City of Heroes Legacy Updater no longer in use from August 4

ive never had any issues with the nclauncher either and i do like the additional options and having test and beta listed in the one place so i can see if any of them need an update

and yes i also wish that the steam overlay and client would still work saying that your in game like it used to

The NCSLauncher was already working through Steam (with overlay) on my home rig, but I just installed CoX via Steam on my laptop as well and it worked exactly as advertised. No issues.

I'm Useing the NCS Launcher and its keeps telling me servers are down, But i launch the game fine anyway.

To those claiming the new launcher is always always always faster....sorry.

I've actually had an opportunity to test some extreme and normal situations with the new and old launchers, and frankly, it's a mixed bag at best. The good news is that in most normal cases the NCSoft Launcher will have a fairly slight edge.

I don't have my actual timings anymore, but here's the cases where things choke:

2) Downloading the game: About a 10-15% loss of speed. I have no idea why DLing the game would produce wildly different results from simply patching it, but that's what happened.

1) On an outdated 360k DSL connection: This is the nasty one, and probably where a lot of the complaints come from: I experience about 75% slower downloads on this using the new vs. old launcher. I'm not sure how much of the US is still stuck on these kinds of lines, but it's definitely not ZERO and these are the customers who are really hurt.

I see about a net 0% speed change except when applying after a patch. Then it has thus far, in the last few months, been a vast improvement.

I'm on Comcast Xfinity internet. I patched on the updater at about 20-100KB/s. I patch on the NCLauncher at about 800-1000KB/s. No joke. So much faster I can't even imagine going back to the updater.

Since I set the NCLauncher to close after use, I don't see its memory leak robbing my system of resources while it sits there doing nothing. Thursdays and any day that patching is announced, I fire it up before going to work and by the time I get home, everything is hunky-dory.

I *HATED* the NCLauncher at first. It had horrible issues, especially the memory leak and crashing problems. I couldn't access anything related to NCsoft (the game, the forums, the account website, NOTHING) while the launcher was running. It still has the memory leak but that is easy to get around. The crashing hasn't happened in months. I have no idea when they fixed the access issue but that hasn't happened in quite a while as well.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Dispari I don't know why Dink thinks she's not as sexy as Jay was. In 5 posts she's already upstaged his entire career.

A few things that may be affecting some people's results; if folks (especially rednames) have more detailed info that would be useful. The more we understand how things actually work, the better we can help people troubleshoot and get things working.

* As I understand it, the NCSoft launcher client downloads use one or more distributed content provision services, probably including Akamai.

What this means is that if you have an Akamai server that is "closer" to you in a network-topology sense than the NCSoft main servers, you will get the benefits from downloading from that "closer" server. For many, probably even most people, this will be a significant increase in inherent speed; but it's not guaranteed to be faster, and in rare perverse cases might be inherently slower. Specifically, most ISPs have a much higher bandwidth and cheaper internal network than their actual "Internet" connection(s), and in some markets may have low-cost / high-bandwidth peering connections with other local ISPs and institutions; if you can reach an Akamai server via one of those routes, inherent performance will almost certainly be better.

In my case for instance, my home connection is a small local broadband ISP, but which has a peering arrangement with a nearby major research university, which IIRC hosts an Akamai distributed content server in their machine room; I'm likely downloading from across town instead of across the continent, and get significantly better performance.

* All of the above relates to "inherent" performance; unfortunately most ISPs these days use one form or another of traffic shaping, which will affect customer observed performance, possibly significantly. Smart ISPs with good setups may actually give Akamai-ized traffic *better* traffic parameters, as it costs them a whole lot less in the long run for you to get content locally that doesn't clog their expensive upstream pipes to the general Internet. However, some ISPs without good peering may lump Akamai in with "rich media" services in general, and strongly choke down the bandwidth they allocate to such things; all of a sudden you're no longer in the generally well-behaved (from a traffic standpoint) bucket of "gamers" but fighting for artificially-limited bits in the stream with all the Netflix folks. Cable modem ISPs tend to be more likely to fall in the latter category, given their competitive desire to make streaming video other than their own channels look bad.

* As I understand it, there was supposedly some peer-to-peer (P2P) "like" features in the new launcher; I've not seen any direct indications of this but haven't poked at it in detail. These sorts of technologies usually depend on opening multiple ports and paths, sometimes significantly more so than a "traditional" connection. Some older or cheaper routers have problems with this sort of more "parallel" download, and may not perform as well. (E.g. We've got a system behind an old, cheap router at work that will work happily for months under normal conditions, but on the rare occasions we distribute something via BitTorrent the router needs to be rebooted every few days... some sort of route table garbage collection problem under load I suspect.)

Additionally, even if your equipment is up to modern standards, everything between you and the outside world may not be. There might be less capable equipment in your apartment complex, in the building up the street, or even the local office. Some ISPs also reflexively throttle anything that looks like it even remotely might be P2P file sharing, under the theory that most of it is illegal anyway and it eats into their expensive bandwidth quickly; this is another case where for a few customers transiting to a technically superior service may run afoul of ISP bandwidth allocation policies and end up getting worse performance.

* I've personally noticed that the actual *patching* process runs significantly faster on my computers; however, as some have mentioned it seems to want a lot more scratch / temp space than it used to. If you have a computer with limited or fragmented free space, you might not see the benefits, or might in some cases (nearly-full drives) see even slower patching. As a ballpark guess, you probably want something on the order of 10 GB (in other words, a bit more than twice the size of all of CoH) of clean, unfragmented free space over and above whatever your pagefile and OS needs are for best performance. Depending on exactly how their new patcher works, it may also be taking better advantage on modern systems of more memory, at perhaps the cost of some slowdown on older systems with less.

* Note that none of the above are taking into account the "trickle" downloads; I don't normally leave my home desktop on to save power, and have it set to exit the launcher on game start for performance. However, if I'm expecting a patch, I can leave things on while I'm at work or sleeping and have it automatically be ready for me when I get back to it; in the long run this can be a significant user time saver. (Compare trickle downloads to a crock pot... things may take longer to cook, but if it requires no attention on your part and runs while you're at work, the user time from walking into your door and having food / game is shorter.)

* In general, the old NCSoft launcher was horrid on Vista. The current version seems to run smoothly on Windows 7 systems with plenty of resources. I no longer have Vista systems to compare, however. I will need to upgrade before the deadline an antique backup laptop with limited disk, ram, and Windows XP; it will be interesting to see whether the new launcher holds up there or has worse performance.

Don't worry too much about blocked ports. I'm behind an ISP NAT that blocks all incoming packets that aren't responses to something originated on my computer. I still can use the NC Launcher just fine. A quick inspection with ProcessExplorer shows that the NC Launcher initiates a bunch of HTTP requests when it starts up, and it sends some more HTTP requests when it wants to update a game.

If you're sure there's no software in your computer interfering with it (antiviruses, I'm looking at you) then the problem is most likely with your ISP. The best way to test if there's a software conflict in your computer is to make a fresh install of Windows in an external drive (Windows XP SP3 will do just fine for this; you can install it without a CD Key for a month, so you don't even need that big of an external drive) and running the Launcher from there, with no other software installed. If it runs there, something in your Windows install is messing with it. If it doesn't, time to grab the pitchforks and go after your ISP.

Another test would be to install the NC Launcher in a laptop, and then try some wifi hotspots in public places or friend's houses. If it works there but not at home, you know switching ISPs will fix the problem.