je_saist

You aren't the only one whose thinking that GuyPerfect is the one that's out of his depth in this thread.

Leave the humor to those of us who can actually make jokes please.

*head tilts*

They didn't forget. They just didn't put it in there.

First: There was a practical reason: Describing custom characters takes up a chunk of text space, and there are various warnings that implementing a custom character will take up more space than implementing a pre-existing in-game character.

Second: Players working in the AE system do not have access to all of the tools the developers have. Somethings are held back specifically for the developers to use in their content.


Getting access to Signature Costume Parts probably will happen eventually.

As far as hand-picking each single power not in a player-accessible power-set... probably NOT going to happen.

Ack! ZOMBIE!

*turns and fires, only realizing that afterwords the Kitten is NOT holding an unlicensed Particle Accelerator, but instead grabbed one of the TF cannons from EGS*

Okay, rebooted? or reinstalled Windows?

Rebooted is just turning your computer on and off.

Reinstalling windows is... Reinstalling Windows.

*works on a SpacedPlushie*

hmm. You won't really work well in a plushie form... I guess I can try to go with the ever popular Pet Rock approach...

I do see how Chaos came to that conclusion.

One of the reasons Freedom and Virtue pull so much of the perceived population... is that they are popular. Imagine if you will a new player whose never seen the game before logging in for the first time on a Saturday night. They see the Yellow dots on Freedom and Virtue, and think to themselves something of the effect that "those must be good servers, I'll go play there." New player turns around and tell all their friends about CoH and recommend friends come play on the same server with them.

New player looks through all the archtypes and they wind up making multiple characters, getting a quick bout of "alt-itis", and thus run out of space for all their new characters. So, faced with the choice of spending more money, or trying a different server, most players think, "I'll try a different server", and do so. There they find different people, with different play-styles, and different play-times.

Chaos highlights the concern that allowing players to move slots around would allow certain players to aggregate to one server or another. A good, or depending on your point of view, bad case example was witnessed with the free server transfers earlier this year. As the PvP'ers spoke to one another and moved to Freedom, other players picked up and moved off.

***

The very real fact is, the hard-cap of player-slots at some point forces players to go to other servers to continue to make new characters. Allowing players to consolidate slots on one server or another would remove this, forced, interaction.

Now, I, personally, am neutral on the issue, and I'm going to attempt to draw a parallel to explain why:

One of the reasons I hated Final Fantasy XI was the worldpass bug^^^feature. For those who never played Final Fantasy XI, your starting server was randomized. Which meant that if you and a group of buddies all signed up at once, it was highly likely none of you were going to wind up on the same server. The "WorldPass" would allow players to go to a new server and join their friends. Squaresoft's conceptual idea was that you would have to talk with and interact with new players, and the Worldpass was one of their ways to force interaction in the game.

Which, while the system and concept worked for the Japanese Market... more resembled an Impervium Coated balloon in the US and UK markets. Many gamers, when questioned, flat out said they did not like a game developer telling them they had to play with somebody else.

Of course, the concept that "the developers cannot tell me that I have to play with somebody else" does sort of run counter to the whole point of playing an MMO. One of the "features" of an MMO is to meet other people, team up with them, and take down challenges. Ergo, there needs to be a balance between the developers respecting the wishes of the players, and enforcing the concepts of the game design.

***

My own personal opinion is that the Cryptic Studio developers, and now the Paragon Studio developers, have done a good job of maintaining this player-direction balance. I think only a small minority of the game is really bothered by the limit on character slots per server. I'd go so far as to say that I think such a minority is actually smaller than the "core PvP" crowd.

I also think that it's a bit of a moot point.

We "know" that the developers are working on a modification to the underlying engine where you can change characters without actually having to log completely out of the game and log back in. We also know that the developers have talked about a serverless environment, explicitly telling players when character transfers were implemented that a serverless environment might be in the game's future.

Now, this is just pure conjecture, but presuming that work on "CoH2" is underway, I suspect the server-limited environment we have now won't be replicated in a future game. My suspicion is that the future of CoH holds Dimensional Separations, where each Classic Server is given a dimensional assignment. Ergo, Triumph server would be Dimension Zeta Upsilon 23-7, and Victory server would be Omicron Upsilon 22-9.

My theory is that you'll be able to make a character, assign it to a slot, and pick a home dimension. However, you'll be able to team up with players from other Dimensions, which would be cross-server play. I think this sort of I've run out of slots on my favorite server solution would be more suited to the long term benefit of the City of Heroes franchise.

sorta... it does have a couch, and you could faint on it... and it is a really comfy couch...

Okay, fair point. I did read the original question as asking whether or not the pre-purchase was required to play the new sets right now, which is the typical re-occurring question on Demon Summoning / Dual Pistols.

I did not see an interpretation as: Do I need to prepurchase to get them period, or If get the Complete Pack, do I have to wait for the actual retail launch.

okay! getting somewhere!

So, let me make sure I understand this: in Windowed Mode, on your laptop, the game is running normally with no graphics lag or other issues?

I'm honestly not sure what to make of this development. Such behavior would normally indicate a driver error or an API issue.

***

also: you can email the pics to mepisguides at gmail dot com.

Photobucket does allow you to upload images based on file size, not resolution, but Photobuckets new interface is one of the reasons I switched to using Picasa for embedded image hosting and linking. PicasaWeb has it's own issues in that there is, as of yet, no way that I can find to hotlink to the fully sized picture. I can direct link to the full sized picture, but then you have to magnify and mouse/scroll around it inside the picasaweb viewer.

Correction: I found that the text s1600 could be used in place of the existing s400 / s800 options to link to a full sized image.

Call Me Awesome: actually the Omega drivers do the same thing this program does: http://www.hardwareheaven.com/modtool.php They add the list id's in to recognize by chipset, not vendor id, much like the Linux drivers. You'll also still only be running the 9-3 driver version.

There's still the problem that the x700 you have is on the legacy list, and NOR is the vendor included in the list of those supported. As a note, the following vendors have submitted their hardware changes back to AMD/ATi and are recognized by the installation software.

* Alienware
* Arima
* Clevo
* ECS
* Eurocom
* Falcon Northwest
* FIC
* Fujitsu Siemens
* HyperSonic PC
* Mitac
* MSI
* NEC-CI
* Pro-Star
* RockDirect
* Sager
* Uniwill
* Velocity Micro
* VoodooPC

Note: Sony is not anywhere in that list.

Okay. I sort of covered this in the sticky thread. Windows Update isn't the only one that will tell that your drivers are up to date when they are not. Most web-based "are your drivers up to date?" services have sound properties normally associated with Hoover or Electrolux.

This is why I "like" the GPUZ output since I can compare the driver revision reported with the driver revision that the vendor has actually released.