Hyperstrike

I, too, have lost badges. When the new zone exploration badges were introduced, I lost the last of each of the original zone badges and had to go get them again. I'm CERTAIN I lost them because as of Issue 13, I'd had ALL the exploration (save one Safeguard) and history badges available hero-side in-game.

I lost Isolator once.

Most recently I've found out that I lost all but TWO of my safeguard badges.

And this is on my main. Who has NEVER switched sides.

I've notified Paragon each time I've come across these losses. Unfortunately they either never respond or tell me I'm mistaken.

The last ticket I submitted was closed with nothing more than the automated response.

**ADDENDUM**

Actually, addressing this has got my dander up about the issue again.
Shot a PM off to Zwillinger asking him to put eyeballs on this thread and requesting a response other than "Maybe we'll look at this, maybe we won't" that comes with the automated responses.

I'm sorry but you're incorrect.

In terms of loading, in his case, the memory is far more important. The reason is that currently he's SWAPPING TO DISK during loads. I don't give a damn if you have a 500Ghz CPU, if it's spending 99.9% of it's cycles waiting for data from mechanical storage it's no faster than his P4.

The CPU will help more in terms of FRAMERATE for some of the CPU-intensive portions of the game. But loading a zone map isn't one of them. Please feel free to continue arguing this if you like, but it won't change anything.

Comparing his 2GB system memory to your old configuration with 8 is meaningless because your system bottlenecks are in completely different places.

Yes, but a 2500K would also require buying a new board and memory. I'm not sure he wants to COMPLETELY tear apart the system.

2.93Ghz E7500 Core2Duo: $120 (Free Shipping)

4GB (2x2GB) Patriot DDR2 800 (PC6400) Memory: $60 (Free Shipping)

CoolerMaster 600W PSU: $63 shipped

Western Digital 1TB 7200rpm drive with 64MB Cache: $90 (Free Shipping)

Or if you don't mind open Box returns

Western Digital 2TB 7200rpm drive with 64MB Cache: $73 shipped

Also, don't worry if the drives say SATA 6GB. All these SATA drives are backwards compatible.

nVidia GTX 260: $108 Shipped

OR

nVidia GTX 460: $158 Shipped and a $30 Mail In Rebate

So, were you to go whole-hog on all these upgrades, you'd wind up spending $530-580 (and get a little back from the MIR).






Okay that's a bit... MUCH. I could see, with 3rd party software, defragging just the game file. But the whole drive? Believe it or not, that is simply adding disk wear and actually NEGATIVELY impacts disk performance.


Your board might have need a BIOS update to recognize a 2TB drive, but you should be able to plunk a 1 to 1 1.5TB drive in no problem.

Question, do you leave the NCSoft launcher running? If so, set it to shut down when the game is launched.

Post your CoH Helper and Hijack This logs over in the technical support forum if this doesn't help your issue.

Agreed. There's the Ascension armor than the Ascension Radiance. The stuff with the auras is the Radiance stuff.


Me either really.

On the contrary. Going from 2 to 3-4GB would probably make a difference in his zone loads. Purely because the system would be doing less disk swapping. My 4GB XP LAPTOP shows 3GB of RAM. Outside the game, it uses 2.2GB of RAM. The game uses another 1.something GB when in (so I shut down the SQL server I have running). I'm sitting right on the threshold of maxed out for a 32-bit OS.

Agreed. One of the E7*** series would be most economical (2.9-3.0Ghz for between $120-150). Though if he doesn't object to spending more the E8400 or E8500 (3.0 or 3.1 Ghz for $180-200) would rip up quite nicely too due to the higher FSB being able to keep the chip supplied with numbers to crunch.


Probably not. But decently priced PSUs in that range are readily available. I probably wouldn't get anything much more powerful than a GTX260 though. And hell, Newegg has them for $100 new. The system won't be bleeding edge, but for $400-500 or so, he could give it a brand new lease on life and see NOTICEABLE performance gains.

Typos on my part. I'd just speedily retyped it before going to work this morning and had a freudian fat-finger.

I'll correct it to 500GB and 1-2TB now.

2GB isn't a lot of RAM. The OS by itself can eat that. CoH by itself can eat up to 1.5 before destabilizing. Likely you have resource contention here forcing disk swapping.

Once you're in this territory you're in trouble since swap space is several hundred times slower than main memory (and several thousand times slower than stuff in-flight on the CPU caches).

Things that can be used to reduce client-side zone load times:

1: More memory
2: Faster drives or drive systems. In this case (in order of preference low to high) 5400rpm HD < 7200rpm HD < 10,000 rpm HD < HD RAID 0 < SSD < SSD RAID 0.

Larger caches on your hard drives will help too, as they can spit out data faster than the mechanical portions of the drive can. And the larger the cache, the longer than can spit out data at this faster rate before falling back to the slower mechanical drive.

3: Don't play over wireless. Roughly 1/3 of wireless' bandwidth is eaten overhead (signaling, parity checking, retransmissions, etc). It's also higher latency than a strictly wired connection. As such your system waits longer between retransmissions for failed transactions.

4: Reduce the number of devices between you and your internet connection if possible.

Every device your data has to go through adds latency. Meaning it takes longer and longer for every packet to get where it's going. Now, granted, this is a matter of milliseconds, but several billion packets times X milliseconds is significant after a while.

IDEALLY, you should be hooked directly to your cable/DSL "modem". This would give you the best results. REALISTICALLY, if the "modem" doesn't also do firewalling or you have multiple devices you need to hook up, I'd recommend a router as well.

Also the reason I keep quoting "modem" is because the device used by cable/DSL providers isn't a modem. It neither modulates nor demodulates an analog signal. It's technically a "bridge" device (for connecting two disparate network types).

5: Clean system install. Your system, even with the apps to kill stuff, is quite cluttered, and there's always the possibility that you have underlying damage in the OS.

6: Defrag your hard drive. If you haven't defragged your hard drive in a while DO SO. Also, if you're using something like PerfectDisk, use it to specifically defrag any fragmented files in the CoH directory too. This can speed up load times because the hard drive can access every part of the file sequentially, rather than hunting all over the disk for pieces.

7: Make sure you stay above 15-20% free space. Windows requires a certain amount of free space on FAT and NTFS partitions so that it can properly manage the filesystems. Going below this point and you usually don't have enough contiguous free space left for the OS to do it's job.

8: Clean up your hard drive (but DON'T use compression!). In line with maintaining free space and defragging, if you have stuff on the system that you're not using, delete it or move it off to a backup drive. It's just cluttering up your system disk. But do NOT take the option to compress stuff to save space. Disk compression, while "nominally" seamless, adds massive latency to program operations as it has to unpack the files before it can read them and repack them before saving changes back to the disk. Now, heavily used files don't normally get compressed, but some of your ancillary config files might. Also, with all the packing and unpacking, you run a greater risk of data corruption with compression (instead of 2 operations (read/write) to handle a file, you now have four (unpack/read/repack/write). You've just doubled your chances of introducing a bit-level error at any of those stages.

9: (Not recommended but), also remember that your antivirus is doing scanning of all files on-access. This means it stops the app from reading the file while it makes sure it's "okay", then lets it go again. You could realize some speed gains by disabling your AV while gaming. However, this is HIGHLY not-recommended, plus the fact that some antivirus programs make the process of turning themselves off difficult at best, flat-out-impossible at worst.

"Chartruse/Indigo Two-Tone Hulk not find funny!"

*WHAM!*

Colonel Sandurz: NO SIR! I DID NOT SEE YOU PLAYING WITH YOUR DOLLS AGAIN!

Sure they do! But we're built tough! We can handle it! THEY usually can't take getting beat back though.

Two words (well, two more):

KOBAYASHI MARU!

You don't get out much. Do ya?

Seems as if the majority of people nowadays who have kids do with people they only marginally know or like. Then, as they grate on one anothers' nerves for a few years.

<Newb Hero> Natural?!?!?

Do you leave it up and running after launching the game?

If so, stop doing that. Regardless of how it presents itself, the NCSoft loader is NOT meant to just be left up and running for days at a time.

HEIL WEBSTER!

Yes, but is the emote a headspin? A bunch of popping and locking? A backspin into a brace?

Yes but "Old Blood and Guts" wore his tucked into his cavalry boots. Look at your pic.

You can simulate that with the pants we have now.

The only thing you can't simulate is an exposed "tight pant leg" option.