Psyte

Looking forward to getting home tonight. This issue has a lot of stuff that I and my various SG/Coalition mates are going to really enjoy across the board.

New booster and the Mac goodies... hurry up! My credit card is waiting!

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Faux windows

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Oh please yes!

If there was only a way to fake part of the base being "outside" that would be beautiful. Having a day/night sky ceiling texture would be magnificent!

More tile-sets, even if they're reused from other parts of the game. Cavey-looking stuff, normal office building (carpeting!), etc.

Another vote for all decorative items found in Pocket D and other areas, plus real beds and such that don't look like torture devices.

I'd love to see one of the arcade games (Timberwolf's suggestion) be a big, two player sit-down machine like the old Virtual On game from Sega, but with Exteel branding

To be perfectly honest, there's a lot of stuff from some of your sister games I'd love to get "borrowed," have the serial numbers filed off, and implemented as decorations. Suits of armor, mechs, statues of aliens and monsters for a "trophy" room, weapons, etc.

Is it just me or is the sign that a community rep is truly awesome is that they leave? Cuppa, Cricket and now Lighthouse?

What a bittersweet tradition!

Gonna miss ya but happy trails!

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He actually told you nothing about what changed or how things were tweaked. What was there to like or dislike?

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Heh - there's a bunch of stuff in the patch notes. I just wanted to voice my support of glee and happiness

I like the looks of the PVP changes (normally just a PVE player).

I LOVE my long time (years) little QoL change (copy and paste in-game) is there. THANK YOU!

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... I would MUCH rather have seen the resources be put into a technology refresh than deployment to another platform...

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More subscribers = more revenue = more money for NCSoft and hopefully more money going towards COH development

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Ok..here is the hardware specs....Mac Mini is out :-(

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No surprise there. Apple made sure the Mini was worthless for heavy lifting out of the box.

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I use MacMinis for my DNS and DHCP servers, and the web server portion of it for minor items.

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When my boss' G5 died (liquid cooling leak fried it), the company, in its penny-pinching ways, bought him a Mac Mini. So, Quark, Photoshop, etc., are all subject to the spinning beachball of wait, more sluggish, etc., compared to my G4 (which has less ram to boot).

I want to tear the thing open, pull out the 2g ram and harddrive, and replace them with 4g ram and a faster harddrive of some sort. Or throw it out the window. Maybe both. When he's on vacation I have to lay out our newspaper on his machine and its a pain @_@

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Ok..here is the hardware specs....Mac Mini is out :-(

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No surprise there. Apple made sure the Mini was worthless for heavy lifting out of the box. My G4 dually runs circles around my boss' C2D Mini w/2g RAM. Its *really* pathetic. Like Mark Rein, I blame Intel's integrated graphics with shared memory for being the source of all gaming evil. Even the old G4 Mini's had dedicated video

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Psyte: I don't trust TUAM anyway.

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I followed the links to a Transgaming press release, so they were right about this.

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Just because you've got access to something doesn't mean you have to use it. At anyrate, we'll see.

@Nalrok
Tis cool (never heard of them myself). I guess the frustration for me is that any "news site" can be cited later for anything.

Apologies if I offended.

Side note: I've got two Capcom games with SecuROM. They work fine, no problems to my system. Christian “Sven” Svensson at Capcom noted that there are various ways for developers to implement SecuROM ranging from minimal to draconian. Capcom has chosen, at least on the games I've bought, to go the lesser route. DMC4 required no registration key, no online activation, no anything other than I keep the disc in the tray. Bionic Commando: Rearmed has offered me no issues.

Your mileage may vary, blahblahblah.

I'm not saying this because I think SecuROM is this great thing every game should have. I'm saying this its not always as horrible/bad as some folks make it out to be. DRM being a touchy subject and all, I figured I'd better throw this out now...

Why on earth would that form of DRM be needed for a MMO? I could pass game discs out to everyone I know and they're worthless for anything without a paid game account. While I wouldn't be surprised if it was an option for other types of games, there's literally no need for it on a MMO.

I'm calling this bologna. And the cheap mystery meat type, too.

Thought: This isn't something you decide overnight. Can you IMAGINE the grand-slam, out-of-the-park update i13, "The Architect," complete with Day Jobs, Level Pacts, Mission Architect, Pain Domination and Shields, was originally intended to be?

@_@

Not to say i13 and i14 aren't going to be awesome, but man... you guys were aiming for the freakin' moon here! No wonder you kept holding back information... Must've been like holding a king and ace, then watching a king and an ace come out on the flop!

Possibly dumb question: Is this going to be a separate retail box? Or will the new versions of GVE come with both and somehow differentiate the serial numbers (or change the included goodies altogether?).

(qr) Well, you've just blurred the line between my personal (PC) and professional (Mac) life. That being said, I'm already pimping COH to Mac owners I know, and expect to run out of referrals when its available. My Dell smashes my G4 (which is not on the supported hardware), so I won't be playing COH in OSX anytime soon, but still, wow.

I am simply amazed. Has someone told Brent Sienna at PVP Magazine yet?

(qr) Like it. I've noticed some banner ads for COH as well recently. I can only hope that in the coming months we'll see a major marketing effort for COH (as if you guys were relaunching the game). Seriously - COH is SOOOOO much better now than when I first started playing, does a lot uniquely and well, and is so NOT more of the same that I think it really does need and deserve it.

Plus updating the GVE box to include i12 or i13 might not be a bad idea. i7 was a while and many megs ago @_@

(qr) As someone intending to go from being a regular player to being a more casual player, all I can say is "yay!" This is great for me and my alts, certainly. While the Patrol/RestXP bonus is a bit generous (I'm a miser here), this certainly does help prevent playing from feeling like a job. Will certainly help casual players in a Level Pact advance, too.

No - I love it. Hardcore/Regular players are still better off, I think, but casual/infrequent players get a nice boost.

qr:

I would love to see the exploits of some of the famous heroes from years past like Galaxy Girl/Kelly Graham.

Maybe its because I just watched Batman, but seeing origins for the various heroes and villains would be great too. Maybe through Ouroboros or the Midnight Squad - a group of inter-time interlopers goes about history trying to make sure key NPCs never come to be.

I would love to see some things that are done for the lighter side of things that still relate to canon. For example, how Icon came into being?

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We all pay money every month 15 bucks on up. that money needs to be spent on developing content and fixes for the game as it is now. seem that they just used our money and developed a way to make more money by charging 9.99 for a respec.

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Your monthly fee is going towards development of the game, paying salaries, paying for servers (power, bandwidth, maintenance, maintenance staff), etc. And I believe the money from the sales of "extras" goes towards increased development too (recall the wedding pack sales let them do the VEAT's a whole issue early).

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Technically, your monthly fee is paying for access to the game servers. That's it.

What NCSoft as a company chooses to do with the revenues from subscriptions or micro-transactions is really a different matter all together.

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True. Apologies for assuming.

RC cola without peanuts? Man... that stinks.

Didn't one of the rednames saw, roughly, where the money goes? I recall it wasn't for champagne and Ferarris. I remember one of the big goals was to double the development team...

I tried finding it, but my search-fu was weak

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We all pay money every month 15 bucks on up. that money needs to be spent on developing content and fixes for the game as it is now. seem that they just used our money and developed a way to make more money by charging 9.99 for a respec.

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Your monthly fee is going towards development of the game, paying salaries, paying for servers (power, bandwidth, maintenance, maintenance staff), etc. And I believe the money from the sales of "extras" goes towards increased development too (recall the wedding pack sales let them do the VEAT's a whole issue early).

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or for 10 bucks you can buy 100 mill inf from one of the stupid spam in game emails that continue to fill my in game mailbox. and with that 100 mill you can buy 5 in game respec recipies.

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Sure, if I wanted to lose my game account, I could do that.

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My point was who is the real crook?

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On top of Eiseregen said?

A quote from Scott Olson, Edge-Online.com.

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While Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming (MMO) sites continue to beef up their fraud detection capabilities to combat a wide spectrum of online fraud and abuse that includes credit card chargebacks, stolen virtual assets, gold farming and account takeover, the biggest threat today is fraudsters working together to create fraud rings and share information on how they can defraud MMOs and their legitimate players.

Unfortunately, we’ve reached a point in time when acquiring stolen credit card information over the Internet is as easy as purchasing a Starbuck’s gift card. With the simple click of a mouse, fraudsters can easily and affordably purchase details on hundreds of stolen credit cards to create new online accounts to commit online fraud and abuse. And while adding more tools and techniques to an existing fraud fighting arsenal may help reduce fraud and abuse, a online gaming site that doesn’t have the ability to identify fraudsters within their network who are hiding behind multiple identities and accounts, will continue to experience increased levels of fraud and abuse.

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From SOE president John Smedley on Gamasutra.com.

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Moreover, Smedley believes that 95 percent of game fraud is perpetrated overseas, primarily in the Asian region -- and North American companies are limited in the ways they can seek restitution, further disarming game companies. "The fraud rate is starting to become a very significant issue," he said of the industry at large. "We’re seeing customers facing farmers, and we're seeing, economically, ourselves and other publishers being hurt."

It isn't just issues of game balance and gold farming, Smedley says. "We're seeing a lot of stolen credit cards. Say you buy gold from a service in China -- you may not know it's in China, but you give them your credit card and buy gold only once. They use these credit card numbers to set up new accounts in these games. They buy an EverQuest account key, farm for a month, and then charge it back to the stolen credit card."

And this isn't just damaging to the consumer. "What happens is that over time, as that rate of chargebacks rises, we start getting fined. We have been fined over a million dollars since June. That's not the chargebacks themselves -- just the chargeback fine. It's brutal; it's the dirty little secret of the industry."

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The farmers are the real crooks, and any player who uses their services is not only an accomplice but a potential victim. That foolish gamer loses, the company who owns the game loses, and we lose. Imagine how much could be done if all that money that was used to pay off fines from credit card companies was used for game development instead?

So, on behalf of everyone who's ever had their credit card number stolen and sucked dry, or their account hacked, characters wiped clean, I will have to say the spammers are the real crooks here. I can't find a single argument against NCSoft doing this that even comes close to comparing to what the real crooks, thieves and out-right rat-bastards are doing.