je_saist

huh? Splashtop itself is a Linux and doesn't run on iPad.

are you talking about Splashtop Remote? http://splashtopremote.com/

Anyways, as to your original question, I think you asked if the developers at Paragon Studios had experimented with touch-screen play, given that you posted in the technical issues forum. Touch-screen gaming is probably never going to be implemented in City of Heroes, and I don't think the developers here are going to focus on the tech.

While Multi-pointer / Touch development has been under development for years, such as MPX which dates back to 2005, City of Heroes, as a game, was designed without such input in mind.

The case in point here is everytime somebody wanders around asking about CoH on a Gamepad. Some of lightly snicker and have to refrain from responding, "you play with a gamepad then the team will be asking you to please go back to keyboard and mouse. CoH's interface was largely designed to be navigated with a standard keyboard and mouse, and as such the game makes several inherent assumptions about key combinations and interface placement.

This was one of the reasons why Google decided to not use an existing Linux window manager / desktop interface for it's Android OS. Compiz, Kwin, Metacity, Mutter, Xfwm, Fluxbox, Blackbox, you name it, none of them really fit the objectives of a purely touch designed interface. The interface inherent assumptions and action combinations are also why Google told vendors to not put Android 2.2 on screens larger than 7", and is working on larger screen support for Android 3.x: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/n...-potential.ars


Now, as to whether or not you can make touch-screen work like a mouse, well, obviously, you can.

Well, I've done ice / mace and ice / elec.

The advantages to ice armor are that it is the only set that can soft-cap to Smash / Lethal / Energy / Negative Energy Defense on SO's without activating a tier 9 panic power. Ice is the only tanker set with a damage debuff component. Ice is the only armor set that can slow an enemies recharge rate. Ice is the only armor with two taunt auras. While Ice is not the only armor set with a Tier 9 that does not involve crashing out, it's Tier 9 is a complete invulnerability crossed with an insane heal and end recovery. Ice Armor can also drain enemies endurances, with a single swipe of Energy Absorption knocking out significant chunks of an enemies endurance bar. Ice also shares the Dull-pain advantage of Stone and Invuln sets as it's Hoarfrost power could put players at the old Tanker HP cap.

The disadvantages to ice is that it is a defense only set, which means that all attacks that do land, will be landing for full damage (minus the damage debuff). Ice armor is also one of the most endurance intensive armor sets, surpassed only by Dark Armor and Stone Armor with all toggles turned on. Granted, Ice makes up for this with Energy Absorption, but even at endurance recovery ED cap, Ice Armor still "requires" at least three enemies close by to top off. This means that single target performance in sustained fights, such as against AV's or Monsters, suffers greatly.

The disadvantages are what set most players off. Other problems have included many an Ice Tanker's reliance on the Hibernate Power. Many a team-wipe has occurred after an Ice Tank went into Hibernate and lost aggro on target since somebody else on team could out-taunt / out-damage a mob enough to draw aggro.

Then there's the late-blooming factor. Getting to defensive soft-cap on SO's involves picking up Weave from the Fighting pool and grabbing Energy Absorption. This puts most Ice Tanks blooming in the late 20's to early 30's, and will leave only Stone Armors waiting on granite feeling less protected.


So, to sum up.

No, Ice is not a bad set.

Ice is a good set.

Ice armor, as a set, involves more interaction than simply wading into a mob and hitting the attack button over and over and over and over again. It just takes a relatively long time to bloom as a set, and has some pretty hefty off-sets.

The 6870 uses less power than the 5870, but these numbers are a pretty good guideline.

To my knowledge there has not been any official statement on the Information Kiosks made on the forums, on the test server, or during previous beta's.

I'm also afraid you probably won't get an official response. *points to the top of the this forum where it says:
Now, if you want my opinion, re-enabling the Information Kiosks to display data on arena fights is pretty low on the developers list of things to do. There have been several suggestions on what the developers could do with the existing Information Kiosks, ranging from trying them into the Tips System, to using them as a gateway to an interface for advanced teaming and task-force forming. So far the developers have not, to my knowledge, given an indication on whether or not they would look at such changes for the Information Kiosks.

even then, I'd say the chances are pretty low. Level 53's weren't, and aren't, common drops. Actually, I don't think I've seen any level 50+ since Hamidon gained the choice between reward merits or an enhancement drop.

There are likely to be more 50, 50+, 50++, 51, 51+, 51++, 52, and 52+ HO's floating around and in base storage. These enhancements are largely server locked since they can't be placed in the auction house or sent by email. I think the only way they can be moved between servers is through a server transfer.

Also, as to price, get prepared to bend over.

Level 50 Ribo's go for 400,000,000 on average.
Level 52 Ribo's have gone for as much as 1,000,000,000

There is no auction house record for level 53 Ribo's. All of the ones that I'm aware of making the trading market are sold off the market and for more than the personal influence wealth cap. Depending on how many you want, you'll probably need 10 or 12billion sacked away in order to make up the prices that players selling level 53 HO's are going to want.

So, for those wanting layered vision in CoH, it could be arriving in 2011.

Also, as a note, the iZ3D system "generally" works across both Nvidia and ATi graphics cards.

A few years back somebody posted a response to the concept that defenders heal with... I want to say it was a video, titled I'm a defender! I just remember lots of pictures showing defenders doing different things. In fact, the subject was actually a sore-point for the developers themselves.

One of my largest complaints on defenders was the labeling of the class. When you go to create an avatar in the game the defenders damage was described as "medium" while a blaster's damage for the same powerset was described as "high". For all other archtypes the difference between "high" and "medium", such as a Scrapper's damage to a Tank's damage, and a tank's shielding to a scrapper's shielding, was about 30%. The difference between "high" to "low" was about 60%.

Defender power to identical Blaster power though, on average, was 60%. Only in various AOE's were the 30% rates observed, and in some powers such as the Blizzard Nuke, ignored. The reality was, Defender damage was bloody low.

Many players basically became used to the idea that Defenders just didn't do damage. One of my friends made an empathy / archery defender, and.. well. Let's just say that solo-ing was not a strong point. My friend could deliver all of the buffs in the world, but because he couldn't debuff an enemy, and none of his attacks had a secondary effect, he just couldn't defeat enemies.

This is where we get to the sore-point. One of the problems the developers ran into with Defenders is that Defenders had too wide a range of powers. Minor changes to the overall damages, in order to actually give defenders attacks with "medium damage ratings" would turn defender combinations with -resists into power-houses that would, on paper, out-dps blasters.

In fact, the developers recognized that the old Old-Vigilance was a bit of a problem for some power-sets. Endurance Reduction depending on team-mates health didn't work for all archtypes. In fact, endurance problems created their own internal issue.

Some classes (cough radiation cough) would have large amounts of recovery tied up in running their toggle debuffs. In many cases a Radiation Emission on SO's wouldn't be able to do anything but drop their toggles, then pretty much spend the rest of the fight doing nothing since all of their endurance was powering the toggles alone. Such toggle heavy power-sets would rely on team-mates loosing health to take advantage of endurance reduction.


Now, granted, today's IO system, and the new vigilance have addressed two of the problems that defenders faced.

• Recovery or +endurance buffs tend to be common in the mezzing or debuff / buff IO's available to most defenders.
• The new Vigilance gives a damage buff while in solo or small team configurations, actually giving defenders the DPS to be effective.

For many older players, the conditioning can still remain. There is a mentality that defenders don't attack.

You can actually see this in practice by checking a players power list. There are many defenders who will quickly sacrifice their secondary / attack powers to pick up useful pool powers, such as the Leadership pools, the fitness pool, the invisibility pool, or the healing pool. For many defenders, it's not that they don't want to cycle through from their primary to their secondaries. It's that they don't have any secondary powers to cycle to, or the powers that they do have are IO'd out for IO buffs rather than power-effect.

Hopefully this answers your question and gives a bit of background insight into the game.

every time a new issue hits I tend to make the requisite now hosted by SOE jokes.

As to the original poster's problem, I've been working a wide range of servers over the past couple of weeks, and I haven't noticed any particular map-dropping errors. Actually I did figure out what was causing my own "game seems to pause for 5 seconds" issue from a good while back. (it was KDE changing background wallpapers for those interested)

I've got the old net_info tool that used to be on NCSoft's support site mirrored through google docs. It can tell you if you have any problems connecting to various NCSoft games. Useful for determining if the connection problem is the server or your connection.

Also, if you are running a Cable or DSL modem, type the address 192.168.100.1 into your address bar.

This should bring up the modem control panel. If you are running through a router, you might have to set yourself as a DMZ host to view.

On a cable modem you should have both a Receive Power Level and a Transmit Power Level.

• The receive power level should be between 0 and 1.
• The Transmit level should be between 45 and 56.

If the numbers aren't in that range, and you are on a cable modem, you might want to call your ISP and have your lines checked.

Well... honestly... get a system that doesn't use Intel graphics.

One of the basic problems is that Intel doesn't really have much interest in the gaming graphics market. Sure, Intel makes demonstrations at E3 and other cons showing off their chips running the latest games... in low resolutions and with the lowest detail settings. Intel's status as a provider of gamer-capable graphics is such that most developers openly mock Intel, and one of the big pre-selling points on Project Larrabee was Intel's aggressive approach in getting game developer input. Intel canned that Project Larrabee which once again sent a message to game developers that Intel just doesn't care about graphics.

Another basic problem is that not all of the Intel Branded hardware is actually Intel hardware. In many cases the graphics hardware is designed by Imagination Technologies.

That problem is complicated by the problem that not all of Intel's drivers are written by Intel. In many cases the Graphics Drivers were actually designed by, and implemented by, Tungsten Graphics who are now owned by VMWare.

The Intel Hardware / Driver matrix is so complex that even Intel is on record admitting they have too many drivers for some products.


The problems with the actual hardware, and who-ever writes the drivers for that hardware, is further complicated by notebook vendors themselves.

Both AMD and Nvidia have taken to hosting chip-compatible bare-bones drivers for the GPU's that they sell to the OEM's and ODM's that actually produce laptops. One of the driving reasons stated by AMD is that notebook vendors weren't keeping their own drivers up to date. As many City of Heroes players have found out the hardway, notebooks with AMD graphics would often come with a driver that lacked any OpenGL support.

Case in point for me, I've got an Asus F3Ka. The laptop shipped with a RadeonHD 2600 mobile GPU. The latest AMD/ATi driver that will support this GPU was released on 10/22/10. The latest driver Asus lists was released on 2007/10/31.

Now, the reason why laptop vendors do NOT update their offered drivers is fairly simple. Laptop vendors figure that at some point you'll have to buy a new laptop and the more quickly your current laptop is obsolete the more quickly you'll spend more money.

There are also other factors. To a beancounter it simply is not worth the maintenance cost to continue to properly update mobile graphics drivers. Many of the custom drivers meant for laptops often have special hotkey access, special timings, or even special fan controls, that a generic driver won't support. In many cases adding the special controls to a driver can take additional man-hours and the actual product driver will have little resemblance to the reference driver.

In the Intel situation where there is a wide variety of Hardware, and a wide range of product drivers, some of which are updated and some of which are not, most laptop vendors simply say something to the effect of "screw it"


I, personally, don't agree with that sentiment. That being said, I don't know how to fix that mentality on the part of the laptop vendors. I don't know how to fix Intel's perception that drivers are not-important and there should be an easy and non-complex way for users to update their drivers without having to dive through one of the industry's worst software-download matrix's in the history of web-interfaces.

I honestly don't know what to tell people who have Intel graphics hardware and aren't in a position to replace it. There's only so much you can do on the driver front, and for the most part, you are either waiting for Intel or the laptop vendor to care, neither of which are likely to do so.

erg. My head actually hurts on this question.

Okay, first thing, Choking Cloud is in the Radiation Emission Powerset. It is a toggle point-blank-area of effect power. The stats of the power are identical across all three archtypes that can get it: Defender, Controller, and Corruptor. The pertinent stats are:

• 15ft radius / 30ft diameter
• 50% chance for 2mag hold
• 80% chance for 1mag hold

So, first of all, yes the set will do a 3mag hold, just "like more other sets.

Second of all, it's a constant PBAOE toggle. That means that it works like an attack armor. Any enemy that gets within PBAOE / Melee. The reason why it is only chance for hold is because the archtypes that get the power are not supposed to fight in melee range. Let me repeat that, and bolded.

The Archtypes that have access to Choking Cloud are not Supposed to be Fighting in Melee Range.

Choking cloud, as a power, is designed to give those archtypes who have enemies enter melee range a chance for the avatar to leave melee range.

Now, is the power worth getting? Well, considering that the Basilisk's Gaze has a 7.5% recharge buff with only 4 slots, and Choking Cloud gives you a platform to put this set on, and it can save your hide when an enemy closes up, then yes, Choking Cloud is probably worth getting.

If you don't spend a lot of time in melee range, as most controllers, corruptors, and defenders should be doing, then you likely will not really miss the power in a regular course of play.

nope. not even the tip.

I've run the numbers before comparing the active player population as determined by average number of posts versus the total population of the listed board members versus the known subscriber numbers versus the expected subscriber numbers. From a purely numerical point of view the active population of the forums could be anywhere from 2% to 15% of the actual paying player base. There are several reasons why the percentage range is so wide.

To put this in comparison for a moment, if somebody was to judge the player base on the forums alone there are several logical conclusions that can be gained:

• All players have at least 2 accounts.
• PvP is an active component of the game with a large number of participants on many servers
• Everybody has at least one level 50 avatar on Hero and Villain side
• Everybody has unlocked Villain and Hero Epic Archtypes
• Everybody uses purples in their builds
• Everybody builds towards defensive soft-cape
• Everybody is sitting on at least 2billion influence on one avatar
• Anybody can use the market to gain millions of influence in a very short amount of time.

Every single one of these logical conclusions by active forum posts is... you guessed... dead wrong. PvP content, on the basis of player traffic through all PvP zones on any given server, was once described as gaining less traffic than the old Hollows on the same server. Keep in mind that this comparison was made back before the Hollows Revamp and the I13 PvP-revamp, in which many cite as a PvP-heyday.

We know from the developers decision to move Epic Archtypes to a level 20 unlock that a majority of the player-base hadn't ever reached level 50, and thus not everybody had an Epic Archtype avatar. We also know that players reaching the influence cap is a rare occurrence. The devs are actually on record as describing off-market trades for more than the personal-influence cap as being an abuse of the system, one they are not sure how to address or deal with. The list from that point goes on, and on, and on.

From a strictly practical point of view the forums represent a small group of players, and that small group is, in and of itself, fragmented. In some cases the fragmented nature can be useful, allowing the developers a quick range of feedback on any given specific issue. In most cases the fragmented nature is not so useful. The not-so-gentle point here is that the "jerk" player who does not understand basic game design is more likely to be more vocal, and more forceful in that vocalization, over any given issue from somebody who actually knows what they are typing about. Just look for the calm and collected posts that take time to reason out any given scenario, event, or idea. Then compare the number of those posts to the flat one liners with disparaging remarks.

On some level most game developers understand the communication problems associated with opening up any particular forum or avenue of communication with the player-base. There are a variety of different methods by which game developers can approach the community in order to get effective feedback, such as having a limited-access beta for any given software release, or responding to emails or private messages. For particular issues where mass feedback is required typical approaches include marketing survey's, pop-up notifications in game requesting feedback, and other such methods.

Specifically for CoH, a F2P model probably isn't in the near or long-term future. NCSoft was pretty clear about having a multi-year plan for the CoH franchise, so I'll go-ahead and restate my opinion.

If Going Rogue does not sell as well as NCSoft expects over the Christmas Season, and if subscription rates are not where NCSoft would like them to be by the end of the first fiscal quarter of 2011, NCSoft will likely work with Paragon Studios to pursue building a CoH2 game.

Should NCSoft pursue and develop a sequel title, it is likely that NCSoft would do a unified subscription, with just a single CoH subscription unlocking access to both games. I don't think, at this stage, that a F2P business model is in the cards for City of Heroes as it is now.

Conversion to a F2P model has only largely worked in one circumstance: Market Saturation.

To end this, let me pose a simple question:

How many Fantasy / Medieval themed MMO's are there?
How many sci-fi first person / third person shooters with online components are there?
How many Super-Hero MMO's are there?

Thing is, F2P can work when you have a good basic game that is better than the competitors basic game, but both are in the same market. Charging a subscription fee for something that is offered for free elsewhere can work if you have a good brand-name or an outstanding product.

When nobody else has a competitive product, you can pretty much set your own price. The fact is, as of right now, CoH doesn't have any competitive products. From recent game demonstrations it's likely that CoH will continue to remain unrivaled for a few more years. With the lack of any real competition to force a product or pricing move, there is little reason for NCSoft to pursue a different financial model.

I'm responding to this a bit on an off-the-cuff level. While I do have a dark / stone brute, that avatar is in the 20's and is several levels away from Granite.

The reasons why I have a Dark / Stone brute are related to some of the reasons you don't really see that many stone armor brutes around, at least not these days. Several issues back Stone Armor was the king of survivability. If you wanted to take damage, Stone was the way to go. However, with defensive capabilities exposed through various existing IO sets, the Willpower and Shield armor sets have become more prized for those seeking survivability, offering power-sets with decent base defensive capabilities, decent resistances, and powers that can leverage a brute's high-HP cap.

I decided to make a Stone Armor brute precisely because I wasn't seeing them around.

My own Dark / Stone build is largely being built with the idea of not using Granite. On paper I can achieve a defensive soft-cap to smashing / lethal, and get close to, if not perma, Earth's Embrace outside of granite. The conceptual idea is that in doing so I won't actively be sacrificing total damage, and will still have a high recharge rate for when I encounter enemies that will require the defensive and resistance properties of granite armor.

The aspect of Fury while in Granite mode was a consideration. A player I know from a global channel does have a Stone Armor brute and we compared Fury levels after the I18 update. On average my existing Electrical Brute was able to sustain the ~80 fury limit. Under similar aggro conditions, in granite, the other player was sustaining between 10~20 less fury.

On paper then, under the new Fury and with the damage debuff to Granite armor, a Brute in Granite Armor without any other external or internal buffs, should be putting out the same average damage as a tank: This being based on ~63 fury being the equivalent of a scrapper, and Granite's -30% damage debuff being the difference between scrappers and tanks.

So yes, in practical effect, being in Stone Armor will effect negatively effect Fury. However, the damage debuff of Granite itself will, in most cases, affect total damage more-so than the loss of Fury itself.

The company he went to needs a lot of good employees.

... *sends them a resume to see what happens*

if, for some reason, the player somehow enters a code that only unlocks a single faction / side, Customer Service was activating the other faction / side of the game manually.

The system is supposed to be setup so that buying City of Heroes or City of Villains or entering a code unlocks both games. Doesn't mean it always works.

Well, first thing, the Gift of the Ancients 7.5% run speed proc also includes a +Defense component, so you don't really sacrifice protection to place it.

On my first stone tank I did a 4-slot franken-slot of
Luck of the Gambler Defense / Endurance
Luck of the Gambler 7.5%
Gift of the Ancients 7.5%
Gift of the Ancients Defense / Endurance

Now, that being said, spending slots on movement will only buy you so much. With both Granite and Rooted up, you'll have -10.02 + -12.89, or basically 22.91mph of your base run speed gone. So even if you rack up on movement speed boosts, you won't be moving very fast anyways.