TonyV

Actually, I'd advise against that. We're close enough to CoH:F now that I'd give it a few few days and see if it's available on the Paragon Store. The problem with getting it off of eBay is that you run the serious risk of being scammed--buying a copy of the game that has a code that's already used. I'm almost 100% sure that they'll provide some way to obtain the various "goody packs" that have in the past been available in the packaged editions on the Paragon Store.

No phones? No lights? No motor car? Not a single luxury?

This is not true. Part of the fun is the reward. They're inexorably tied together. Under your logic, they could take away all rewards in the game and people would still play. After all, if it's fun with the rewards, wouldn't it be just as fun without the rewards? Or they could go in the opposite direction, and give everyone a "god mode" button that grants any reward the player wants. After all, if running a task force is fun with such-and-such a reward, wouldn't it be just as fun if you just had a button to get that reward without running the task force instead?

Those are facetious examples, but it's still a valid point. Not many people I run across on trials express the abject misery I've seen from people hyperbolizing (is that a word?) on the forums. Part of the fun of the trials is having a whole crapton of people running them. If suddenly half or more of those people went away, it wouldn't be as fun. Not because anything in the trials has inherently changed to make it less fun, but because running them with smaller teams and having to sit there and recruit a lot longer for a trial because it's just easier for everyone to run them solo/everyone is getting the solo rewards anyway means that a lot less people will be running the trials.

I wish that there were some way to keep track in real time of how much total reward is being given out for various activities, and balance them on-the-fly. Provide a solo path for Incarnate stuff, and rig the system so that if everyone starts flocking to getting stuff via the solo options, the rewards for doing it that way go down and the rewards for doing it via trials increase proportionately. I'd like to see the same happen with task forces. If people start flocking to one, its rewards go down and the rewards for the others increase proportionately.

This would effectively remove exploits from the game. If something accidentally went live that, for example, broke the Citadel task force so that it were instantly completable, it wouldn't take very long for the rewards for doing so to become zilch and hover there until it's fixed. It would also effectively let the players decide the work/reward ratio in the game.

Wow, that's extraordinarily kind! And I hope this doesn't come off as superficially deferential, but the honest-to-god truth is that I'm mainly just the guy that keeps the server running. (And really, Sekoia is very helpful at that, too.) The real wizards are the unbelievably prolific writers and editors, including Eabrace, Sekoia, Aggelakis, Blondeshell, and a whole bunch of others--the list could go on and on, literally hundreds of contributors at any given time.

Also, I can't help but give a huge shout-out to people like Diellan (lead Mids developer), GuyPerfect (lead Sentinel developer), Keen (lead CIT developer), and DeProgrammer (lead Waterworks developer and generally helpful guy on other projects as needed) who keep the rest of the Titan Network updated. I just cannot emphasize that enough, it really is a group effort with a lot of people contributing.

Although, don't get me wrong, keeping the server running really can be a fun and sometimes challenging task, but fortunately, it's one I kinda like.

For what it's worth, I thought the same thing. Surprisingly enough, it also censors the word *******, although I'm clearly referring to the city in Austria.

Followed by some user session information. When I Googled that error, I found some advice on tracking down what caused the deadlock. I ran the SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS command and found that our database was trying to run two queries against the sessions table at the same time: an UPDATE command that updates the session id and a DELETE command that removes old sessions based on activity time. Exacerbating the situation is the fact that the last_activity column in the sessions table isn't indexed, so it was doing a full table scan.

So why am I posting this in this thread? Because in the InnoDB status report, this line caught my eye:

Transaction (1) is the one that updates the session_id information of some user. I got to thinking, of course, what problems could that cause? Well, the first thing that came to mind is that if the user's cookie has one session id stored and the database, which wasn't updated with the new session id because the transaction was rolled back, has a different one, the application will think that the session doesn't exist, effectively logging out the user.

Even further (and this is speculation because I don't have a copy of vBulletin to actually check this), it's possible that there's a security check built into the system to protect against hijacked sessions. If someone tries to access a site using an old session id, it's entirely possible that the software will wipe server-side session information, causing the user's settings (such as messages read, etc.) to be reset.

I'm going to PM Zwillinger and Avatea with a link to this post to pass onto the CoH site webmasters. Here's my suggestion: Digest this article thoroughly, especially on how to detect (SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS) and troubleshoot deadlocks. Check to see if you're encountering deadlocks especially against the sessions tables, causing session-related statements or transactions to be rolled back. If so, that will result in inconsistent session states between the server and the client. Given the sporadic nature of this issue, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that's what is causing this bug. It's probably not even a bug within vBulletin itself, but I know that there are hooks into the database for managing things like the test server character transfer and validating accounts against the game subscriber database. Be especially aware of INSERTs, UPDATEs, and/or DELETEs that are occurring regularly against the sessions table, perhaps as part of a maintenance script.

I'll see if I can get a copy of vBulletin and troubleshoot it further, but since I'm working on Titan 2.0, they don't exactly give out free trial of the software, and I have no idea what all goes on with your back-end database, I can't make any promises. Still, hopefully it's a good start on finding the problem.

You know what strikes me about the posts in this and most other threads? When I see Golden Girl post snarky remarks, it's almost always about certain principles and ideas, not personal attacks against people themselves. On the other hand, an awful lot of people who reply don't extend her the same courtesy. Instead, they do stupid stuff like make fun of her tendency of posting smilies in her posts, which is pretty silly given the harmlessness of this "trademark" and how annoying other posters' have sometimes been.

For the record, I like Golden Girl's posts. They're funny, sometimes a bit irreverent to old-timers, sometimes more than a bit insightful and on the money. I've also played with her in-game, and she's been nothing but nice and very competent and skillful, a pleasure to be around. I suspect that she certainly makes a better teammate than people whiling about smilies, calling people bullies, and posting messages just to say they've ignored someone else.

And what is barbarian? Do you think that barbarian men historically actually went around dressed like Conan? Has anyone stopped to think about what exactly women's roles were in a barbarian society? It's not like they had concepts like equal rights. They were mostly relegated to caring for children, cooking, sewing, and some farming. In some cultures they had religious and/or political power, but I don't know of any in which the men weren't the hunters and soldiers. If the game were realistic, barbarian women would likely be wearing full-body skins or, for those who had authority, robes. I'm not saying their role wasn't important in the society in which they lived; it was vital. But if the game were realistic, there would be no barbarian set for women, because the odds that a barbarian woman would be out on the street fighting crime would be pretty much nil.

Of course, the game is not realistic, it is based on comic books. For those complaining about the costumes we're getting being skimpy, sexy, or totally impractical, is this really what you'd prefer? I mean, this is your pretty stereotypical comic book female barbarian. Besides, we can already make those kinds of "barbarian" costumes.

Not me, I team up with folks.

I normally don't mind your stories so much, but I have a few problems with this one. It mainly boils down to, I wish that people would stop going into these things expecting perfection.

I can understand if you feel like you've been lied to, point taken. Before leaving, did you ask the leader why he queued up the team for a Keyes instead of a BAF? Maybe he screwed up and picked the wrong option. Did you check your chat channel carefully and make sure that you didn't misunderstand? You did say that one of the team members said he wished you were doing Keyes instead; are you sure you didn't miss a leader's comment saying something like, "Okay, we're going to do Keyes, is everyone okay with that?" Sometimes things are easy to overlook in the league chat, even by multiple people.

As for points two and three, that's just how it goes sometimes. It's not like everyone is born knowing how to lead these things, and if you've been on enough of these teams, some of the things you take for granted that are "obvious" really aren't. Over the past few weeks, I've watched as Belle has lead some of these trials on Infinity. She gets flustered because it's not like she sits there playing with a spreadsheet mapping all of this out. Last time I sat in on one of her trial sessions, unbeknownst to her until well into the trial, she had plain 50s on her team, hardly had any teammates that were +1, +2, or +3. They got wiped over and over, and she kept blaming herself for doing something wrong that she just couldn't figure out.

Fortunately for Belle, she has a lot of friends, and they were very reassuring. Some of them pointed out things she could do better, and I helped out as much as I could. I'm pretty sure she'll run more at some point. But if everyone were as intolerant of imperfection as your post conveys, why would anyone new ever want to learn to lead these trials? I mean, I know that if I had led some trials that failed and thought that this post might be about me, I'd probably give up and never run one again, not particularly wanting everyone in the world to think I was a dumba** just because I had the audacity to expand my role and *gasp!* make some mistakes.

I suspect at this point you and a bunch of other people are probably going to jump in and tell me how these mistakes you ranted about are obvious and no one should ever make them. I know you were probably frustrated. And believe me, when it comes to a threshold for tolerance of stupidity, mine is pretty low. However, there's a huge difference between stupidity (knowing the right thing and deliberately choosing to do otherwise) and ignorance (not knowing the right thing) and/or mistakes, differences in opinion, and desire to try a different way of doing things. Everything in your recounted stories doesn't particularly smack me of stupidity, but of 1) a misunderstanding, 2) wanting to try something different, and 3) simple inexperience, which can only be overcome with people giving the poor guy a chance.

So of the three trials, you bailed on two and one failed. Big effin' deal! On the one that failed, how many threads and Astral Merits did you get? How much Incarnate experience? I'm guessing they were something above zero, so it's not like you were just piddling around wasting time with nothing to show for it. Unfortunately, though it sounds like you also managed to convince three people in the process that they're utterly incompetent at leading trials and shouldn't try. Wouldn't it have been better--even worth giving up some rewards for--if you had had a little patience and understanding and possibly helped to create three more kick-a** trial leaders, people who have graduated from the school of hard knocks and learned from their experience, instead?

So that's my rant. I'm just really tired of people playing this game with the attitude that their time is so precious that if they don't get the particular shiny they were going after, no matter what other rewards they were getting along the way, it was just a miserable failure because their fellow player wasn't a perfect automaton doing things they way you think is "right."

By the way, regarding store 3, you were just plain wrong. There's a bug affecting these trials in which most of the time, once you get in, the teams are scrambled up and the leader has to rearrange them anyway. Have you considered the possibility that the team leader didn't want to spend a lot of time there figuring out who goes on what team just to have to move them all around again once they get inside? That once everyone was inside, he would have thrown a couple of tanks and brutes on team two and a couple blasters on team one?

What the—!!?

That's not football!

The product Antec is selling is the case. (Probably including the power supply, as that's frequently included and Antec is a reputable manufacturer of power supplies as well as cases.) The contest, though, is for a gaming PC, presumably with all of the components installed, using the aforementioned case.

The contest PC is pitched as "a complete NCsoft-themed Gaming PC with hardware from Antec, Intel®, Zotac®, Kingston® and Seagate®." Knowing those respective manufacturers, it's likely an Antec case and power supply, an Intel CPU and motherboard, a Zotac cooling system, Kingston memory, and Seagate hard drives.