Also, for new villains who may not have seen them before, be warned that they have a variety of nasty tricks. The Fiends will reach into the ground and pull out an imp with a bomb on his back, which they will toss at you. If it hits you are partially blinded and take damage over time (as he punches you in the side of the head) with a decent sized nuke at the end when the bomb explodes. One type of Redcap will try and dive into the ground after taking a certain amount of damage. If it gets away with this, it disappears and is replaced by a *stronger* Redcap at full health.