je_saist

yes.

All enhancement sets cap at 5.

Couple of threads about this already.

The general consensus is that too many players were using rep as an insult board to get around forum rules, and the mods had enough of deleting comments filled with profane and vulgar words.

Because a lot of people weren't treating it as a fun little game.

I've cracked before about the Windows Fanatics that left rep, but it really wasn't a joke. Most of the neg-rep I got was extremely vulgar and directly insulting. I comments that were censored by the forums filtering software, posted by people deliberately trying to get around the forum rules. I even, I think, coined the term hell-reppers to describe players on the forum whose only intent seemed to be to negative rep and insult anybody who said anything they disagreed with.

Much like Bill though, I'm going to speak my mind. I am going to say what I think is true, and what I think is right. I'm not going to say something I don't believe, or say something I think is outright wrong or a lie just to please somebody who can push a button and leave a cutesy little comment.

So like Bill, I highly doubt that the reputation system actually changed, or modified, anybody's behavior. Even those that got slammed with Negative rep because they posted flame-bait threads generally have held to their guns on their arguments. Just look at the various Lets Merge the Server threads.

Another aspect is the limitations on how often you can negative rep somebody. Now, I know what rep comments I got on what posts, and I know that for the most part, every time I got neg-repped on a post, I got positive repped as well by somebody saying I wish I had the guts to say that in the forums, or your asking for lightning, but somebody had to say it.

Given the way some of the neg-rep comments were delivered, I suspect that much of the neg-rep I got was coming from maybe 4 or 5 repeat players. Given that I also know that you can rep so often in 24 hours, and that you can only rep somebody once before having to rep other people, that suggests that the hell-reppers were actively going around repping other people, or repping themselves, so that they could neg-rep a particular player.

***

Another aspect is that the rep system discouraged players from actually participating in a thread. By removing the ability to conveniently leave comments, there is an aspect that the forum mods could be moving people to actually post in the thread and stay involved.

Oig.

I forgot how much DirectX made my head hurt. Yes, I know this doesn't matter, and yes I know I'm being a bit of a pedantic idiot harping on this, but I sort of can't let this go as a matter of documentation for anybody searching the forums for Can I Use a Radeon 7000 or 7500 to Play CoH.

The case in point here is exemplified by both the GeforceFX and Intel Integrated Graphis chips.

The GeforceFX was announced and marketed as a DirectX 9 graphics card, much like the Radeon 9700 / 9500 cards from ATi. However, game developers quickly found that if they used the stock rendering path from DirectX (and from OpenGL for that matter, although at a later date because OpenGL 2.0 only arrived in 2004), the GeforceFX cards were horrendously slow unless they used a special mixed path or vendor specific OpenGL instructions from Nvidia.

The fact was, the GeforceFX cards was actually a DirectX 8 hardware card that had been designed to compete with the presumed successor to the Radeon 8500. ATi's completely mind-blowing and unexpected Radeon 9700 took Nvidia by surprise and they had tried to bolt a DirectX 9 accelerator onto a chip that wasn't designed for full Shader precision. The biggest developer to raise a fuss over this was Valve : http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/13/4

***

Intel is a different story. They don't typically try to bolt additional hardware or additional logic onto their graphics chips. Rather, if you actually look into the specs behind the Intel Chips, you'll find that while Intel advertises DirectX 9 and DirectX 10 support with pixel and vertex shaders, their graphics chips actually don't have shaders like you'd find in an Nvidia or ATi card. Rather, the Intel chips largely rely on the main processor for some features, like transform and lighting.

***

The point here is a difference between Hardware and Software support.

Hardware support is when all of the features of an API are accelerated in one chip and does not require the use of a co-processor or additional external programming logic.

Software support is when the features of API can only be partially run on a single chip, and require an external co-processor, or must use the system's main processor in order to complete the functions.

Yes, the original Radeon cards and the clock bumped Radeon 7000 and 7500 series could run a subsection of the graphics API as specified in DirectX 8. However, they could only run a Sub-Section of the API. If you actually made a game that utilized all of the features that could be accelerated in hardware on a DirectX 8 or DirectX 8.1 video card, yes, you could run it on a Radeon 7000... but... many functions would have to be run in software on your central processor.

Which is why ATi can, and did, promote the original Radeon card as supporting DirectX 8. It did. It just didn't support the DirectX 8 Graphics API in it's physical hardware.

This line actually says it all. There is a discrepancy here that a lot of people overlook. The developers interaction with the player-base is largely limited. The forums, for example, are largely populated by a small percentage of the entire player-base. If CoH is doing better than other MMO's, maybe, maybe, 10% of the player pop visits the forums on a regular basis, and maybe, maybe, only 7-8% actually posts. That's the best-case-precedent scenario ratios. If Coh is in line with most other MMO's, maybe only 5% of the paying population actually logs into the forums, and the forum-activity is driven by 2-3% of the player population.

In the same way, the people who actually visit Hero-Con, are not the average player.

However, there is a difference. One of the reasons why Hero-Con is so important is that the type of player who visits Hero-Con is the type of player who keeps paying to play. It's called Customer Loyalty. The type of person who visits Hero-Con is more likely to be more accepting in changes to the base-gameplay, and are more likely to have better ideas about how the gameplay should evolve.

The forums aren't really a good place for such discussions for one single reason. It's very easy for a single person with no actual time played to advance their cause or make brain-dead requests based on 2 minutes of thinking rather than weighing the pros and cons of the request against the design of the game and the intent of the game.

Hero-Con makes players put their money where their mouth is. The Forums. Don't.

Now, there is the valid argument that Hero-Con's West Coast only approach does unfairly cut-off players from the mid-west, mid-east, and eastern coastline sections of the US, and offers a uniformly high barrier to players in the UK, Europe, Korea, Australia, and New Zeland (New Zeland does have gamers? right?). One of the things I'd like to see as a promotional for Going Rogue is a quick World Tour with somebody like SuperChick (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqW8uD6WuLI - Hero), Pillar (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgvXRgszvI4 - Original Superman), or Thousand Foot Krutch (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ueOCAqCWgtw - Break the Silence). Something like Nintendo's Fusion tour, giving a couple of devs some face time with actual players, but also having something else for those who don't "care" about the game to come and see.

***

This.. .example... really doesn't work. For starters, the naming system in CoH was a little bit more advanced than other MMO's that I've played. Compared to other NCSoft titles at the time (Guild Wars and Lineage II), the system for chatting and naming in CoH was clearly better. The naming problem isn't really an issue off of Freedom or Virtue, and it's not an issue if people actually get creative with their names.

The price has already been set. Pay for a subscription and get the reward when the subscribed time has been achieved. That is the reasonable price.

If you canceled your account, left, or whatever, TOUGH. GET OVER IT.

Sometimes NO means just that. NO.

Because the powers represent darkness. Dark Melee is the name of the powerset because it describes what the powerset and where the source or effects of the powers come from.

Mostly to be funny. In the same sense that somebody has to convince both Bruce Wayne and Batman, or both Clark Kent and Superman. I know, horrible joke.

***

Now, I just can't let this snide comment go. The fact is, I haven't been the one that's been OS trolling. Now, I could show off some of the snapshots taken from the reputation screen and show you legitimate OS trolls. There's a difference between trolling, and speaking in facts, and most people have already figured out that when it comes to hardware and operating systems, I know exactly what I'm talking about, whether or not they actually like what can be a cold truth.

bingo.

I'm willing to bet that the majority of the thread starters making these lets merge servers are used to getting on a team and sitting at the door doing nothing. Now that they actually have to play the game... they aren't interested.

The loss of players hanging out in AP shouting BOSS FARM FORMING: LOOKING FOR DEDICATED HEALER: HAVE TANK: HAVE FIREKIN: NEED DOOR SITTERS

I stand clarified.

Sometimes I wonder if there's like a group of players that draw straws to see who gets to go make the server-merger thread this week.

I wonder if we could talk Mod08 and Ocho into banning everybody who starts a merge thread from the forums and game for a week.

there's a good reason why there's no answer. The devs haven't given one.

The basic problem is that with the Epic Archtypes... the powers are not yours. Your are borrowing somebody else's power-set and abilities. Because of this it is possible that Epic Archtypes may not get color customizations.

hehe.

BIG DIFFERENCE between the 46xx cards and the 48xx cards.

If the 4850 is the baseline for Ultra-Mode, the 46xx isn't going to be able to handle it at all. The 46xx series is a low-end graphics card. I had a couple of RadeonHD 4650's that I mentioned in another thread. In DirectX 9 titles on WindowsXP the 4650 only managed about 90% of the rendering power of the Radeon x1900 or the Geforce 7900 GT KO. In Crossfire mode, due to the lack of a hardware bridge, they weren't exactly performance competitor.

Under Vista on DX10, it didn't do much better. I can't find the numbers I had typed down, but compared to the HD 3870 on Vista, it wasn't even reaching half the speed. The 4650 struggled to maintain a 1440*900 playable resolution across titles like Unreal Tournament 3.

While the 4670 is a bit faster, it's got a higher clock speed and I think a Higher memory speed...

It's still way, way, way slower than the 4850.

I haven't logged into check this... but it's something I like'd to see.

I've got a katana / sr stalker, and when I unlocked the Rularuu Blade I got this /massive/ sword almost bigger than my avatar. I love it, it just looks so right swinging this massive blade around.

I've also got a DB / WP scrapper, and I've been working on the rularuu badge unlock for the blades... but evertime I see somebody who has Rularuu blades on a Dual Blades, they always look really small, like they're about half the size of the katana version.

Is there a difference in rularuu blade sizes?

And if there is, can the large katana blade be added to the dual blades set?