PumBumbler

Please make sure that the RAM that you buy for the Mac Pro is qualified to run on them. MacBook memory is a very different beast than Mac Pro memory.

In particular, I believe that your Mac Pro (2008 2x 2.8 GHz 2GB base configuration) uses DDR2 FB DIMMs that have specified timing results that may not be in generic FB DIMMs from some manufacturers.

AFAIR, if the specific timings aren't in the DIMMs, your fans may default to a higher setting to ensure that they are properly cooled. Not a big deal, but your Mac Pro will be louder than usual. This might only apply to DDR3 in the 2009 Mac Pros but I do recall there being some issues with potential issues with 3rd party RAM and Mac Pros in 2008.

Not all Mac qualified RAM will be sky high in price, many vendors will be very close if not identical to PC channel suppliers for likewise capacity memory.

Vendors that I've had good results with are macsales.com, transintl.com and smalldog.com. They deal specifically with apple products and have always been competitive on pricing. I've got no interest in those companies other than being a satisfied customer. I've had luck with newegg/NCIX/TigerDirect/local PC shops, but it's never been guaranteed as far as Mac support is concerned.

Edit:
I found the link with the reference
apple technote on mac pro memory
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Advanced Memory Buffer [AMB]
In order for the Mac Pro to maintain a safe operating temperature of the FB-DIMMs, the AMBs for each FB-DIMM must provide a functional temperature sensor.

Note: The Mac Pro will run the fans at full speed when detecting FB-DIMM's without a functional temperature sensor, which will maximize cooling on the FB-DIMM's. While the full speed of the fans maximizes the preservation of thermal integrity, FB-DIMMs with inadequate heat sinking may still overheat depending on ambient temperature and system load. In this case, the Mac Pro may shut down the system to protect the FB-DIMM from possible thermal damage.


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What it doesn't say on the technote is which products besides "Mac Pro". Having a date of 2006-11-10 doesn't give me much confidence on which generations of Mac Pro that needing the AMB will cover, perhaps all of them. This is why I prefer to use Mac experienced vendors when choosing memory, sometimes it can be a bit tricky to figure out what works best for Apple products.

Generic heat spreaders vs. Apple spec'd heat spreaders

Thanks for the kind words Arwen.

There were a couple of contacts that stood out for the dialog or had characters that were particularly enthralling. The original idea for fleshing out this arc would have ran 6+ missions, which enforced a certain amount of rigorous discipline to hack and slash out the extraneous information. Some of the information left on the cutting room floor is cruft and some self-indulgent, but I hope I got the basic story across.

Unfortunately, it does mean that almost all the mission intros, NPC text and clues are wordier than I think is normal. This means that between fighting and spawns a lot of text might be missed and can make the story a bit disjointed. It also means that my arcs tend to be more of a solo experience since it might be more worthwhile to pause and check clues or scrollback for dialog.

I have something similar in my arc. I have 5 captives to rescue, from the random citizens mobs.

Most often I get the Tsoo Artist as a hostage about 80% of the time, the rest seem to work as I expect. I think the code for the Random Hostage generation is flawed somewhere.

I've never seen them spawn as an enemy group when it is supposed to be a random citizen, on my map at least.

Like you've found, you can't add him as a group, but you can add him as a boss or ally.

I presume this is prevent people from spawning a mission full of 52 Magus Mu Drakhans.

Make sure you go into your System Preferences and go into Keyboard & Mouse to enable the right click on your mac mouse. It is not enabled by default.

Try another field, perhaps. The patch today specifically tightened up some validation and could have borked some other part of your arc.

I published my new arc, Touch My Awesome Button! Watch the videos first at captaindynamic.com or you might not get it.

Arc ID is 109841.

1 mission, contains various Boss type (EBs?), cats, trees, rental automatons, Captain Dynamic, an awesome button and a potentially massive ambush.

Comments can be left here (linky to MA sub-forum).

Hmm...I didn't get the memo, you'd think they would have made it read only before transferring stuff.

Is the subforum Issue 14: Architect: Feedback (Open) closed now? It's disappeared from the main index.

I use clues to flesh out my arc, put in hidden gems or some humour. Sometimes I use it to reinforce the arc or make it more obvious what is going to happen next so the smart player is rewarded for reading the clues.

So I'm watching the AI of my helper EB in a MA mish and he gets stuck standing around just like helpers in any old bank mayhem before i14.

Only now my lightning storm is slow and my MM bots can't be +rchg by the FF proc that's been slotted in them. Is there any plus side benefit to this change?

I was working on my post, but decided it didn't really address the main thrust of my original thought, so I posted the reply here:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showflat....=1#Post13360857

It's tangential to 5 stars but would be more a revamp into the rating system itself.

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Truth. I have run missions with a description of 11 or that turned out to be farms (often bad farms). Unless they label them (and use at least the basic principles of the English Language so it is readable).

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I think part of the problem with farms being harder to identify now is that the devs/mods/GMs are banning/unpublishing farms. In fact, a red name came onto one of our more popular channels to vent about farms.

He basically said, why are you people putting farms in your arcs and publishing them? And then he said that putting 'not a farm' in your farming arc isn't fooling anyone, especially them. I'm not going to go into the responses to those posts here, just to let you know that farms aren't viewed in any good light by (one of) the devs.

Since farms are being hit with a hammer, the only option they have is to hide amongst the regular folk. I'm not saying whether farming is good/fun/legal, it's just what is happening right now.

If you leave a no rating is that zero stars or just not counted?

I'd prefer a weighted average then or a blend of the median or statistical distribution rather than a simple average. It seems too easy to hurt someone's rating simply by accident or that you don't like them.

I probably have more than a couple of people who are not fans of me, I wouldn't have thought they would seek me out to one star me.

I wish there was a way to anonymize your arcs so stuff like that wouldn't happen. I prefer judging and being judged on the merits of the story I've written, rather than having my friends simply star me or enemies penalize me based on the authorship.

My biggest concern is why are there isn't any feedback on lower star ratings?

I have no problems with someone reserving a star or even two if they didn't enjoy my arc, but when I see lots of 5 star comments etc... and then all of a sudden I lose a star on average without any feedback. It likely means that someone has abandoned my arc or rated it poorly.

Both arcs have over 30 plays easily so having it drop so suddenly without feedback is kind of worrisome. I'm just wondering if I'm doing something wrong.

Is it common to get bad ratings without feedback?

I guess there really are villains out there.

Grief voting? It seems like I can't stay on a 5 star rating for more than 24 hours. Does that mean that people are looking to keep other arcs from staying at 5 stars, just so theirs can be more highly ranked than mine?

Does anyone have any suggestions for keeping a 5-star rating? I seem to keep bouncing up and down between 4 and 5 stars. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I've been trying to solicit feedback for what anyone has to suggest for improvements to my arcs.

It seems like either I get a pat on the back, great job etc. or else nothing at all...I'm not sure if anyone is dropping my stories and giving me zero or 1 star...is there any way to tell? Everyone who has given me feedback has been positive except one, and it looks like his mission was bugged and resolved itself the 2nd time he went in.

My arcs are 3207 and 53420. Can anyone take a look to make any suggestions on improving things?

81992 for those that want to see it in action. I'll leave this up as long as possible but I've got other arcs wanting the slot.

Just put the glowy in the back and have it spawn a boss in the front who flees at 100% health. If you can, make it a boss/EB/AV that has stealth/hide/etc. The surrounding mob should be the same as the mission to mask the presence of the boss.

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My Mac Pro has 8GB of RAM. I certainly hope that's enough!

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How much did you pay for that? 2k with Mac's horrible RAM prices?

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If you're going to troll please be at least minimally informed about what you're trolling about. Mac's are the hardware and software that Apple Inc. makes. If you're talking about the vendor's overinflated pricing on upgrades and accessories, the Apple Store does have that, just as Dell and HP do.

If you want to purchase memory that is qualified to perform properly on your Apple hardware without busting the bank, you might want to try macsales.com (OWC). Not that I have anything to do with them other than being a satisfied customer.

I vote to keep it!!!

The concept of merging with an alien in mission is a great story mechanism that has been used in comics and science fiction.

I can see it now, you can spawn an ambush on the rescue and the ambush text would be 'stop him before they merge!!!'

Too bad you can't grant the hami glow 'temp power' in LGtf after that.

So many possibilities...does the hercules titan do the same thing?

Arc Name: Web of Deceit: Return of the Red Widow
Arc ID: 53420
Creator: @PumBumbler
Why you think it deserves to be played/discussed: Again, like my first, arc, I really enjoyed taking established canon and creating the backfill for it. Of course I always run the risk of having the real CoX writers run me over later on, but it certainly is fun to grab a 'minor' character and run with it.

In this case, the main story revolves around the Red Widow. If you're not familiar with her, she (well parts of her) appear in Ghost Widows Patron arc story. Not much is known about her, but I filled in a bit and extended her story a bit to flesh out what she was like.

In this case I was happy to be able to include the 60s style Arachnos for your encounter with the Red Widow. If you are able to get close enough to her I hope you enjoy the way she looks. I would have liked to be able to add the sepia tone effect when transitioning in to indicate a flashback, but that was a minor quibble for that mission.

Normally I don't want to get into the 'OMG the world is on fire, put it out put it out' situations but unfortunately I did paint myself into a corner. In a sense this arc tends to read like a Patron arc but once I started with the Red Widow (If you read her background on CoH wiki you'll understand) I had no choice.

This brings my long winded discussion to Mission 3. Ideally I would have like to balance it like my first arc...46-50. However the inclusion of a central character in my arc is only available as a (you guessed it) Level 52-52 AV. Seeing as the world is on fire, I guess it was OK to put this character in. The interesting part is that I had to rebalance/rewrite the entire mission around the idea that you should be able to do the mission solo on heroic, which you can.

The 3rd also gave me a chance to put in lots of easter eggs and hidden content within the mission itself, so you can spend a lot of time exploring to find hidden clues and text within the mission.

The last mission is also a nice denouement to nicely tie together the entire story, and takes from canon of minor characters in the CoX universe to make it work.

One thing I *think* I found is a bug that may be on the 3rd mission map that has a boss spawn point hidden, in that the boss will spawn but you can't find him. In that case you may have to reset the mission. :P

Level 50. 4 Missions, 4 EB level badguys to defeat (mandatory), balanced around heroic. No defeat alls, 35-60 minutes.

Description This story revolves around the return of the Red Widow, who is featured in Ghost Widow's arc in CoV. ***Level 50 highly recommended; mission 3 spawns Level 52s minimum unless updates are made to the game. These missions may be difficult even on solo difficulty 1 unless you are very experienced.

Arc Name: When Joe met Becky: a love story.
Arc ID: 3207
Creator: @PumBumbler
Why you think it deserves to be played/discussed: Because I wrote it.

The good: I liked writing it for the extension of storylines from CoH and CoV. I don't want to write too much more without giving away the basic premise. All that I can say is that it revolves around the Malta story in "A Titan called Joe."

If you know your CoH/CoV lore you might even guess the rest. I'm not a big fan of 'vanity arcs' personally. You won't find a PumBumbler AV at the end or some specific Justice inside joke. Not that there's anything wrong with that, I just like to cast my net for players who know the game but don't necessarily know me, which is likely to be 99% of the population.

The bad thing is that it involves Malta. I already got a low rating simply because it involved Malta...I'll never understand people who rate arcs poorly simply because the author included mobs that are existing in the game, but that's a rant for another day.

The ugly. I couldn't put in the end boss that I wanted to since it was not 'level appropriate.' I made the mistake of subbing it in once I had enough tickets to buy the expansion, but I didn't notice that it said 'Level 52-52 AV'. My poor friend Super Boo (on a different character) went all the way to the end and discovered she was facing down a level 52 AV on heroic.

I'm sure I lost stars for that fiasco. So I had to sub in a Boss level character which moves down to a Lieutenant level on heroic. Which makes the final mission a bit anticlimactic. However, I wrote a souvenir clue at the end that should wrap it all up nicely.

Level 46-50. 4 Missions, 3 Bossy type badguys to defeat (mandatory), balanced around heroic. No defeat alls, 35-50 minutes.

Description Even bad guys need love. Especially when they weren't that bad to begin with. An extension of Crimson arc 'Rescue Candice Boxer from the Malta Group' and Vernon von Grun's mission 'Investigate Devouring Earth attack on Arachnos base' in Von Grun's Redemption arc. Playing those first are helpful.

Heh, it was on a moSTF run that my stormy was boosted enough by 3 emps so much that I was the primary damage dealer. I had 4 clouds out and they were going nuts enough to hurt ghost widow that I stole aggro from the tank and went on a spin cycle hold. Of course the 3 emps were on their game and manage to save me as well.

My ice/storm is HO'd and doesn't have the innate recharge craziness that IO sets can bring, but I was amazed at the damage output and effects. I was also sad knowing that pretty much that having 4 clouds out would never happen again.

Now even if I did have the 4 out, they'd never be attacking like they did on that MoSTF.