Starcloud

I wouldn't go for a Zotac. I don't know the brand.
EVGA is a good manufacturer, they warranty their cards for, depending on the model, between two years and lifetime.
XFX is another good manufacturer, I'm given to understand.

For this game, spending $300 on a card is a touch high. If you want good performance at a decent price, EVGA makes a couple different Nvidia GTX 460 boards that will serve very well, or you can try to go upmarket and look for a GTX 560Ti

Is he launching it from a shortcut?

GTX 470's do tend to run on the hot side. It's not as bad as the first 480s, but it is bad.
That said, there's nothing in your current graphics settings that should be stressing the card; it looks like you have it pretty much on minimal settings.

Also, running two different real time anti-virus/anti-spyware programs at the same time is not recommended. They conflict with one another. Choose one and leave it on, turn the other off.

Personally, I wouldn't recommend opening up the side of the case. Internal airflow is important in cooling, and the case sides help direct airflow through the case. However, I would check to see that dust isn't blocking the intake slots of the case. I would also get a can of compressed air and clean the case out.
When using compressed air around one of the fans, though, make sure to hold the fan still with a finger or a pencil eraser. The motors can burn out or generate spurious electric charges if allowed to spin freely while you're blasting it with air.

The NCSoft Launcher also needs access to its own directory. You might want to take that into account.

Don't leave it running in the background. THe NCsoft Launcher has unfixed memory leak issues. Go into the settings and tell it to shut down when the game is launched.

So.. everyone who logs in this weekend is a D.O.P.E.

Did anyone at Paragon Studios think before naming the badge or is this a not so subtle hint about the developer's feelings towards the people who play this game?

It proves two things:

One, buffing is definitely not counted as participation by the participation system in Incarnate Trials and Praetorian Events.
Two, whomever came up with the idea of the flawed participation system and the concept of gating major chunks of advancement behind random rewards is powerful enough in the behind the scenes politics at Paragon Studios to force a change to the buffing system RATHER THAN remove or rework the participation system.
These changes have, for a long time, been asked for by the community and been flatly turned down before. Several times.

Don't fool yourselves. This change was meant to preserve the participation system, not to make life easier for us as players.

I never noticed the AI change, because I always treat them as a PBAOE rather than a self-guided targeted AOE.

They do still go "derp" if they're not "facing" the right way when they appear. And they do have facing, because I've seen some odd targeting behavior that can only be explained by the closest targets not being in the "line of sight" of seekers as they are summoned.

Go back and reread the patch notes. It only reduced the chances of it happening. Which it did from the last time you complained about it.

I dont' get it. Why is your computer sending to the loopback address to try to connect to the patch server? It shouldn't be doing that.

That's very strange. Ah well, Vista's version of UAC is clumsier than Windows 7's version.

The problem is, the weighting of the incarnate component rewards is 50% "uncommon."

So long streaks of "uncommon" components are to be expected.

Or, you know, you could always just set the Launcher to run as administrator.

Make certain you are running the launcher as Administrator.

Yes, though I think it might be two different codes. In any case, it can be applied to your current account.

Sony, in particular, is known for also blocking the installation of any graphics drivers that aren't theirs. This is in keeping with their corporate philosophy of "You buy one of our products, we OWN you."

I still find it strange that Evga's card played so poorly with your system, but I'm glad you got it fixed.

I had a hard drive that started making very soft clicking noises. I promptly backed it up.

Within twelve hours there was a lovely sound like a breaking pot from that harddrive.

Luckily, it was a secondary drive but it taught me that off-brand and cheap hard drives with names like "Quantum Fireball" are prone to coming apart at the seams.

Hard drives actually undergo a lot of stress. You're spinning multiple very thin platters at thousands of revolutions per second, and you have multiple read/write arms floating across them. Sooner or later, they will fail, the only question is how.

They *shouldn't*. In other missions, Longbow will attack any Voids that show up. The problem is that the developers are firmly of the "**** the lore, villain Khelds should still face their special enemies AND whatever other enemies are on the map." mindset.

That's unfortunate, but it doesn't happen to everyone. I've been playing for months with my GTX 465 without a single graphics or graphics driver error. On Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit. Before that, on a GTX 260. And before THAT, on a GTS 8800.

So I'm much more inclined to believe it is the operating system (Vista is still crap when it comes to video drivers) than the graphics card's chipset.

Also, your D: drive is almost full. Depending on where you have City of Heros installed, that could present an issue or two.

In many cases, a sudden burst of endurance being added is more valuable than a constant boost to the base recovery rate. I know I've seen numbers on this before, and the +endurance proc ended up being better overall than a level 50 endmod IO.

One big advantage is that the proc doesn't care about -recovery effects. Having it often means that you're able to get back into combat after firing off a nova without needing to chug blues.

Another big advantage is that the +endurance proc is available well before level 50 IOs are.

It's true that it is most valuable when you're at least triple slotting stamina.

The motherboard has two PCI-E 2.0 x16 slots. The motherboard can therefore handle any PCI-E graphics card on the market.
There might be a slight advantage to an Nvidia card on this motherboard, and there definitely would be an advantage if two identical Nvidia cards were used, since the board has integrated SLI support.
Other than that, your questions should really be "How much can you afford to spend?" and "will the chosen graphics card actually fit inside the case?"
je_saist is correct that you'll run into a CPU bottleneck long before the motherboard becomes an issue.

So, does anyone know what today's (may 20, 2011) miniature patch fixed? Does anyone have any patch notes on it?

What was changed?

"Missing NTLDR" means "There is no recognizable version of Windows operating system on the hard drive."
If reinstalling XP from scratch is not working, then there's some serious problem with the computer.
It could be the power supply not providing enough power, it could be a hard drive that has experienced a controller failure.
Use the XP install disk to run chkdsk, is what I'd do. There ARE some diagnostic tools that run in the command prompt.