Jaso

Originally Posted by Hyperstrike

What, if anything, would stop you from using drive-cloning software to transplant your system from a spinning-disk drive to the SSD?

This would be a simpler, more elegant solution than uninstalling and reinstalling.

Moreover, your ENTIRE system would benefit from a speed-up then. Not just CoH.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville

Without sidetracking too far into a balance discussion, there's a presumption that, say, the defenses in SR are already balanced against the def/res/+health of Invuln for the case of zero tohit buff, because if that wasn't true one of them would already be broken in PvE and have to be fixed. So assuming that SR and Invuln (and Regen and DA and EA and El and Ice and...) are balanced in PvE, the only question is how to deal with the fact that in PvE, players aren't morons and won't fight with one hand tied behind their backs by giving up tohit buffs like critters are designed to do (sometimes, although increasingly they are wising up also). The goal is - was - to soften those without nullifying them so the players that use them don't think they are worthless, but the players with defense don't think those are worthless either. And the way to do that is to essentially take the defense sets, and make a portion - but not all - of their defenses essentially resistant to tohit buffs (reducing them not to zero effect but making them only as strong as accuracy). So tohit buffs do some damage, but not total annihilation.

To make defense bend but not break, but also not any stronger than it already is, you have to essentially do what I mentioned above: add Elusivity but take back defense to even it out. That's what would be fair to both sides: the attacker and the defender. Adding any Elu without taking defense back would basically be making defense sets stronger, and by the time you add enough Elu to make a difference you've also buffed defense sets too high. That was the problem with the original 30% Elu. The converse problem exists with the current 10% Elu. I don't think 20% is a goldilocks number. I think its equally likely its both too weak against tohit buffs *and* too strong outside of them, meaning its only reasonable against the one guy with coincidentally the right amount of them.


Just to try to stay vaguely on topic, one thing I believe is that I've always felt the better PvP experiences were ones in which there was some semblance of fairness. That fairness did not need to be equality: if you're better than me, you should kill me most of the time. But if you're able to defeat me because of a mechanical imbalance that I can only remedy by making a special PvP toon that lacks exploitable failings, then PvP isn't about my character anymore. Its about me making a throwaway alt specifically for PvP.

For some people, PvP is a player vs player activity only. The characters are just generic playing pieces. They are really weapons, not characters. And that's fine: I have no problem with that. But I think the problem is that to get good cross-over enjoyment from PvE players that invest time and energy into characters, whether they are role players or just emotionally invested in their alts, PvP has to have some way to involve the characters that players want to play. It cannot *solely* be about crafting the perfect PvP toon. There is a place for that among the the people who want to do that. But just like many players think crafting their build from level 1 in Mids sucks the fun out of it, I think many people think making a special PvP toon sucks the fun out of it. For me, I want to PvP and win or lose with the characters I've played with for years.

That's what I meant earlier when I said mechanical issues should be corrected only when they hurt people's perceptions of PvP enough to make them reluctant to participate. You'd have to be practically nuts to venture into PvP combat with a melee defense character. Unless you were one of those fight-in-Elude-then-run-away people. That sort of situation has to be avoided whenever possible. But it has to be done carefully, so that in fixing one thing you don't break other things and reduce the enjoyment of the game for everyone else. That's counterproductive.


As an aside, I was discussing this with another player and we got on the subject of mini-games which involved both a place for the hardcore PvPers to battle it out, and PvE players to not face other players *directly* but still get involved. A spitballed idea was a zone with an above ground free for all PvP area and a below ground faction-separated area where PvE players could perform mini-game tasks that would assist their side battling above ground. They could defeat PvE critters in tunnels and repair turrets that would rise up and assist their side, for example, or intercept PvE drones sent by the opposite side to disrupt their side. This could be extended conceptually to low grade PvP areas where more "casual" PvPers could engage in combat without automatically being obliterated by the top combatants. This could be enforced by a reward system that encouraged good PvPers to go after other good PvPers in the high-reward areas, while the lesser PvPers would go after lesser PvPes in areas that simply had degraded rewards.

Of course, that is a completely off the cuff idea, but I thought it had promise, because it could tap the many different ways people enjoy different forms of player vs player engagements: indirect, casually direct, and hardcore, and in settings where the rewards would scale with the skill level of the players, encouraging them to get better but not forcing them to do so.

It goes without saying this sort of thing only works if you can get enough players to buy in and participate.

Originally Posted by Cade Lawson

But what about the jerk hackers?

Originally Posted by je_saist

Jaso: I've had hands on with a GTX 470. Stock, it can't outrun a 5850. Basically put, I can't duplicate or replicate the results I see other websites getting, or say the 470 gets.

The last time this happened was back with the GeforceFX... and I think most people are agreed with how that ultimately turned out. To get a lot of it's "performance" the FX was using a metric ton of driver shortcuts and "driver cheats" for lack of a better word.

This is why I link to HardOCP when it comes to reviews because Kyle, regardless of whether or not I agree with him, Gets It. Performance of a graphics card is more than just how the card performs in a synthetic benchmark. It's how the card performs in actual games. And in actual games, the 470 does not outrun the 5850... and in actual games where SLI and Crossfire are "equally" supported, it doesn't run away there either.

Originally Posted by Pouncer

There seems to be a large number of missing costume pieces. They can't be accessed in either character generation or the tailor. They were reported in the I17 test but it went live without being fixed.