Miuramir

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  1. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Miuramir View Post
    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.
    This just in:
    Updates to the Winter Event

    "Lord WinterÂ’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.
  2. Quote:
    Originally Posted by UberGuy View Post
    The part I think makes this questionable "farming" material is that in order to "farm" this you need the cooperation of around 20-25 other people, minimum. Classical prisoner's dilemma: you can go hang out in the process of trying to kick off a raid, or you can just go do your own thing by yourself and farm presents. Joining a raid helps everyone if it succeeds, but wastes your time if it doesn't, or if it takes too long.
    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.
  3. Based on the Winter Event 2009 test yesterday, one of the things you can buy for candy canes this year is a respec, for 500. Text indicates it counts as a freespec. Standard disclaimer about numbers may change before live, etc.

    I don't follow either the respec recipe or the candy cane markets, but I'm curious what this may do to the price of either or both of them. Presumably, there will be at least some price pressure forcing a respec toward the cost of 500 canes; how does that compare to previous events? Which price is likely to do most of the moving? Seems like a potentially interesting discussion, and a chance for those that think they can predict the market to test on an unusual case.
  4. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Derangedpolygot View Post
    Way WAY too high a cost. Considering Lord Winter is worth only 20 canes, one would have to grind away for hours to get anywhere close to FIVE HUNDRED.
    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.
  5. Some Martial Arts booster issues:

    * The grip texture on the Chinese Jian appears to be missing or bugged; the grip appears lightless black irrespective of weapon color settings. Either a cord-wrapped (I think this is what the colorizable grip texture on the Chinese Dao is supposed to be), or a wooden grip would seem to be typical, but even the standard rough leather-wrapped grip found on many other broadsword models would probably be acceptable. Ideal resolution: implement the colorizable cord-wrap grip from the Chinese Dao on the Chinese Jian. (Tested on Female Broadsword.)

    * Using the Terra or Terra Fire robe, there is no matching Terra / Terra Fire sleeves; and the existing sleeves (including Warrior and Warrior Fire) have a gap at the shoulder join. Ideal resolution: move the underlayer texture of Terra and Terra fire a bit further onto the shoulders, as in the correctly working Warrior and Warrior Fire. (This would insure compatibility with all sleeves; having a specialized Terra & Terra Fire sleeve would be less optimal but still better.) (Tested on Female, several characters.)

    * I'm not sure if this qualifies as a costume or animation issue, but Ninja Running with the one of longer bows out on at least some body shapes ends up with the hand in an awkward-at-best position, and the end of the bow stuck up the character's nose. (Tested on Female, Archery)
  6. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Texas Justice View Post
    Arwen, I think I only got that fogged view once, and most of the time I was in Hover. I assumed it was a graphical glitch since I couldn't reproduce it. At all.

    Of course, the one time I saw it it was right after I'd seen LW calling forth a Guardian, and when I turned around the Guardian was in sight.
    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.
  7. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Texas Justice View Post
    It may be that the Beta Testers channel is close to the cap, and a lot of the accounts that are members of the channel may be inactive accounts.

    By creating a channel just for the event, it makes it easier to wipe it out after the even, and also to parse logs if needed.
    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.
  8. It is fairly likely that Ultra Mode will be using OpenGL 3 for at least some features, and may possibly require it to run Ultra Mode at all. While 3.0 only "officially" released in August 2008, many of the details have been around longer, so depending on manufacturer drivers are available for some older cards. It's an interesting question as to whether they'll be using OpenGL 3.0, 3.1 or 3.2.

    OpenGL 3 is *roughly* equivalent to DirectX 10 in terms of hardware requirements, but doesn't require Windows Vista (or Windows at all, in fact).

    On the Nvidia side, it doesn't matter much; currently any card that supports OpenGL 3 at all has driver updates to bring it up to (claimed) full 3.2 compliance. (It's not clear how well tested some of that is, as few games are actually using 3.2 yet.) This seems to be all GeForce 8xxx and newer (9xxx, 2xx, etc.) desktop chipsets, and all but the lowest-end equivalent mobile chipsets. See the Comparison of NVIDIA GPUs table for details, in the Graphics Library Support / OpenGL column.

    ATI is more complex; according to the Comparison of ATI GPUs table, there are a number of chipsets that support 3.0 but do not have driver support for 3.2 compliance (e.g. the Radeon HD 4xxx line).

    My recommendation at this point is that if your current card doesn't have support for even OpenGL 3.0, there's a substantial risk you'll be unable to turn on at least some of the Ultra Mode effects; and may not be able to use Ultra Mode at all. If you're getting a new card, make sure it supports OpenGL 3.0 at a *minimum*, and getting one that can properly support OpenGL 3.2 is a good idea.

    One of the implications of this is that the folks still stuck on AGP are going to have an even tougher time of it. I'm not seeing any AGP Nvidia cards with OpenGL 3 support, and there are a scant few AGP ATI cards with OpenGL 3 support (Radeon HD 4650 and 4670 are still available in AGP versions for now). Time to start thinking about a more serious overhaul if you want Ultra Mode.

    None of the above has to do with whether it's going to run Ultra Mode smoothly in combat; the above is about whether you can use it at all, even to take a shinier screenshot of your character at single-digit FPS. Based on the substantial performance hits of some of the similar Champions Online effects (realistic shadows in particular seems to hit lower end cards hard), my personal experience was that a ~300 GFLOP class card (GeForce 9600 GT) required me to turn off those effects to get playable combat performance; and Ultra Mode looks like it will be even harder on your system. I'd suggest planning for a ~700 GFLOP class card or better if possible, and a ~1000 GFLOP class card may be a good idea if you've got the budget for it.
  9. Miuramir

    Base Manifesto

    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Fire_Away View Post
    Base Graphic Effects - All of CoH is going to undergo something the devs called "ultra graphics". Windows (and real game water as opposed to slow fields) reflects, shadows occur with change of day and other effects of that nature happen (it looked great btw). Unknown how much of this will apply to bases; but shadowing indoors (including bases) won't work.
    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.
  10. Quote:
    Originally Posted by MaHaBone23 View Post
    Here's one to prove/disprove-
    I've noticed I am more likely to get a Treat if I have an empty slot in my Inspiration Tray. I've gotten Treat with full trays and Trick with half-empty ones, but leaving a spot for the small insp to drop seems to increase the chance of getting a Treat.
    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.
  11. Quote:
    Originally Posted by BackAlleyBrawler View Post
    Unfortunately, no. The spawn points for those objects are actually in the ceiling.

    They should be flagged as non-selectable/targettable now to avoid any confusion about them.
    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.
    • Are objectives clear when the Event is running?
      Not entirely. It seems that it is required that at least one person be attacking at each banner; in the final Port Oakes run, we had approximately one team on each of two banners, a soloist on a 3rd, and no on on the 4th. We beat on them for at least 4 min. without any appearance of blue on the bar at all; the moment I moved to the 4th banner and started shooting, the blue bar jumped up and was moving quickly. This is not at all obvious, and cost us too much time; we ran out of time and weren't able to get all the banners down.

      Given that it appears that full zone debt is earned, having to sacrifice a character to start the other banners if you don't have enough folks is troublesome, especially as that character probably will not get the banner kills either.

    • Are rewards being handed out correctly?
      Even with the small and cooperative number of people on Test, it was difficult to get to the final GM before they went down. If it's using the 10% coding, it may be difficult to get the badge on a busy server.

    • Are there any problems with the event occurring in any City Zone?
      (Note: The event will only be present In Paragon City or the Rogue Isles City Zones, and not in any PvP Zones, Hazard Zones, Trial Zones or Co-Op Zones)
      As noted, one popped in the Hollows.
    • Are there any graphical effect bugs?
      Targeting the banners themselves, when vulnerable, doesn't work well; their click area is small and it doesn't seem like you can TAB to them properly.
    • Do banner icons appear correctly on the MiniMap when the event is running?
      Yes.
    • Do waypoints correctly appear when the event is running? (Note: Navigation waypoints of active Missions orient players to the Halloween Event objectives when a playerÂ’s character is near one, and should disappear when they leave the area.)
      Didn't notice, was driving by the mini-map.
    • Are enemy NPCs appearing at the appropriate level? (i.e. a Level 50 should be able to fight side-by-side with a Level 5 character).
      Sort of. I started a team for the Port Oakes run, as a level 29. Due to auto-exemp, that meant everyone higher was lowered. We were considerably more effective when I passed team leader to one of the level 50 characters.
    • Are all badges awarded correctly?
      Seemingly, although see above about the final GM.

    Objective Feedback:
    Regarding the earlier comment on bugged Vampire Lords, I can attest that the two I saw in the very little ToTing I got to do had no reluctance to attack me.

    Subjective Feedback:
    As noted elsewhere, some sort of in-game explanation would be appreciated. My suggestions would be the Pocket D War Witch and/or NPCs outside the Midnighter Clubs, as these are thematically appropriate and in areas accessible to all.

    The seeming fact that the banners can't be taken down serially (in the way that players are accustomed to for, say, pylons) is not obvious, and can waste considerable time causing the event to be failed. While having some info on the wiki will help with this sort of thing, the info should be present in-game.

    Perhaps even having a neighborhood mentioned as part of the final GM message would help; looking around Croatoa was bad enough, some place like Independence Port the majority of the zone will never even see them.

    Currently, it seems like there's a sweet spot from about 1.5 - 2 teams to somewhere between 4 and 8 teams, where the event should be great; with fewer it will be very difficult to get critical mass, and with more it will be difficult to get more than one banner per go, and few will get the final GM at all. Given the newness of the event, and the delays between triggering, I suspect there will be complaints on heavily populated servers; people may end up waiting for hours and then get one badge if they're lucky. If the costume salvage turn-in has a high chance of triggering that may help, although many existing characters will already have it.

    Would it be possible to rig things so that even if a character already has the costume slot, they can still turn in the 4 event salvage and cause a (potential) trigger?

    In general, I give it high marks for concept and use of new mechanics, but it could use some tweaking to make sure it scales well, and to actually leverage the story potential.
  12. Quote:
    Originally Posted by MarsMkII View Post
    Pocket D would be an ok place for the npc contact for this event but the Midnighter Club wouldnt work because not everyone has/can unlock/access the club (IE lowbies) better to put one in main zones like the npc that got you into the wedding during the Valentine event
    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.
  13. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Cende View Post
    Because of contest and competition laws in RI. I forget what, exactly, but there's something bizarre in there.
    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.
  14. Quote:
    Originally Posted by The D Man View Post
    Good question, I've been wondering for some time now how to build a telepad. I build the Raid Teleporter or whatever by accident, but it didn't help at all.

    So 2 questions to the helpful people that posted earlier:
    1) What in the hell is the raid teleporter and what does it do?
    2) So all I need to do to get a REAL teleporter that takes my SG members places, is build a workbench? Do you make it out of salvage, or... can somebody elaborate more on exactly what the process is for crafting such an item?
    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.
  15. Quote:
    Originally Posted by GibberingLunatic View Post
    the freeze bug (not a mapserv cause after I come back and check my netstat its all fine.) but my hard drive light just goes solid sometimes for a good 2-3 minutes before the window opens, or my game crashes. That is the only window that ever does that to me.
    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.
  16. I'm updating my desktop (Windows XP Pro, 32 bit) from a Nvidia 9600 GT to a GTX 275 (specifically, a Gigabyte GV-N275UD-896I). The Gigabyte page shows the 190.38 drivers as their most recent certified, whereas the Nvidia page is showing the 190.62 drivers as the most recent WHQL certified drivers. Any interaction between either of these drivers and CoH that I should be aware of?

    My current thought is to try and go with the 190.62 first, and then drop back to the 190.38 if I have any problems; does this seem reasonable?

    Is the Guru3D Driver Sweeper still the best choice for cleaning up the considerably older drivers I have on it now, and/or for backing off the new ones if they're problematic?

    Any other "gotchas" I need to be aware of? I should be fine on power, I originally overspeced with the intention of getting a better card eventually. It's a large, well-cooled case so hopefully no interference or heat problems.
  17. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Jibikao View Post
    Can dev tell what the new players choose when they first bought the game?
    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.
  18. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Squez View Post
    To the closed beta testers: Please, please test this thoroughly. And see if you can do Doc Delilah early.
    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.
  19. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Gaspard View Post
    I haven't had crashes or problems lately, I used to ,but deleting and installing the newset nvidia drivers solved all the crashes. This is the very first time time this is happening. I played some Far Cry 2 after this and had no problems, I also speed-ran the villain respec with few of my mates and had no technical problems.
    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.
  20. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Positron View Post
    Current implementation on Training Room is "character" friends list.
    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.
  21. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Grumble View Post
    Many thanks for the help (even houtex! )

    If anyone looks in again, how does this laptop look for $800.00?

    It looks like a great deal, but I'm not too familiar with laptop graphics cards and I couldn't find any useful information on the GT series from nVidia, but I did find information on their GTS and GTX series.
    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.
  22. Quote:
    Originally Posted by SilverAgeFan View Post
    Big question: what do people think of SSD's? Are they worth the $300 or so dollars? With gaming where do you notice the difference? i.e., do CoX zones load almost instantly relative to a traditional hard drive? Any experience how these things work with graphics applications, like hi-res photo editing? Do 30 meg images open in an instant? Or is that more of a RAM and processor issue these days? (If I got an SSD I probably would also get a 1 or 1.5 tb drive for swappable storage. In my non superheroing life I'm an artist and sometimes work with some heavy files, both for myself and for clients.)
    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.
  23. Quote:
    Originally Posted by MadJack View Post
    I was wondering if there was a source for the updates that I can download the patches to the game without running the updater itself. I have a crappy dialup service at home but have high speed at work. Although many sites are blocked I was thinking it would be simpler then waiting almost 10 hours per update. I think I have the updates through May done.
    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.
  24. Quote:
    Originally Posted by Ultimus View Post
    I am getting randomly disconnected from COH tonight. When it happens I cannot access the COH website but other games work just fine like World of Warcraft and so does visiting other websites. I did notice though I cannot access the Facebook website during this either but I can access myspace.
    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.