Smurch

Actually it depends on the MMO. For example, Warhammer Online breaks PVP into "tiers" of 10 levels each, and higher levels could not participate in lower tiers at all (well almost: they could, but they'd be changed into a chicken with 1 HP and able to peck for 1 point of damage).

Also, the PVP is team based (called RVR or Realm vs Realm). You will be teaming up and when engaging. You can, in WAR, jump into RVR around level 2 until the endgame and be able to compete. Whenever I made a new character, as soon as I finished the intro missions to get my basic gear, I'd be queing up for RVR scenarios. In that game you can gain RVR levels in addition to your PVE levels, so you can be a high level PVP player even at a lower level within your tier.

Not all MMOs treat PVP like something you need to do as a second job to be any good at. WAR did some things wrong, but RVR/PVP they got pretty darn spot on. They turned my Wife into a bloodthirsty PVPer and she normally HATES PVP in most games. It can be done!

I got a chance to play Global Agenda at DragonCON and that one is more like a shooter than an MMO in many ways. I didn't get to see entry-level PVP, but from the look of it, team work is more important than individual equipment choices. Plus the ability to respec your character On The Fly means you can adapt to an unpredictable enemy instantly!

I hope they don't engage in force-quit SGs. If someone feels it doesn't make sense for their side-switched character to be in the same group they can always quit (or if leader, kick others of the wrong morality out) but if I have to remove my characters from my SG that I worked so hard to build just to be able to enjoy content I had to PAY FOR I'm going to be very very unhappy.

It's pretty easy to re-write the mission text in your mind when going though arcs to remove any angles that don't fit. It's also easy for such a pragmatic villain to pretend to be mercenary and allow someone to believe he's working for them when it suits his purposes.

For instance, a mission from Mister Bocor revolves around acquiring the Loa Bone. You can easily have a villain who desires the Loa Bone for themselves. In fact, when you complete the mission, you do in fact get to keep the item! It takes a little tiny bit of imagination, but it works just fine.

You don't have to see the AE as being a "virtual world". That's just the in-game explanation behind it to justify it's existence. You can just as easily imagine it to be as "real" as anything else in the game. Because for all intents and purposes it IS.

Same here. In the words of Dungeon Keeper (another great game) "Evil is Good".
We have to be "good" people every day. It's quite cathartic to be able to indulge our darker sides in a healthy way.

So, in case it's not abundantly clear, even if they enabled this horrific idea of ruining our names by appending the global onto them as well, you STILL wouldn't get "Rumble".

I gotta go with the "if you can't find a name, you're not being creative enough" crowd. There's always more names. Always. I make new characters frequently, and while I've run into some names I've considered being taken a few times, I always manage to land a name I'm very happy with.

So, the system displays the BIOS screen, sees the HD and your "optical unit" (what is that, exactly? DVD? CD? Firewire?) and displays info about them on screen, then it goes to a black screen with a flashing cursor and stays there. Is that correct?

Did you recently add anything to the system? For example, a memory upgrade?

You can just drop them.

This is also a good point. I'd love to see some story based PVP. Or at least some persistency to wins/losses in PVP. If those wins and losses carried over and stuck around beyond the goldfish bowl (directing or influencing a story), it might be more worthwhile. PVP here doesn't MEAN anything, and in a game like this it really should.

The problem with PVP that is hard to break into and relies heavily on knowing the right "tricks" is that it means that only a certain marginal group of players will be involved in it, and that means it also will attract the anti-social subset of that group. However, the kind of trash talking elitists in this game are not always the dominant force in other PVP games.

You shouldn't let what are actually a small but vocal minority ruin an entire style of gameplay for you.

Another thing WAR did right was make sure that players on opposing sides had no way to communicate to one another.

Yup, this. I'm really disappointed with the experience of PVP in this game. And not just that I almost always lose, either .

I'm not a person who minds losing at all, as long as the actually playing is fun. "It's not if you win or lose but how you play the game" is an adage I take very strongly to heart. If the game play is fun, if I happen to lose, I'll lose quite happily. But the gameplay of PVP in this game just isn't fun enough for the time investment needed.

One of the things I liked alot about WAR was I could hop in, make a character, que up for a PVP scenario and actually be effective (if I was smart and knew my role) from about level 2 on up with no special gear. It was fun, especially for someone who finds number crunching and build tweaking kinda boring. I just wanna play. I merrily chopped, hacked, and hexed the forces of Order for several months until population imbalances made the RVR zones a bit of a joke. Up until that point, I never had more fun in an MMO.

I've done PVP in this game from time to time and probably will in the future when I'm bored, but honestly I have better PVP games available to me right now that I can play. I can play Left 4 Dead in Versus mode, I can spin up Exteel, I could resubscribe to WAR if I really wanted to, and there's a ton of shooters I can PVP in. Global Agenda is out next month. Steam is having a mega end of year sale on tons of PVP games.

PVP here just doesn't engage me like those games do.

Paragon City is in the US (Rhode Island, if I recall) and the Rogue Islands are near Bermuda.

So, yes, the US Independence day would be appropriate.

But yeah there can just as easily be an in-game holiday (which can coincide with the Launch Date of CoH, which would be very appropriate).

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/

You'd think so, wouldn't you?

What, only one?

Come on, I ran a tradewars hub and MajorMUD!

Still one of the bestest games ever.

I remember when 14400 baud came out. It was godly. ANSI graphics just flew past!

Oooh burn!

Yup. The difference is, everyone CAN outrun the bear. There's just bound to be some guy who wants to give the bear a good talking to first.

I was a BBS Sysop!

That's probably true, but you have to admit, some of those mis-tells are EPIC.
They can fuel the rumor mill for months after.

I'll never forget the one where an MM was describing how she used her robots' "attachments" on her partner... I'm sorry, but there's just some places high speed rotory action should NOT be applied.

And that one was dropped in broadcast, too.

False. It worked on FIDONet, and it worked on USENET, and it'll work here.

*Sigh*

And this is why there will ALWAYS be trolls and griefers, because people cannot just simply ignore them.

It works on the forums as well as in the game: Don't Feed the Troll.

From an installation perspective, a driver is a driver is a driver.

I agree that updating that video driver is the first step to troubleshooting this. Even if it did work yesterday. OpenGL has been updated about a dozen times in the last 2 years and is the number one source of crashes. I've had an outdated driver cause random openGL crashes: some days it would work fine, others it would Crash to Desktop.

So that's definitely your first step.