je_saist

Gut reaction is: Legal

First, there is the acceptance of payment. Legally speaking NCSoft has to report all financial transactions. The expectation is that EU only buys from EU, US only buys from US, and so on and so forth. Now, we "know" that a significant number of non-US players buy and play on the US servers. Basically this just winds up meaning more paperwork on NCSoft's end to report transactions to the proper legal authorities.

There is also the submission of content for ratings. NCSoft submits the content to both the ESRB (in the US), and PEGI (for the EU).

The EU version, as I understand it, also includes translated content in French and German. As far as I'm aware, this translated content is not available in the "US-release" :: While the digital art, polygon, and geometry builds would be different, the additional languages would require additional code, making for a different final binary client.

You don't have the chops to go further.

... sorry. definitely... definitely... SORRY.

The only thing that could make that kid's life more awkward is if this guy had the god-fathers of Jason Burrows and Scott Nall.

Four Words: Lord Recluse Strike Force

A Mind Dominator with perma domination can shut down the Heroes, making one of the toughest and most annoying fights in the game a near trivial experience.

Actually I'm running 10.1, 10.4, 10.5, and now 10.6 against CoH Ultra Mode. (and no, you don't want to know how long it takes me to go through the entire set)

I have not been able to duplicate this error on Live or Test with WinNT6 or WinNT5 against my own RadeonHD cards.

which is... small!

because it was the cutest thing we could find for you?

that's good to hear. Thank you.

I'm one of the players infamous on the forum for stating that tanks without taunt are bad players, period. A lot of other players in the game don't like that I say this.

However, I can invariably pull out a non-tanking avatar from my stable of controllers, blasters, and scrappers, give the tauntless tank a head-start into a mob, and then invariably rip aggro from them. I can't do it repeatedly, or reliably, on a defender due to often lower damage counts and lack of available direct attack powers.

Now, I won't fault you for not wanting to take taunt on some armor types, specifically the resistance based sets Fire Aura and Dark Armor. At low levels, you just won't have the endurance management or shield powers to reliably take damage... and even if you wind up performing extensive IO work on them, there's a reason they get a self-rez.

Something else that you might want to consider if you are thinking about making the mistake of making a tauntless tank is that the current developers tend to focus on "scenario" battles. They keep trying to create experiences that require strategy to work on, rather than just a dog-pile.

Case in point? Statesman's task force and Ghost Widow. Get a couple of blasters and controllers to stack immobilize on Ghost Widow, and a tank can taunt her from range. She can't heal, but won't attack anybody but the tank.

ITF was another one that was initially designed with strategy in mind. Separate Romi from the Nictus, but keep them in sight. Again, early teams could complete a separation strategy with two avatars with taunt.

Now, I know that somebody is just going to trot along and pipe up that you don't need strategy in this game. Fair enough, pop enough inspirations, take the right builds into a mission, and you can dog-pile anything. I don't think our developers are going to back down and just making this a zerging game though. I think we are going to see more and more "scenario events" where the developers try to force players to use their archtypes strengths to solve the scenario challenges.

run windows update until you have all of the updates.

check your in-game graphics settings. The settings have changed with the I17 update, so the same settings as before will give you a higher image quality.

doubtful. NCSoft and the ESA don't exactly get-along with each other, with NCSoft pulling from the trade organization back in 2008. NCSoft reportedly still maintains a grudge over how they were treated at previous E3 events, and in all honesty, I really can't blame them.

According to the official exhibitor list, NCSoft is not at the show: http://www.e3expo.com/exhibitors/92/exhibitor-list/ :: http://e310.mapyourshow.com/3_0/search.cfm?let=N

While it's possible that NCSoft could be at one of the surrounding hotels performing closed door sessions, I haven't seen anything pop on my news wires.

His system model is listed as a Pavilion dv8000. I'm fairly certain that system is not recognized by the Catalyst Mobility Xp drivers.

Twiggy: grab the 9-3 driver from here: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownloa...?&lang=English

Then go here: http://www.gamingheaven.net/modtool.php

Follow the instructions on the mobility modder page to install the 9-3 driver.

Deus pretty much makes my argument for me. It really depends on the melee set you take with it. It also depends on what your goal with the tank is. Most of my tanks are built for sustained combat, both in mob combat and in single target combat.

Now, given the way your phrase your statement about your Dark Armor tank, I can make a couple of guesses about how you "made it work" without stamina:

• A: You have dark melee and rely on a high recharge and high accuracy bonus to drive Dark Consumption
• B: You didn't take that many attacks, or you don't use attacks in combat, probably taking fire melee and coupling it with Fire for Scorch, Combustion, Build Up, Fire Sword Circle, Burn, and Greater Fire Sword. Lousy sustained average dps, but high burst damage coupled with a crowd clearing mitigation.
• C: It's purpled out

In all of these situations, there is the assumption that there is a heavy use of Invention Origin enhancements, or of a non-tanking strategy.

In the case of the original poster, he stated that his melee choice was Dual Blades, and he's also going with Willpower. Willpower is at it's strongest in a "traditional" tanking situation: surrounded by mobs. Dual Blades is also at it's strongest when working the combinations, and working the combinations requires triggering the endurance heavy attacks on a regular basis.

Ergo: he's probably not going to be able to drive what he wants to do without stamina as a backing power:

There's also another factor to consider: in-game cash: We don't know what the original poster's budget is either: is he a billionaire with influence to burn? Is he looking at an SO build? Is he looking at something that he's going to work towards building?

Now, I won't argue that some builds of Willpower don't need stamina. I can think of several off the top of my head. I've made a couple.

There's a difference between telling a player that "yes you can do without that power if you have this amount of money to burn," and teaching a player how to think their power interactions out.

Personally, I prefer teaching players how to think about how they play, and how to approach the powers in the aspect of how they play those powers, rather then slapping them a MID's output and telling them to have at it. There's a reason whenever I write a build guide I go through point-by-point explaining why I took one power or another.


I'm not going to tell you that you have to take travel powers. I presume from the way you phrase your statement that you are aware that Ninja Run gets turned off if you go on a "Master of" task force. I'm pretty sure you've also heard, or read, most of the arguments about IO slotting, proc usage, and so on.

If you want to take a travelpower less build, then you are free to do it.

Your regen rate is partially tied to your HP cap: http://paragonwiki.com/wiki/Hit_Points

You can get a Willpower to the HP cap at level 50 with a bit of IO work and the usage of accolade powers.

There are several factors that you'll need to consider when chasing after ever increasing regeneration rates, such as:

• regeneration is not the total answer to survival
• regeneration rate boosts through IO's are limited
• overall avatar power choice and design for task at hand
• if you take all of your primary and secondary powers, you will have six power choices left to make

No matter how you slot physical perfection, it's not going to give you greater surivability over taking the fighting pool for Tough and Weave. Ergo, you'd only want to take physical perfection if you were able to fit it and another epic pool power, either Focussed Accuracy or Conserve Power, on top of a build that already has boxing, tough, and weave included atop your basic armors.

So, you'll need to already have a handle over which powers you can reasonably drop. Out of the Willpower set, the only real droppable power is the revive. Out of the dual-blades set, it's not so easy to pick a power to drop. As a set dual-blades is weaker on straight damage and straight mitigation of incoming damage. The damage counts and mitigations are made up for by activating the various combinations of Dual Blade powers.

Now, I'm sure some number cruncher out there will tell you that oh you can drop such and such a power and skip that chain and it won't affect your DPS / Aggro handling abilities. My personal opinion is a "depends on what armor you coupled it with."

Willpower, as an armor set, is extremely weak to slow powers, with no recharge rate resistance. So, all it takes is one Crey Cryo tank and your combo ability goes out the door. As you get into the later stages of the game, you'll run into more and more enemies that have slow components to their attacks, such as the Carnies (Psi), Malta, Rikti, Arachnos, and Rularuu.

In order to put your DB mitigation down effectively, you'll pretty much have to take every single power on a tank. Sure, scrappers can get away with dropping Confront, but if I have to explain why dropping Taunt makes a player a bad tank, I don't want to.

So, for an average DB / WP built tank, the only power you could safely drop would be the Revive.

That's only going to leave you with 7 free powers.

3 of those powers go to swift, health, stamina. That leaves you with 4 powers. two of those go to your travel set.

That just leaves you with two power choices, and on a tank, you really, really, really want to get your smash / lethal resistance as high as possible... so that pretty much limits you to boxing and tough.

From there you could work backwords, thinking about which powers you might not really need. You might be able to justify dropping Strength of Will to take Weave, and just settle for not being able to handle alpha strikes as well as you could with a different build.

***

Once you have your basic build structure in mind, and you know what you want to do with the build, then you can start to look at various IO sets, seeing which ones offer HP cap boosts, or regeneration boosts.

The general rule of thumb is that in the long term an Hp Cap boost is going to benefit you more than a straight regeneration boost, and many IO sets with HP cap boosts also have regeneration boosts.

Hopefully this helps you in your quest to make a good tank.

CannonFlumps off the top of the Castle, landing on the lounging Fey!

nothing's changed. But I seriously doubt you were in the Storm Palace doing your hunt on an Energy Energy blaster without getting slaughtered on a regular basis. I also doubt you were staying in melee range and letting them stack up debuffs, and as an energy / energy, I suspect you had enough knockback to keep them away if they even thought about getting close.

For the most part Overseers only spawn in 3 places throughout the Shadow Shard:

Level 44 minus: Point X-Ray - Fire Base Zulu
Level 44 minus: Point Tango - Fire Baze Zulu
Level 50 plus: Storm Palace

(yes, they do spawn elsewhere, but not consistantly if you are hunting them down for the badge, these are best hunt locations)

All spawns in the shadow shard are Hazard Zone Spawns, which means full mob.

You can find small mobs at Point X-Ray with 2 Overseers and one minion, but for the most part, it's 5-8 minions, a couple of lewys, and a boss, and sometimes two bosses.

Short version: You don't.

Long version: Given that an aggro-capped group of level 44 Rularuu can chew through 49's like a group of 50's chew through a 54 AV, you'll want to reconsider not fighting the low levels for the overseer badge.

The Rularuu contain some of the most powerful debuffs in the entire game, and are designed for team combat, and still contain some of the old design traits such as non-positional Psionic attacks. The only reason afformentioned archtypes like Willpower can survive them is due to the Psionic resistance / defense. Something you have to keep in mind when the Rularuu were designed is that only two defense powers in the game could counter their attacks: Dark Armor's Obsidian Shield on scrappers and Stone Armor's Minerals on Tanks.

They were basically designed to chew through everything else, so even if you had an SR with a couple of Force Field defenders behind you or an Empath with Fort, you'd still be chewing dirt on a regular basis.

Like the thread already suggests, you'll want to be hauling along a team-mate, either somebody who can heal you, or somebody who can stack holds.

If you don't have a team-mate, head to Point X-Ray in Firebase Zulu.

Okay. There's an assumption being made here on the part of the player base, and I've been guilty of making it as well. It's the presumption that the server setup allows the developers to maintain two different servers and two different patch-sets with one updater command and one login.

As far as we "know" access to test is simply flagged by adding the -test command to the end of the shortcut used to launch the game. This -test flag tells the loader to get all of the files for the test version of the game. We've assumed in the past that because various shards listed on the test server were turned off, or had disabled access, that other content was on that alternative shard.

Given what we know of how the game works, it's actually likely that the only content difference is going to be the player database, and that the other shards don't actually have any in-game engine / exposed content differences. Why would this be so? Well, if the only difference between the -test server and the -live server is the tag used on the starting shortcut, how would the other shards know to access un-downloaded content? Thing is, we "know" that each patch update to the game only contains a small amount of data, and each patch is intentionally kept small so that bugs or other issues can be easily tracked.

It would make no sense to have players downloading huge swaths of code that were changing, or going to be changing, that could cause errors. Imagine for a second downloading a version of the patch that enables the Mutant Pack, but also puts a Portal Corp building in the warehouse district of Atlas Park which links to Praetoria. Even if your account was still locked out of Praetoria, you'd see this Portal Corp buidling, wonder what's up with it... and then a few days later the devs might say... No, we're going to put it under City Hall and have it accessed through a door there. Now there's a new patch, with new code, with changes the player-base can't see... and now you have players wondering why they just downloaded a patch that did nothing.

Now do this for every possible change that Praetoria access could bring to the existing game, and you've got a patch / repatch schedule that would be adding / removing code on a near constant basis.

Given the method by which code is flagged for download by the launcher, and given the way the code is injected into the existing game, we can be fairly certain that other shards don't contain other server builds, and that enabling another shard isn't actually possible.


Which brings me to my other point. I really think the unhappy non-US players are barking at the wrong site on how non-US players are being handled with the game. I know the last time I brought this up the non-US players snerked... but really the non-US marketing should be handled by NCSoft's international branches.

Here's the thing as I understand it: Paragon Studios just makes the game. NCSoft is the one that actually provides the hosting servers and account log-ins.

Something that I don't see anybody else asking is where exactly does Paragon Studios get their hosting hardware from? Does NCSoft have a cap on how much server hardware they can use? Is there a cap on purchasing costs of server hardware? Is there a cap on what Operating System's they can use on each server? We know from past developer statements that the testing hardware allocation is far sight off of the allocation from a live server.

It might be that NCSoft simply won't allocate any additional hardware for the non-US markets. It might be that hardware NCSoft has allocated for testing Going Rogue isn't substantial enough to handle everybody who could be in the beta. Thinking back to the I17 Open Beta, on some nights the system lag was way worse than Talos Island on Virtue at Lagworths and the Train station, and the test server couldn't have been pushing the same population load as virtue (if the /search system was accurate). It might be then that for the non-us markets, Paragon Studios only has access to one hardware setup that's substantial enough to handle the beta test, and that hardware setup is the existing Test Server. It might just be that if Paragon Studios partitioned the hardware and ran two instances of the server client, the test instance and the beta instance, the system performance would be horrible for both instances.

Again, this comes back to: This is NCSoft's Problem, not Paragon Studios

Now, I'm not going to say that Non-US players don't have a reason or a right to be angry. Once you toss a Windows Server Operating System license aside, servers tend to be really cheap. I mean, take a look at what $5000 could get you from HP. 2 Opterion 6172's, 16gigs ram, 4 gigabit network ports, a hard-drive controller that I presume is really fast, and a 750 watt power supply. Fine, that doesn't include the actual hard-drives, or the other list of options HP would gladly tack on... but still...

I mean, we know that NCSoft loves to brag about how profitable CoH has been for them, why not turn some of that profit into an overkill server solution?


anyways, if you are genuinly in busting NCSoft for this, drop by their global contact page: http://www.ncsoft.net/global/support/contact.aspx

Couple of tidbits here. While there is an office for Media Center in Europe, there's no European marketing / publishing listed. Might be why Going Rogue is online only in Europe.

Fifth Floor, Mocatta House, Trafalgar Place, Brighton BN1 4DU,
United Kingdom
+44-0-1273-872000


Oh, and a final note, why complaining here on these forums might not get anything accomplished. I mentioned in this thread that companies such as AMD suggested that gamers contact the actual board vendor requesting driver features or updates for graphics drivers. After expressing confusion over why in the world the company behind a product was writing the driver to begin with wanted us to go talk to somebody else, it was put like this: AMD doesn't sell graphics cards directly. They sell graphics chips to OEM's and ODM's who then in turn sell those chips to consumers. Telling the likes of Sapphire, Tul, Dell, or Asus that their products would not be purchased or returned if they didn't meet an expected level of support would have the "real customers" of AMD panicking.

Well, it worked. Back when ATi launched the RadeonHD 4870, most of their board partners started putting Penguins on their boxes and including Linux drivers off the disc.

In the same way... NCSoft is a alternate-party to the City of Heroes game. If NCSoft gets leaned on and told that if they don't get a market into shape they'll lose that market, they'll scramble to get the market into shape.

It's quite possible, and it's something I don't think the non-US players want to consider, that NCSoft has decided that the non-US / non-Asian markets are not profitable enough to pursue, and intentionally are not making any efforts to reach those markets. Unless the people in those markets start fussing to the right people at NCSoft, I don't see anything changing.

*groans as the alarms interupt the unwrapping of the Becky*

... do I answer the call of duty... or the call of booty... *looks through the Land of Tushie regulations to see which is more important, cuddles or sackthingy containment*

*pops a Reaver from the Tech Plant and boosts to the scene of the Sack-rampage*

This is S.A.C. Interceptor Alpha, we have visual confirmation of the Tango, over

Tango is accompanied by kitten in toilet paper: Will commence restraining Missile Run in 3, 2, 1...

*hits the boost and flies in firing off ribbon missile after ribbon missile at the Sackthingy, covering the Sackthingy monster with bright pink ribbons*

Sackthingy Monster Secured, landing for kitten rescue operation

*lands the reaver, scampers over, picks up Becky and carries her back*

Base, this is S.A.C. Interceptor Alpha, make a note to develop a two seater version of the Reaver Intercept Platform

*pulls the toilet-paper covered Becky into the tight cockpit of the Reaver, and then flies back to base, having contained the threat of the sackthingy, and rescued a kitty in distress*

Course, the fun is found in unwrapping the kitty in the toilet paper :P

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showt...21#post2938621