je_saist

Please see this thread from last December: http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=248204

Specifically these posts:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...06&postcount=1
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...19&postcount=4
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...8&postcount=16
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...3&postcount=21


Then read these posts by Tex made yesterday:
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...84&postcount=5
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...6&postcount=14

...

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...postcount=1258
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...7&postcount=14
http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showp...77&postcount=5

I'm starting to sound like Steve Ballmer.

Developer Resources
Developer Resources
Developer Resources
*flicks the light switch on and off and waves a glow-stick in the air*
Developer Resources
Developer Resources
Developer Resources
*Monkey Dances!*
Developer Resources
Developer Resources
Developer Resources

Okay. Short, Short, Short, Short Version.

The developers already told us that additional power customization options would be looked at AFTER GOING ROGUE LAUNCHED

The Earliest Point in Time that any additional Development on Power Customization could have started was August 18th, 2010, after Going Rogue Launched.

Exposing Power Pool, Epic / Patron Pool, and Costume Overlays to the editing system Is not an easy task, nor is it low-hanging fruit.

Exposing these options to players requires additional Database work, additional engine modifications, as well as additional UI work. This is going to take Time to get through. The developers KNOW that we want this stuff. They already done told us more modifications were on the way.

Now, are these customization options ultimately going to be exposed to Patron Powers Explicitly? Nobody knows yet. Some of the developers have mooted the idea that Patron Powers will retain their native colors as those powers are not "natural player powers" as the Epic Powers are. Such murmurings are often accompanied by the possibility of additional story arcs unlocking Hero Specific Patron powers, probably the same power lists that are unlocked as would be gained by completing the Villain Patron Arcs.

yep. several differences between the two as well.

Fire Imps can be killed. Phantom Army is Untouchable.

The developers had never intended for players to be able to have Phantom Army out all of the time. The Decoys are simply too powerful. However, the developers have expressed the opinion in the past that because "Perma Phantom Army" is so hard to reach, they didn't see any particular need to punish players who had managed to get there.

In recent issues the Developers have begun modifying PA's specific behavior, such as allowing Hamidon to blast PA away, to try and mitigate situations the developers actually want players to be in.

Perma PA is being able to summon new PA as soon as the old one's disperse.

You cannot replace PA already in the field.

Nor can you activate new PA if the old PA are still out.

The system is supposed to be designed so that you cannot, under any conditions, have two PA's out at once.

While you are poking around, don't forget to ask some of the older guys about the sudden influx of Windows 98 users a few years back that occurred after an update to CoH broke Cedega's Win2k compatibility mode.

Basically, don't forget that there are several players that count on the Transgaming connection for "un"-official Linux support, and have done so long before the OSX client was ever announced or arranged. We wouldn't mind having a bone tossed our way as well one of these days.

http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Invulner...esist_Elements
http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Invulner...esist_Energies

Resist Energies does more than protect against Energy and Negative Energy damage. It also prevents endurance drain. It is a significant utility power for not just high level play, but also for low level play where enemies such as Clockwork can rapidly eat away at your endurance.

Resist Elements also does more than protect you against fire, cold, and toxic damage. It also prevents slow debuffs. Again, a significant utility power for not just high level play, but also for low level play.

Well, I disagree with this because there are better ways to sell the basic purpose. The stated purposes of the "lifetime subscription" from Hellgate / Champions is that it was to raise money right?

Well, why don't games sell very well to begin with? What happened to making an initial bundle on the original retail release?

Well, one factor is the initial starting cost, $60 or so for a major retail game. That's actually kind of expensive. You aren't making an impulse buy for a game. You are making an investment.

Another factor is the short tail economics. Major publishers like EA, Sony, Activision, Take 2, and the like only count on any particular game to have an active shelf life of 3 or 4 months. After that time period is over, such publishers consider the amount of sales to have peaked.

The problem is, there is ample proof to suggest that these two factors actively harm games, and the industry itself. Nintendo, for example, works on a Long-tail economics model. Nintendo fully expects major franchises like Metroid, Mario, and Zelda, to still be selling in volume 6months, 8months, 12months, 15months, 18months, and so on down the line. And Nintendo is right. Franchises like Mario Galaxy, Zelda Twilight Princess, and Metroid Prime still appeared in Top 10, 20, and 50 game sales long after 3rd party products released in the same time-frame had been pulled from store shelfs.

Part of Nintendo's advantage is the lower cost of entry. Sure, $50 is still a lot of money... but it's a bit easier to swallow than $60. Then there's the DS phenomenon where the average entry price for a new game is around $30.

Lowering the cost of entry is just one of the ways publishers and developers can make games more attractive to a wider number of players. Learning how to work the "long tail economics" is another.

Valve's Steam is one of the best known examples of Long-tail economics in practice for Video Games. "Ancient" games such as Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, still moves massive numbers, enough to stay in top 10 or even top 5 total sales rankings. Publishers and Developers genuinely don't know how to handle games that do this. Many never considered the possibility that, low and behold, somebody who never played a game released 10 or 15 years ago, might actually want to have a go at it.


For MMO's, figuring out how to work both a lower entry cost and a long-tail sales plan is a much better plan than Life-Time Subscriptions which are a short-tail approach only.

A couple of ways off the top of my head.

1v1 launch subscriber subscription for expansion(s).

With this model, every dollar the subscriber spends on a subscription can be used to buy expansion backs or add-ons. This less money over all for the developer / publisher, but a player will feel more comfortable if they know that any future expansions are part of the subscription price they are paying

Adjusted launch subscriber bonus.

With this model the launch subscriber pays a bit more for each month, but they get expansions for free, and maybe even the game for free. Let's say that a group of developers release a game for $40, and plan two expansions for release after the initial game also with price tags of $40. That's $40*3 or $120.

The publishers / developers then take a percentage of that money, let's go ahead with dividing by 3, so back to $40.

The publishers / developers then divide that $40 by 12 for 12 months, around $3.33 cents.

The subscription the user pays is increased by $3.33. So if the subscription is $10 a month, a launch subscriber would pay $13.33 per month.

However, the launch subscriber would get the game, and both of the planned expansions, for free. In total the launch subscriber would spend $80 less than they would buying the game and both expansions.

These are just two examples of ways that developers can get an increased cash flow or larger subscriber rate at the beginning of a game, and be more likely to keep those subscribers as changes get worked into the game and the bugs are ironed out.

Unlike Lifetime subscriptions, these methods don't punish the developer / publisher in the long run. I'm sorry that you don't agree, but in every economic and financial sense, my statement still stands. Lifetime Subscriptions Are Are A Bad Financial Idea.

Lifetime subs are what killed both Hellgate: London and Champions Online. The basic problem is Economics 001. It's not even Economics 101, it's that basic.

Let's say Hellgate: London had somehow managed to last 7 years.

Okay. How many months is 7 years? Multiply 7 by 12. You get 84 months.

Okay. If you were charged $10 each month, how much money would that be? Well. It'd be $840, which is 84*10.

Okay, so how does that compare to the life-time subscription?

Well, to reference Champions Online, they wanted about $200 for a Life-time subscription. Hellgate: London only wanted $149.

Okay, so how many times does $200 go into $840?

Next question, how many times does $150 go into $840?

Well, you should have answers of about 4.2 and 5.6.

On a $10 a month plan against a $200 lifetime subscription, the developer and publisher would be accepting over a quarter of the money less for players who stuck with a game for 7 years.

On a $10 a month plan against a $150 lifetime subscription, the developers would only be accepting less than a FIFTH of the of the money that would result from each individual player.

A $200 life-time subscription against a $10 a month game would only be the equivalent of 20 months.

A $150 life-time subscription against a $10 a month game would only be the equivalent of 15 months.

What happens if the game lasts longer than 20 or 15 months? What happens the game DOES last for 7 years, with years 8, 9, and 10 looking pretty healthy?

Where is the operating money to fund the developers going to come from?

Where is the operating money to fund the servers going to come from?

How large can the support staff be?

What's the business model going to be?

What happens if a large number of Life-Time subs start asking for their money back because the game was crap?

This is why Champions Online has had to revert to a Micro-payments and has been bleeding subscribers. The economics for a Life-Time subscription simply do not make sense for a game that a company intends to keep updating and developing.

The bottom line is that Lifetime subscriptions are a BAD FINANCIAL IDEA for any MMO game. If you see any game, and I do mean ANY GAME offering a life-time subscription... here's some simple math you can do.

Divide the life-time subscription by the basic monthly payment.

That's about how many months the developer actually intends to support the game before they go and do something else...

leaving you with a game that won't be updated and won't be patched.

A GTX 260 will only buy you about 30~ fps @ 1680*1050 with

• High Shadows
• High Reflections
• Ultra Water
• Performance Ambient Occlusion
• 100% World Detail

And yes, this game does have intensive graphics. A GTX 260 is around the starting point for ultra-mode support in 1680*1050. The starting point is the GTS 250... which actually has more shader power.

For reference, the GTS 250 has the following through put rates:

• 11,808 MegaPixels
• 47,232 MegaTexel
• 70.4gbps Memory

The GTX 260 216 has the following rates:

• 16,128 MegaPixels
• 41,472 MegaTexels
• 111.9gbps Memory

So while the GTX 260 216 is more powerful in games that rely on textures, and in applying filtering effects such as anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering. it is actually WEAKER in producing shaders.

Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on your point of view, Ultra-Mode is rendered through the shaders. Which means that for this particular game, your GTX 260 isn't likely to outperform a GTS 250... and more than likely, will perform a bit worse.

I'm going to give the short version as I know it. This may or may not be entirely accurate.

Transgaming derives Cider from Cedega. Major upgrades and improvements to Cider arrive after, and ONLY after, those changes have been fielded in the Cedega engines and are stabilized.

About 2 years ago Transgaming started a complete overhaul on the Cedega engine with the code-named Maudite Series. The Maudite Engines replaced several segments of legacy code from the WINEX days with new code. In some games Maudite was delivering 4x the performance over the older 7.x Unibroue engine.

However, CoH support only stabilized under Maudite against a couple different engine releases. Maudite 14, for example, was stable with CoH and Ultra Mode graphics. Maudite 15 promptly introduced a regression that broke compatibility.

As I understand it, these regressions, changes, and other problems resulted in Transgaming being able to provide a stable Cider engine based on Maudite for / to Paragon Studios.

The problem was further complicated by a change in Transgaming's strategy which came down the pipeline earlier this year: http://gametreelinux.com/

What we don't know is whether or not this change on Transgaming's part will have an effect on the Cider engines. It is presumed that Cider / Cedega will remain linked. Transgaming does their development on Cedega, stabilizes, then produces a Cider client based on that stabilized code.

If this order has changed, or if Cider is now to be developed separately of Cedega development, Transgaming has yet to clarify. Nor has it been clarified if this change in strategy means that game developers themselves will be able to work on the Cedega engines directly, and merge their own changes through the GameTree development network.

Given the rhetoric delivered by NCSoft's public relations staff, I believe that Paragon Studios is serious about trying to maintain a client for OSX users. Whether or not a compatibility layer such as Cedega / Cider is really the best path to take... well... that's unknown as well.

yeah, not the best place, but we've already had a threadjack so far before the sticky.

I'll be honest. Right now, the only way I could tell you with a straight face to buy an Nvidia card is if you wanted the absolutely highest performance, period.

If you don't care about having the highest performance on the market, and you don't have $500 to spend, Nvidia really isn't a viable option. At pretty much every price point AMD cards have either more performance (RadeonHD 6900 and 6800 series), or similar performance with much lower power usage (5770 / 6700 series) and much less heat.

That being said, AMD's been tweaking the OpenGL driver for the 6000 series of cards, and those changes are wreaking merry havoc down the line-up of cards back to the 2000 series. I couldn't give you a date on when support will stabilize for the OpenGL driver.

another vote for You Don't

Not every armor is going to be almighty against every type of damage, nor does every armor have to be almighty against every type of damage.

The design of the game is that each set has... get this... trade-offs! That's right! You don't get to have your cake and eat it too. Sometimes you have to choose whether or not to put that cake on display, or nom it all.

In the case of Ice Armor, the set has virtually no resistances. Anything that hits you (outside of chilling embrace's -damage debuff) is going to hit you for max damage. However, the lack of resistance is balanced by Ice's ability to 45% soft-cap on SO's to Smashing, Lethal, Energy, and Negative Energy damage. Ice's Hoarforst has the ability to reach the old Hitpoint cap, and contains a powerful heal. Ice can also sap Endurance from enemies. Two swipes of endurance modification slotted Energy Absorbtion and most enemies won't have any endurance left.

Using Ice Armor effectively involves putting All of these mitigation techniques to use. Not just one or two.

You have to be prepared, and willing, to deal with enemies that are not convenient to play against. Psi based enemies are intentional problems for Ice Armor. You have to learn to be flexible and adjust what you do when you come up against opponents with Psi damage. Sometimes that means setting back and letting a Dark, Willpower, Electric, or Stone Armor with Minerals take the point. Sometimes it means having to settle for the fact that you will have to use hibernate. Sometimes it means that you'll have to settle for the fact that something CAN defeat you.

And that getting defeated, and not being all-powerful in every conceivable situation... is NOT a bad thing.

tools like that are not precise, nor are they accurate.

They don't measure the actual die temperature.

The only way you get the actual working temp is if you physically take the heatsink off, lap a bit off of the gpu casing, and run a probe straight across the GPU itself.

If you can trace the event of failure to a specific action, in this case the increase of the clock speed and power consumption from the 2D rendering mode to the 3D performance rendering mode, then there is a clear hardware problem at hand.

What you are describing, an immediate failure of the card to render properly in any and all circumstances, strongly resembles a heat or thermal issue.

Now, not to say I don't like telling people I told you So, I've been telling people for a long time now that Nvidia has thermal issues. Nvidia Products Run Hot

Now, if the card is indeed a few months old, you might be able to get it RMA'd. That should be the next step you take.

Contact EVGA and get the card replaced.

He may or may not be full of it from his point of view.

It's called the perception phenomenon. Players in a game tend to notice when things that are unusual happen. E.G. players tend to remember attacks that miss, rather than attacks that land.

It is very possible that the guy on your team only noticed the shards dropping when he had debt because he was looking for any kind of relational behavior: He performs the X event, which causes random Y drop event to occur.

It is very possible that an identical or larger sum of shards were dropped while the player was NOT in debt, but those drops were either ignored or did not register because they didn't fit any particular relational pattern.

It is also very possible that due to the random number generator, the guy may have only gotten shards while in debt due to the timing and the rolling of the random number generator, and the debt was simply a coincidence.

The development staff at Cryptic and now Paragon Studios have been very clear in the past that item drops are all based off their own separate generation systems. There is no intentional You do X event and it causes random Y drop event occur behavior coded into the engine.

Most of the player held theories on X performance causing Y random drop event are often disproved by simply running HeroStats.

Case in point. Everytime there is a patch, some player comes running to the forums screaming that accuracy has been nerfed. Two or three herostats sessions later and the logfiles show that no, accuracy was not nerfed. The player just noticed a string of misses and it stuck out.

By the same token, everytime somebody comes running into the forums saying that X performance causes Y random drop event... chances are some stat tracking later will show that there is no relation.

Actually. Good point.

My guess would be that a large enough number of players are still using that obsolete hardware with Windows Xp. I would think it unlikely, but NCsoft / Cryptic / Paragon Studios haven't really been forthcoming with data on what hardware the playerbase actually has in hand.

The only reason I could see to maintain an OpenGL 1.4 shader path, if not for those users, is if NCSoft / Paragon Studios were planning to tackle the mobile market. However most of the tablets and other mobile devices in that market pretty much start at OpenGL 2.0 ES support...

engine's been through some changes since a while ago.

You may be able to get an updated driver that is compatible with OpenGL 3.x from: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/defa...me_downloadctr