ZemX

Are you sure you're not just hearing left/right stereo? Because without the 3D Sound option enabled, I think CoH just does a stereo sound mix. You might be expanding that to 5.1 or 7.1 in sound settings but it's still only playing sounds from generally the left and right as that's all the game is sending. The way to tell is find a sound you are sure is coming from some object in the environment. A torch on the wall in Oranbega should do it. Or someone standing around with their heal on auto. Close your eyes, spin around, stop, and then see if you can guess whether the sound is in front of you or behind you before opening your eyes to check. If you can't do this perfectly every time, you're probably just hearing stereo. Last time I fiddled around with this I think I decided the game actually sounds better when I switch to 2-speaker setup before launching CoH. Normally I play on headphones with virtual 7.1 surround speaker setup. In most modern games that actually can mix to multi-speaker setups, this does a good enough job of letting me know where a sound is coming from. But in CoH it was acting weird. Some sounds seemed like they were nowhere or inside my head. Other sounds were painfully loud like Ice Swords (still are sort of). Putting it on 2-speaker helped me pick out better which direction sounds were coming from left/right and that was usually good enough for finding glowies.

Some PuGs are quiet. Some are so chatty people are dying because they were busy typing some witty reply in the middle of a fight. On Everlasting, sometimes people run "RP friendly" PuGs. Don't know how much that happens anywhere else. This is code for "It'd be cool if you got into character and had some fun but we won't be sticklers about it. At the very least you need to able to put up with the rest of us play-acting". So it's pretty casual and fun. Still other PuGs are good with banter without having anything to do with roleplaying. I would guess your odds of a chatty group are probably less depending on what type of team it is. On a speed Task Force or PI radio team, it tends to be mostly all grinding away or rushing around. Not so much chatting. More common to get a good chatty team on mission arcs or tips, I'd say.

This. People can do whatever they want and that includes them triple-boxing and me quitting their team when I find out they are triple-boxing. I don't care how good they are juggling three windows. That's not three teammates. That said. I'd say it's pretty rare I've run into that on random PuGs. Most people multi-boxing are doing it in farms, I'd guess. And there it makes all kinds of sense.

It's a shame the "3D sound" option doesn't work anymore. It was even better when you could actually tell which directions sounds were coming from.

No, listen we haven't repeated all the same arguments from the last thread yet. We need a few more pages!!

No, I'm good thanks. I'll continue to say what I believe and if you've got anything more than "I'm right because I say so and everyone believes me! (believe me they do!)" then do please let me know. I was quoting what was actually said and if you'd bothered not to just snip part of my post and pretend it was the whole thing (though I don't know why I expect anything else here) you'd see I explained BOTH examples of names I'd believe were stolen and ones that could have just been guessed because they were simple. Hell if "Ascendant" weren't reserved in the game now, someone who never knew him would probably have grabbed it because it's a freaking word in the English language folks! There are probably plenty of "Famous" live players who had simple names anyone would guess entirely on their own and then be accused of having stolen them. You have no idea how many names or which names this guy reserved so stop pretending you know anything more about this than I do. You're guessing and so am I. If he wants to pipe up and say he totally copied a bunch of forum folks' names directly he can. But that isn't actually what he said. He said they were desirable names. And that's any simple name. Ask Superman.

I was being honest. Simple, thematic names tend to be the most commonly chosen and hence the hardest to get this far into HC's run. The comic book genre is filled with such names. Most of the iconic heroes (and villains) have them.

If you're referring to the post linked by @PeregrineFalcon earlier in this thread, what it actually says is that they grabbed "a large number of desirable names" and then later got mistaken for "famous" live players. The thing is, "desirable" names are desirable because they are simple and thematic. Maybe you've heard of Superman? Batman? Wonder Woman? If someone grabs "Arcanaville" who isn't actually Arcanaville from the old forums then I'd be suspicious. But as @Troo's post illustrates, I am not surprised if names as simple as Gy, Guy, Gee, and Tru were taken, entirely independently by people who just thought them up on their own. Sorry to say, but I'd think the same of "Frostbiter". I used to have "Fissioneer" on a rad controller on Live but it was gone by the time I joined HC. I never imagined anyone scraped the old forums and found it in my old .sig. It's a simple, radiation-themed, name construction. I wasn't surprised it was taken. I was more surprised by the ones that weren't.

Well... there's something I've never heard a Scrapper ask before. 🤪

The only info I think we've heard is from Number Six in a post when the warning phase was activated. Across all servers in total, there were then about 700K characters in the level 1-5 range inactive for at least 30 days. Of those, 600K were also inactive for more than a year. A "significantly smaller" number are in the 6-49 bracket but a number wasn't given. Another post by GM Impervium stated there were a total of 2 million characters at that time. Of the 700K characters above, it's reasonable to assume some names are duplicates since these numbers span all servers. I think it's reasonable to guess based on these reveals that anywhere from a half to three-quarters of a million character names could be freed up total across the servers with the bulk of them being of course probably on just two or three of the servers. This got held up by technical issues last I heard, not because it wouldn't free up a lot of names. They obviously do not want mistakes if they flip the "On" switch on this thing. It's probably also not the highest priority to fix whatever needs fixing right now. Might never be turned on because of it.

Were it not for random and occasionally disastrous PuGs, I'd probably have quit this game shortly after discovering it. That doesn't mean if I have a really banger of a story about PuG disaster, I wouldn't share it just as @Snarky is doing. He's just "luckier" than me apparently. 🤪

When someone uses so few words and yet manages to tell me everything I need to know about them, I look at it as a gift.

Soft-capped *and* DDR protected defense on the Stoner. If you are being hit by Enervating Field from a +2 PP boss, you've just lost around 36% res(all) no matter what you had to begin with. If defense is also stripped on the Bio by gunfire and/or Rad Infections, yeah, you're down to relying on absorb and heal vs increased damage from res debuff. Not good.

As it was I was glad I logged in a bit early and got another DFB run in. So I still had time left on my amps. I had +acc and +recovery buffs from DFB. I had slotted both ATO procs. Added some ACC enhancement to my attacks. Kismet. Shield Wall. Added a few base empowerment buffs. The temp AoEs. Loaded my insp tray with orange candies. Checked the status of my Last Will and Testament. You know... normal preparations for a @Spaghetti Betty team. 🤪

I've just started toying with this same idea on a cyber-assassin character of mine. Her name is "Chrome Ninja" so other than being vaguely ninja/assassin themed (which the costume, Stalker AT, and Ninja Run pretty much take care of), the name doesn't exclude any powersets. I did a fairly obvious Staff/Ninja/Elec Stalker to start with but am now working on an Elec/Ice Stalker. I can play this as just having different cybernetics equipped. Could easily work as a Scrapper or maybe even Archery/Ninja(or Martial) Blaster.

I swear I saw a half level worth of xp on the first spawn. But it also seemed like it took us 5-10 minutes. I definitely feel no shame that we brought grenades and plasmatic tasers. That stuff saved lives (sometimes) with the knockback... which was also fun to watch.

Oh no... they never escaped!! ☠️

Probably right. Except for the concept, I'd have suggested Staff/Ninja/Mu. I have one and it's really effective. Melee defense is solid and the build has room for a few alternatives if you're not into Smoke Flash or Blinding Powder. I like Caltrops for reducing incoming attacks if I need it and it's great for interrupting an ambush train coming at the team from behind.

Yeah, raving...

16GB DDR4 3000MHz. I doubt it's memory limited. At some point I will probably try going through settings again with some perf monitor overlays up to see who's getting maxed out. I am guessing the game just can't use all the cores so it's probably maxing just one or two of them and idling the rest. Ultra Mode, old as it is, is also probably doing things in software that the GPU could do in hardware.

@Warboss whatever you do, do NOT put @Spaghetti Betty in charge of the mish team! We'll all be running +4 with no insps at level 10!

Same. 2560x1440. The monitor I recently bought is 3440x1440 ultrawide but I experience more slowdowns with that so obviously there must be some CPU hit that scales with resolution in this engine because no way is the 4080 even breaking a sweat with this game.

I'm on an i7-8700K but with a RTX4080. GPUs are just so much easier to upgrade and for the most part, even the latest games are doing just fine still for me because I don't play at ludicrous refresh rates. Once I turn up every graphics setting in a game, it usually maxes out the GPU before the CPU and I'm still north of 60fps with variable refresh rate smoothness. ... except for CoH. Most of the time, it's fine. But with Ultra Mode and everything turned up it will run into framerate problems in some zones or with large crowds of players/enemies. Like, it'll be going 120fps in one zone and then go to Atlas or Cap Au Diable and for some reason in places it will chug down into the 30s or 40s. And it REALLY doesn't like me trying to go 21:9, so I am currently playing letterboxed at 16:9. I assume it's CPU limited and probably not using more than one or two threads. But I haven't bothered to fire up a CPU overlay to check it. I am long overdue to replace everything outside of the GPU. Probably with a PC built around a Ryzen 7800X3D.

Issue 17. btw, this is a great thread to bookmark as well: