Miuramir

This just in:
Updates to the Winter Event

"Lord Winter’s resistances have been equalized": We'll see what that means, but I'm guessing that equalized means actually the same. The question is at what level; when you're fighting 226k HP or so, resistance makes a huge difference in the actual difficulty and time.

"Completing Father Time's mission will once again give the choice of selecting 5 Candy Canes": I'm not actually sure this is a good idea, as they've been trying to get away from mindless repetition. Personally, I'd like to see a more substantial candy cane reward, but put it on a TF-like timer.

While I'm certainly of the opinion that the event needs some retuning, it's not quite that bad. We won the mission with several minutes to spare redside with less than 2 full teams of completely random people, at least some of which weren't even 50. Admittedly, we had some fire, good debuffs, and enough buff / healing to get by; the blueside try I was on didn't do as well even with slightly over 2 teams because it wasn't as good a mix.

I'd guess that a well-organized team of 8 deliberately picked characters could probably handle it; it's probably actually easier than Reichman in some respects, particularly if you've got fire for your DPS. An uber team of AV-soloing toons could probably get by with even less; You probably want 16-20 if you're dealing with pickup teams, though, and I'm seriously concerned that getting enough folks together on lower-population servers after the initial rush will be a problem.

Also note that the "small fry" snow creatures in the winter realm have a chance of dropping canes on defeat. Having even a few minutes to clean up the zone afterward can increase the cane yield significantly; I think I ended up with 29 canes for it all told, although some of those might have been from the initial triggering winter lord. The initial winter lord rewards the usual 2 merits, so a typical return would be 8 merits and about 30 canes for your half hour's work if you can take the real Lord Winter down.

As for preparing... what you do to trigger it is run around and open presents, so it's not like you're just standing around waiting for people to show up to the hive.

Note that this appears to grant a freespec, which is the least useful and least stackable type; and there are many different ways to get various sorts of respecs these days. This isn't anything special to the winter event that you have to grind for. Last year, the winter event ran for three weeks; depending on your playstyle, if you find it easier to generate 500 canes over three weeks than do a trial or pay $10 or generate enough millions of inf to buy one at Went's or whatever, great; if not, do whatever else you'd normally do to earn one, or wait for the next vet reward or issue grant.

The fascinating question is whether respec recipes will stabilize at 500x the cost of canes at Went's / BM; I'm not a follower of either market enough to know what that means compared to previous years, and whether it will pull one down or the other up.

The heavy fog rolls in as part of the fight change at 75%, 50%, and 25%, when Lord Winter goes phased, summons a Winter Guardian, and triggers the fog. It is thematic and serves the purpose of being an obvious warning that something different is happening; however, I'd say it lasts a bit longer than necessary.

I only had time for two runs. First one was was a 35 villain, SSK'd up to I believe 40 at first though we may have switched up to 50 eventually. One full team and a partial I believe. We did reasonably well, and managed to win with several minutes to spare; we had a lot of support going, which made a considerable difference (we may have also had more Fire, see below). The second run was a 50 hero, about 1 full team, and it did not go well. We were taking a lot of damage, and only got LW to 50% before time ran out. We had what seemed to be reasonable debuffs, but I think we were lacking on support / healing and could have used more -Resist; we were taking a lot of damage and loosing time due to hospitaling, and not doing enough DPS in the meantime.

I'm seriously concerned that once the initial rush is over, it will be very difficult to get enough people to do this. It's worse than the Halloween event this year in terms of team requirements, and it's all or nothing; if you can't beat LW within the short time limit, you get nothing.

Some notes on things:

* Lord Winter has 85.14% base Resistance to Cold, 59.51% to Smashing, Lethal, Energy, Negative, Psionic, and Toxic; and 17.02% to Fire. He doesn't seem to have any significant base Defense, although he does have 85% resistance to Defense Debuff.

While on a thematic basis this is entirely reasonable, from a balance and fairness standpoint I'm seriously concerned this is a problem. Especially when you add in that Fire users have bonus damage, and Cold users typically have bonus recharge reduction... which he has +10,085.00% resistance to!

This is going to make it very difficult for ice / cold users to accomplish anything; and I'm concerned that it may be problematic for them to get through the event without having to depend on friends willing to carry their nearly-dead-weight.

A lesser concern is that teams may refuse to bother if they can't get some fire users involved; they do so much more damage that this is almost justified statistically, but is obviously unhelpful from an overall event design standpoint.

* The Northern Lights routine attacks did multiples of -8% Defense, and was stacking up pretty extensively. (Detonation, Bolt, and Scatter at -8%, Blast at -16%, possibly others.) I spent a good chunk of the second fight between -32% and -56% net Defense, which probably wasn't helping.

I have what is hopefully a fairly complete set of screenshots from Surveillance on Lord Winter, and most of the Winter Guardian, if folks have specific questions.

Actually, the main Beta Testers channel was maxed out by, if not before, the I14 open beta; I was unable to add my alt account to it at the time. There was an official Beta Testers 2 channel created, but not enough of the people already subscribed to the original Beta Testers channel also subscribed to it, so it was a bit of a mess.

Having testing-event-specific channels not only helps everyone be on the same page, but neatly organizes the saved chat logs for later reference.

Based on watching the videos, trying to understand how Ultra is going to work, and some comments, it looks like we've got the following planned / likely for how Ultra graphics interact with bases. If anyone that was at the con has more specific technical details please fill in.

* Ambient occlusion should work inside bases. This will improve the look of lighting and make complex 3D objects look more "real". It may also highlight the *unreality* of some items, and make composite items created by stacking things into other things look a bit more odd, depending on how their lighting model handles that (or fails to).

* Realistic shadows: not in, they're outdoors-only even for dev-created stuff. Strong implication that the new cool shadows are only created by sunlight (effective infinite distance, parallel rays, very slow moving on predictable path).

* New reflectivity: uncertain. This is a mixture of cube mapping for the scenery and more direct reflection for characters. They gave the impression that the cube maps were pre-computed for the city areas to make it possible, and they weren't sure what they could / should / would do for bases.

* New water: N/A. If we ever got real water in a base, it should render under Ultra with the new effects; but given other comments, no new base items pending means there isn't any to worry about.

I was noticing the same thing enough I was beginning to wonder over the last few days, before seeing this. Small sample size, memory bias, yadda yadda; but it seemed significant enough to pop out of the noise to me.

Last night on live I noticed that while I couldn't target the firing range paper silhouette targets, my fire imps ran over there and were attacking the nearest one (rightmost near target) while I was talking to Serpent drummer.

They couldn't damage it, but I also noticed that there was a standard police pistol sort of target scoring rings on it, which was only visible when the imp's fiery effects were actively lighting it up. (This is a dark silhouette, normally solid, the light rings only visible as above.) I'm not sure what combination of graphics settings I was on; I normally run fairly high, but had done a zombie invasion recently and may have turned it down.

My suggestion would be the Pocket D War Witch. Already logically connected with mystic stuff, and accessible to anyone. The other logical approach would be to have NPCs stationed *outside* of the Midnighter Club, having presumably come out to try and recruit anyone who would listen given the sudden overwhelming threat.

http://www.howstuffworks.com/question541.htm
tl,dr: It looks like it's a criminal offense to offer contests like this to Rhode Island residents without filing the right advance paperwork and paying at least a $150 fee. They presumably decided it wasn't worth the trouble. One can only imagine how much more legal and financial hassle it might be to offer it to people in other countries, probably involving hiring a local lawyer or at least legal consultant for each country; not even counting the possible tax and corporate regulation issues.

1) It's a leftover from the old base raiding system. If they ever do something similar in the future, it may or may not use the same items.

2) See the wiki for a variety of answers. You go into Edit Base and place a Basic Worktable or Basic Forge in an appropriate room in your base; this requires 50k Prestige to place and requires 20 Energy, 10 Control to run. You can get these back when you're done crafting by deleting the table if you're on a tight budget. Exiting edit mode, and using the worktable, you build a Basic Telepad item using salvage; several recipe choices are available. You then exit the table and go into place item mode, and drop the pad in an appropriate room. After that, you need to exit that mode, go into edit base mode again, and place at least one beacon linked to the pad. Assuming you've got sufficient power and control to run the pad and beacons, you can then go places.

This probably means you're short on available main system memory (RAM). Opening the market window unfortunately tries to list everything at first, and that can take a fair amount of memory; if you don't have enough, the OS will try and swap less-used things off to the far slower hard drive.

If your computer has the wrong combination of little main memory available, insufficient swap space available, slow hard drive, or a few other factors, you can end up with a "death swap", where it spends an increasing amount of time trying to juggle what it's doing rather than actually doing any of it. See the wiki on thrashing for some more info.

It is almost certain that adding more main memory (RAM) will improve the situation, quite possibly drastically. You can also get some improvement by running fewer things in the background when you're playing CoH. Using a somewhat oversized fixed-size page file may help a little.

Those of you who are experiencing this problem can post a thread of your own on the Technical Issues & Bugs area of the forums if you need help resolving it, or at least mitigating it. Starting by posting a quick summary of what's going wrong, your basic computer specs, and a CoH Helper log.

If I were doing datamining for NC Soft, one of the more interesting and long-term balance important reports would seem to be something along the lines of the following: "What percentage of first characters on an account are each AT? Within each first-AT group, what percentage of accounts pay for a second month?" Then breaking down the sub-details, such as by powerset, looking at the first several characters, and then looking at which characters people play once they *have* settled in.

For instance, if an AT shows a higher than proportional percentage of first pick, but a lower than proportional percentage of continual subscription, there's clearly something about it that isn't working from a player perception standpoint. This might be the result of game balance, it might be the result of perceptual problems with how the AT is "sold" vs. how it actually plays, it might be the result of people coming in from other SPGs or MMORPGs with expectations that don't fit well with CoH, etc.

To extend a previous theme, someone looking for a Thief: The Dark Project experience from a stalker probably isn't going to be really happy no matter how the relative combat performance ends up being balanced. The other aspects of the game and sytem may draw them in, but they're starting out looking for something CoH isn't really in the market of providing.

On the other hand, if amongst the people who first create a blaster and go on to subscribe for longer, one of the blaster primaries is noticeably under-represented... there might be a problem. Even if it's numerically balanced, somehow it's not presenting the sort of experience that leads folks to become enthused paying customers. This might have to do with animation, coloration, public perception, comparison to other games, or many other things in addition to the sort of direct combat output questions most people on the boards tend to focus on.

At that point you'd do further detailed datamining to try and look at more complex relationships... of the people who do play that primary, do they tend to be long-term vets or newer players? Are there levels that that primary tends to plateau out at, with people loosing interest (in context / comparison with the overall plateau trends for the AT and the game as a whole)? Do certain secondaries cancel the trend or reinforce it, which would point to needing to look at synergies / anti-synergies? And so on.

Then you start to get into the more esoteric realms of game balance design over time relative to player populations over time. FF-XI ran into a version of this problem; their original design assumed a rough availability of healing-capable jobs to put into parties as one leveled up, yet didn't provide a large range or variety compared to more offensive roles. With a high percentage of very long-term players, eventually everyone who was interested in leveling a primary healer already had, and it became quite difficult to assemble traditional mid-level parties. They ended up adding proportionally more healing-capable jobs and expanding their equivalent of sidekicking considerably to rebalance the overall game as it aged. The balance issue difference facing a Day 0 game like CO vs. a Year 5 game like CoH are larger than they seem at first glance... datamining the enormous amount of info you've collected over those five years is generally the best way to keep ahead in the Red Queen's Race.

On Live, I've tested that you can't activate Jim Temblor, Penelope Yin, or Doc Delilah before having trained to level 15. Being sidekicked up to or past 15 didn't count. Yes, this means that Yin's special level 13 SOs don't make much sense unless someone else buys them for you; by the time you can buy them yourself, you'd want to use the level 17 ones.

I'm fairly sure you can't activate Doc Delilah "cold" before having trained to level 20, and she has text for "sorry, come back at 20"; although not entirely sure if you can get her missions slightly early if you go through Jim & Penelope first.

Note also that even if you get the O-portal power early, you can't use it until level 25. (I've gotten it as low as level 21 on one occasion, and it didn't work until I hit 25.)

As Faultline isn't a hazard, PvP, or CoOp zone in any case; I'm not sure why you think any of the I16 changes will affect this.

Not a good sign. In my experience, that sort of graphical mess is either the result of a bad driver, in which case they happen all the time; or are the result of something seriously wrong with the card and/or computer. Usually either power problems (side effects of an overvoltage, bad caps, or insufficient power available), overheating problems, or damage to the card. There are various other less common things that could cause it, including an overheating or bad Northbridge, power regulation problems on the PC itself, etc..

Clean out your fans and system carefully, and inspect for loose cables, obstructed fans, warped heatsinks or heat spreaders, cracked heat pipes, any capacitors that are bulging or oozing, etc. Be sure to check under any air-flow ducting that might be blocking your view of potentially bad caps. Make sure that the computer is plugged into a good surge suppressor or (better yet) UPS, and that nothing is obstructing case airflow. Check the +12v rating on your power supply to make sure it's got plenty of margin over what your video card needs; note that power supplies can drop in effectiveness with age and/or electrical damage. Hope the problem doesn't come back. Start putting aside some funds in case it does, as odds are unfortunately significant that you'll need to replace some hardware if you don't find an obvious source above.

In general, a great announcement. But I'd like to put in my voice that it should be (or at least have the option for) based on Global Friends.

Character friends list seems to be a bit of an archaic throwback; I don't think I even *have* any on any of my characters. Either I, the human player, am a friend of the person on the other end of the global, or I'm not. If I am, it shouldn't matter in the slightest what character, server, faction, instance, superteam, or hairstyle they or I are currently playing as far as communications are concerned.

The GT 220M is fairly new, but given the series should be pretty good for CoH. Note that with a 32 bit OS, you're going to see less than 3 GB free out of your 4 GB of RAM, as the 1 GB for the video card has to come out of the max 4 GB of 32 bit address space, plus various other small things. You may want to reserve some budget to upgrade to a 64-bit version of Windows 7 in a few months, to take full advantage of the system.

From a purely statistics standpoint, the rest of the system looks decent. I can't speak for the ergonomics, heat, build quality, battery life, etc. though... you'll want to search for people who have similar models. The main caveat is that the screen seems to be pretty low res for its size; 1366 x 768 is not much on a 16" screen if those numbers are correct.

SSDs are very much a mixed bag when it comes to gaming. There are a number of weird caveats; they simply aren't a direct replacement for traditional rotary magnetic media drives that operates the same. I strongly suggest doing some additional research.

In general, SSDs are *great* for small random reads, good for large block reads, so-so for large block writes, and terrible for small random writes. There are tricks for mitigating the last one, and how they are handled varies from chipset to chipset; it's one of the main differences between manufacturers and drives. In general, I'd not recommend putting your system drive on a SSD for a gaming performance machine, where even a very occasional couple of second delay hang at an unpredictable time could be unpleasant. On the other hand, it should work quite well for zone loading, as that's almost entirely reads, and is only updated every so often and in non-critical situations.

One of the weird things about SSDs is that they get effectively slower on writes as they get fuller. Some of the expensive "performance" SSDs are basically sold as much smaller than their actual space; their extra performance really comes from the drive not actually being full even when it looks like it is to the user.

Windows 7 supposedly has much better support for SSDs, and the emerging standard drive commands to better manage them.

If you can bring a laptop in, or have permissions to install CoH there, you can update one computer, and copy over the majority of the large files to speed installation on another one (having a 4+ GB USB drive helps considerably here). Follow the stickied directions for moving an install and/or speeding up setting up a Test install, except for the Test-related stuff.

With dialup, you may also want to consider getting a copy of the Architect Edition. Cost isn't much considering you get a free month with it and a booster pack, and that lets you start with a DVD install current to I14 at least. It's also probably a good idea, once you have things updated, to back it up occasionally; that way, if something goes wrong with your computer or you have to reinstall, you don't have to redownload everything.

In general, this sort of thing is an ISP level problem. A regional router is down, one of your ISP's peering agreements has gotten misconfigured, someone is attempting a DDoS and the fallout is choking other traffic, fiber backbone got cut with a backhoe, etc.

If your ISP doesn't block it, the traceroute (tracert in Windows) command is your best troubleshooting tool, although using it well takes some practice. Trace routes to various reachable and non-reachable sites, and try and identify the common factors on the non-reachable ones.

There's also some chance you've been infected with some sort of virus or malware. In their efforts to redirect you to corrupt sites and prevent you from visiting anti-virus sites, they can screw up your ability to use the Internet properly. It's probably a good idea to run a full scan with a different product than you usually use, such as Malwarebytes and CCleaner.

If you're less technically inclined but have time to spare, you can try calling your ISP's technical support. Have a list of places you can't reach, preferably with their exact names if not IP addresses. Be polite, but very specific that you can get *most* places, but not *these* places.