The_Spad_EU

Tried that - all that happened was that I lost the new Empyrean merits I'd earned this morning.

I think the idea is to convert the Empyrean merits (when they don't randomly vanish from your inventory) to get the rare stuff rather than paying to craft it.

They're not supposed to but it seems they do at the moment

The SP3 thing is not a pretty amateur bug, it's a pretty understandable oversight. When I've writing apps and building websites I try and test against all current OS/browser versions and as many of the "older" but still in use ones as well - for example, I *still* have to test against IE6, however much I hate it and the amount of extra work it causes me - but I'm not going to waste my time testing against Opera 8, or MacOS 9, or Windows XP SP2 because they're completely unsupported by their developers and have been for quite some time. As it stands, the devs will be having to test against (at least): Windows 7 (x86), Windows 7 (x64), Windows 7 SP1 (x86), Windows 7 SP1 (x64), Windows Vista SP1 (x86), Windows Vista (x64), Windows Vista SP2 (x86), Windows Vista (x64) SP2, Windows XP SP3 and that's assuming that they don't test against Home/Pro/Ultimate as separate entities. Adding in old, unsupported platforms to their testing creates substantial extra cost (time & money) for what should be an almost insignificant proportion of the userbase.

Frankly I've been amazed by the number of people still running XP SP2 and it certainly explains why so many botnets count their membership in the tens of millions these days.

Yes, unplanned downtime is bad, but the devs aren't actually obliged to do anything to compensate us for it (Read your user agreement). In fact, if I were them I'd almost be tempted not to do anything because I know full well that *anything* they try and do by way of compensation is going to make people complain about how it isn't how *they* wanted to be compensated.

I find it's the other way around, purely because the Heroside unlock arc is so monumentally tedious

Heals you a lot and gives you a substantial +End boost too

You need to put quotes around the "C:\Program Files\City of heroes\cityofheroes.exe" bit of the string as otherwise Windows interprets the spaces as the end of the current command.

My /Rad controller has hit 1100 before with Fallout; of course it does encourage me to let my teammates die...that and vengeance.

Well 80 is just HTTP; it's what the launcher uses to check if there are any patches available and get the latest news/info to display. Then the actual downloads take place over 6994, but I seem to remember that they have a sequence of different ports that they try if one doesn't work.

The problem with the LFG system at the moment is that most people are getting into full leagues before joining the queue, so that people "on their own" so to speak aren't getting into the instances.

I can't speak for the US servers, but certainly in the EU the place to go for getting involved in the trials is Pocket D. There isn't a contact as such, the league leader just joins the LFG queue with enough people to start the trial.

And yes, the "ETA" timer on the LFG tab does appear to be something of a random number generator at the moment

Limiting your browsing to "respectable sites" is sadly no longer good enough; so many of them end up compromised via SQL injection, 3rd party advertising providers, XSS or just shoddy security that even visiting "safe" sites can be dangerous these days.

This is why I run Adblock & Noscript in conjunction with client AV and a decent edge firewall on any machine that even goes close to the internet and ensure that not only Windows, but also all the 3rd party crap like Flash, Java, etc are kept up-to-date and, where possible, a not installed at all (Like Adobe Reader).

Of course, the truly paranoid internet user will only browse using telnet from a OpenBSD box