excessionoz

Went in to manage enhancements and my mouse cursor had gone. Was unable to click anything, had to go to windows task manager and end the CoH task. upon restarting game all was well. Windows 10, 'new' launcher.

Definitely

There are many ways to pass time in CoH between leveling new characters, running tf's and playing consignment-house bingo. There are people who facilitate these out-of-character events, normally in the form of various contests. The most common type of being-with-other-people-and-not-getting-XP player run event is the generic costume contest. I am not going to enter the quagmire re CC etiquette vs shambles, it is just a convenient trope example. So ... a character finished acquiring Atlas Medallion accolade, and I found myself in Atlas Park, amidst the yells for DFB and the incessant pitiful begging for AE farm door-sit positions. I had 22Million on my character, and decided I would try to brighten up the day with a Hide and Seek event. "wut?" This is where you do /ghide and select everything but 'tells', so you are as well hidden as you csn be, find a location in a zone and hide. Then announce in broadcast that the game is afoot, any player less than (say) Level 20 who finds and trades with me, gets the prize. In this case I figured I coulf throw 15M away, so that was my prize offering. I would progressively pinpoint my location by posting clues -- -'south of tram' '707 yards east of back alley brawler' etc. People could then zoom around trying to find you to get the prize. After setting up the game in Broadcast, having determined my hiding spot, I was hit with a /tell 'sent you an email'. Hmm, someone trying to scam my location? "Why?" I replied, then i looked at my email, and sure enouogh, someone (lets call him bob) had sent me an in-game email, it contained the text 'for the prize pool' and an attachment of 100,000.000 inf. Far out! The guy went on to say that he hoped more people would participate in such events. I immediately boosted the prize to 50M, setting aside the other 50 for another day. Thanked the generous donater, and felt extraordinarily privileged to be a part of the CoH community that helped make the game more rewarding to all. I am surprised at the generosity of players. I know that some people have countless billions of inf pocketed, and `00M is a drop in their ocean of wealth, but for me, 100M is a heap of influence,and for new players, wealth unimaginable! Thanks to the tgreater community. Player excellence isn't just ability to speedrun TF's. It is about thankless generosity, and string-free gifts to other players. Keep on being awesome. (please excuse typos, I have nerve problems and fat-finger keys constantly)

I should write an article about my way of playing the game, but there is no point really, because it's a player's choice situation almost every time, wihich is what makes the game worth playing, the different situations and different groups. Contrary to my implications, I actually enjoy doing TFs with non-sg members, as well as the (usually smoother) SG experience. As fopr 'need for speed' -- Synapse is a chore, a grind, or as some people say 'the S word' to be avoided. Stealthing through the last mission is part and parcel of my normal Synapse experience. I do the TF's for the merits and the badge for TFC ... xp is secondary 😛 I am sure that much more horrific experiences in game abound; for me, that synapse was unusually long full of my mistakes, and remarkable,. YMMV, and that is how things should be.

Compared to the sub-1 hour Synapse runs I have been on recently, it just seemed glacial. There was no team drama, the team was fine. It was a lack o utility and my personal frustration that my -normal- role of team-taxi was upended due to lack of stealth. Thanks for the clue/hint about pvp patrols granting stealth. I didn't wnt to slash my wrists afterwards --- it just wasn't very slick, and I was the faceplant patsy, which is extremely irksome and galling. Anyway, I wrote for the amusement of all, not whining about players, or mechanics, or evem the stupidoty the whoel Synapse TF experience ... Bedtime. 🙂 oh, yes, as moxie says, i was on "I'm Gniess." 🙂

Synapse - *a horrorshow* </clockwork orange> The first guy recruited asks "where do I go?" That kind of set the tone for the entire task force. However, I was one of the worst offenders! read on. During the recruiting I ask "does everyone have 3XP?", then realise my 2XP has run out. I have to go to Atlas Park to restock the buff. After waiting *ages* to get an eighth plsyer, nobody turning up. Ask the team if all ready, then I start the task force, setting up the challenges. Three seconds later, someone says "do you still have a spot?" Sheeesh, 15 minutes of spamming LFG and nothing then as soon as I kick off ... First mission goes okay, nearly have someone die. I’ve set the time limit to 90 minutes and the death count to 5, these are just TF challenge settings, they don’t affect the reward for the TF, although some (many?) people do think that these challenges make the task force harder. Second mission (defeat 30 clockwork) the ambush goes without anyone dying. Third mission the first of four defeat-all missions, I manage to die on my Brute (street justice/stone level 27), when a whole bunch of clockwork jump off the ledge onto my head and I try to fight them alone, somewhat incompetently. and pay the price. Next mission I die again, after teleporting into a Group before the tank has got aggro. doh! We finished the four defeat all mkssions, then we do the phone hunt in steel canyon. I use my ATT and TT to get the team to boomtown for the big bertha mission, and she goes down a treat. Mission finishes and I ask "does anyone else have TT to get us to steal canyon??": no no next time I’m at P2W I will buy it. *sigh*. Long Tom mission two people die, then of course there’s no TT to the Skyway missions. Team scamp[ers off to skyway via various means. We do the first mission in the warehouse and it’s a huge warehouse, I mean *gigantic* so it takes ages to find all the hostages. Next mission is pretty simple and then it’s time for Babbage. I do the /loc command then announce in LFG that babbage is up in Skyway with the coordinates from the /loc. We get zero responses/help and it takes at least five minutes or so to take Babbage down with the seven players in the team. It’s time for the Clockwork King mission. We get to the mission where I ask "does anyone have stealth and TP?"" Glorious silence. That’s right not a single person has stealth and teleport of any kind. My brute did not take superspeed (/stone, go figure) so has no stealth capabilities, nor does he want it. 59 of my 63 characters have stealth in on way or other, and all have ATT plus a majority have teleport-other (aka Recall Friend). So very annoying that I can't hare off and TP everyone to tghe end room. I have teleport other and ATT but lack the stea;th or the Granite armor required to tanker-stealth (ignore the opain and charge through) This must be the first of the last hundred+ Synapse runs where I’ve had to fight from the entrance to the Clockwork King. The task force finally over the Clock count is at one hour 58 inutes. and the death count is at six. No less than four of those were mine, including the once because instead of hitting fold-space I hit self-destruct!. What a dummy. Anyhow that was my worst Synapse experience in the last year. I hope the tale had dome entertainment value. please not i have little to no feeling in my fingers, so I mash mutiple keys at once and make many typos, so excuse the typos.

Girl With Colitis *mondegreen from the beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds DFB LFM PST ...

I will be 63 this year. "Manners", the social niceties of getting along together, are essential for real world interaction between us apes. The social glue that knits society together. The recent socio-polircal upheavals in America are testament to what wil happen if a large part of society decides to go rogue. Private exchanges aren't public interactions. The 'mannrs;' component of long-time friends isnt as resrrictive; whilst I'm free to tell my friends to eff off (and I do, often, colloquially 'havd ypu been told, today?" is part of the SG argot), the decision by either party to take umbrage must be weighed against the depth of the relationship. Now here I'm 'defenmding' both my own and my friend's interactin, it was private and nothing to do with anyone else -- the reason it was included in the story is to cement some gaping holes in the audience's knowledge of the very background my friend and i share. When it comes to public displays of 'rudeness' (mot res[pmdomg at all to requests to modify a given situation) then your argument about manners can be brought to bear -- it is unreasonable to act in a way that is detrimental to the goals of the team. Both of my friends were guilty of that, and it irritated me to the extent that I wrote the entire wall-of-texrt so that the incident(s) didn't just get swept under the virtual carpet. So there are different sides to this -- amd the bit I rail against is when a group of people are put into a situation where 'the interloper' causes problems that would otherwise not have existed in the group. Anyway, it is all a storm in a teacup. Old news and a poor situation which has now ended and but a memory.

Don't disagree. The circumstances were just too fraught at that particular juncture. A series of unfortunate events.

Without stereotyping -too- much, there is a vast difference between Australian interaction with others and American interaction with others. Generally speaking, Aussies are rough and forthright, needling and prodding, just to raise hackles for a laugh. Whereas Americans, in general, are polite with strangers, to what I consider to be an excessive degree, always ready to defend strangers against accusations of incompetence: "they might be having internet issues" "maybe they are indisposed" "perhaps they are busy on the phone at the moment?" "don't you think maybe their dog got run over?" (<-- this is an SG joke, sorry) Offering explanations for others actions to avoid 'accusing' people of wrongdoing (or plain incompetence) seems to be the American norm, and it just isn't that way here in Australia, in general interaction with others, especially amongst people you know. This is all very meta, and I guess if you have no experience with other cultures, this kind of adversarial ribbing/taunting would seem ill mannered ... I am trying to get across that the perception of black/white delineation of intent in exchanges can be very very different depending upon just who s talking to whom. 🙂 The SG I roll with accepts my attitudinal differences without batting an eyelid these days. But initially, i was deemed an odd duck indeed. The other ducks over on this side of the pacific pond are much the same as I. 🙂 Quack!

Ennvee, you left discord so quickly, I had no time to ascertain particulars before you were gone. I was very peeved that the 'meeting' between my old server friends and my new ones went so badly. My judgment over how you guys reacted is probably skewed, because of my fondness for my long time friends as well as the SG regulars I currently team with each day. It hurt me that my friends were less than perfect (ie asshats) this time -- which is quite a claim, since *I* am the one who is always exhibiting objectionable behaviour when I team with them. Glad you ain't too scarred by the encounter.

Ah. The player in question is a veteran, who recently returned to the game. We have a long history of prodding and poking each other, so his comment of 'no effine way' was to be taken with a grain of salt, he was just acknowledging my existence. His first comment upon joining the team was 'you realise <leader> (me) is going to die, a lot?' Our relationship over many years is hidden from your world-view, and that is understandable, but a grave error if you think he was 'serious' in his dismissive attitude to the question. And the discord thing -- well, discord isn't really his scene, or the other Australian, they don't have the luxury if being able to talk out loud during the evenings, due to other people in the house ... our history never included voice-chat, so there was no real surprise there. Your point about forcing people to do execrable TFs is well made, and needs to be drummed into people -- if they don't want to ever do Synapse, it isn't your place to -force- them to go through the pain. I refuse to do underground and tpn i-terials (unless invited and lb3k is running the show), so an aversion to certain content is completely understandable. My two Aussie friends and i would trio original positron back in 2010 or so, and we were pleased to get it done in 3 hours. There is no way he is 'positron averse'. (These days flashback positron takes me 90 minutes on a full team, but its so much easier with TT and ATT spread across many players.) Just clarifying, not neenerism.

You misunderstand -- I was referring to the remainder of the spawn around the last barrel/glowy, those riffraff.

I wrote my blog post rant so that I could point my SG at it to explain a few things. You see, my Aussie friends are awesomely talented players, I mean top shelf gurus of the game, from our time back on live. But the situation was awkward with them not being on discord, and my SG doing things for 'odd' reasons which weren't apparent. One of the other SG members wrote to the Aussie guy mid TF (Yin) explaining the why and whatever, and my friend took that on board and moderated his desire to speed through and leave the team to deal with the riffraff. That fixed up my friend's rating with one SG member; however, the other is mightily upset over the positron 2 incident, and will not easily back down from her pedestal of irateness. Her choice. Generally my Aussie friends only play at UTC+10, which is 15-18 hours ahead of US times. I play all the time, so during my daytime I play with the American SG and at night I sometimes play with the Aussies, f they are on. It would be nice (for me) if my American SG would be able to see my friends in their element, but that is generally not going to happen. And when it did happen, it was a disaster. Some days in CoH are worse than others. Assuredly having CoH is so much better than not having it. 🙂 I did not post to garner sympathy or strategies on how to deal with what happened. I posted to show/describe to people how things were from my side of the equation and hopefully straighten out some kinks in the friendship chain that have resulted from this botched interaction.

You know, sometimes it just isn't a good time to play, and today was one of those times. What memories do you have of bad sessions, here is my tale. My STG runs a monthly costume contest, create a themed character at the start of the month, play it up to at least5 Level 25 by the end of the month, NO FARMING allowed!. One of the SG members is encumbered by small childred, and has limited time to play. Today was her time, and her character was only level 7. Tomorrow is the deadline for this month;s contest, so she needed to get up there to 25. We agreed to aid her to L8+ so we can do positron 1 and get a bunch of levels, plus any SG teammates who need the badge. 5 of us join, when I see my good friend from back in Live who has recently returned to the game, putzing around solo on his L50. "Come join us for posi1" 'no effing way' "It will bwe fun! wwe are on discord" 'I cant be bothered to hook up a microphone' "just play" 'do I have to?' Anyway, he joins. We start posi 1, and he hares off to do it speedily -- whilst we are trying to get our SG friend some xp. "don't speeed" 'why not?' "need xp." He speeds anyway. So we trundle through positron, and he is speeding, and we are slogging, and I'm telling my SG how much of an awesome fellow he normally is. They are unimpressed. TF finishes, and friend says 'why do posi 1 at +1 ffs', and i said 'xp!'. "Do you want to do posi 2?" 'no' "Are you sure?" 'oh ok' So we start posi 2, and .., he is afk entire first mission, because he's drunk and watching youtube. But he comes back for rest of tf, meanwhile a pubbie/unknowns spends all of the second mission AFK unannounced, and is unresponsive to /tells for the third mission, so I boot them from the team, which i don't like doing, but they were being useless. Final mission of posi2, final barrel to click, and my friend leaves the fight to position himself next to the vahz boss whilst we're still fightng the group. SG 'why is your friend not with us me "dunno" SG 'very irresponsible, not much of a team player' me "I am not the boss of him, he's normally ace" We finish the TF, and an SG member says I am unimpressed with your friend they are now ignored, and she leaves the team and discord in a huff. Apparently she had messaged the guy to ask him why he was beintg difficuult, and his response was not polite. He is australian (like me) so no surprise from me, but she was peeved. The oreiginal needs-to-get-to-25 person is now level 19. I do a tip alignment mission to get her to 20, and see another Aussie friend, a good player and friends with the aussie who was just ignored, he's running around solo and I invite him to the alignment mission so we can shoot the sh*t. he joins but says nothing. nothing at all. Hmf. In discord SG agrees to do Yin tf next. Mission ends, SG friend is L20 and quits discord to go chat with the fully miffed sg member on her discord, but stays on team to do yin. First and second aussie friends follow us to independence port and I advertise for more players to join us for the yin tf. A person in local says they want to join,. I try t invite them 'you cannot invite player because they have ignored you'. Sheesh. I ask a team mate to tell them to unignore me and they say they will do the tf later. Go to start the TF with 7 players and yin wpnt talk to me. My dad calls on messenger, so I pass star to sg friend. Dad's call is unsuccessful after ~ 3 minutes of 'hello'? SG friend invites the player who has me on ignore. But they cannot start the tf -- someone on the team isn't l20. it is my second aussie friend, so I yell at them in chat 'get a real character'. they ignore me, other aussie chimes in 'yeah get with it'. The person who has me on ignore says 'i see the behaviour i put them on ignore for, I'm out' and leaves the team. SG member passes star back and says 'sort out your friend they are coming back'. as tghe second aussie quits the team. I check my global friends list ready to re-invite, and time passes. lots of time SG "your friends seem to be terrible players" I casnt disagree., We wait more SG this is taking too long, lets go already ... so I star the tf with 6 players. Aussie friend says 'speeding ,,,' sigh. We say 'please dont' since we want the xp The other pubbie quits the tf in disgust, we are down to 5. dad calls again. cant communicate. call fails. by this time I am at the end of my tether. TheTF proceeds and finished, and I log off and write this explanation, worst afternoon of gaming in a long long time. Tell me your tales of woe, so I don't feel alone 🙂 excuse typos nerve damaged fingers, tryping is hard.

It was an exercise in masochism. Genuinely surprised that people signed up for the event. Personally, I detest being on those PI +4 missions when I am NOT on an incarnate character, it's just facing large sacks of hitpoints when all you have is a dodgy peashooter ... when not io'd to the gills, a good ol' +1 fight against hard enemies is really rewarding. There is a lot of machismo in CoH pick-up-groups. It is silly and pointless, yet it persists. What makes me happy about CoH is that I am rarely forced to play in a way I don't find comfortable. I can always piss off and do something else in game that is more 'my speed'.

Tonight 9my time, I am in Australia), my character (Radiation/Ninjitsu Blaster) hit L31 after completing the Citadel TF. I was above minimum level for the Manticore TF (L30+), but I was a bit bored, so I went on LEG and advertised a Challenge Manticore run. Challenge Manticore, L30+, running at L30, doing +4/x8, who wants some? Lawks a lordy SIX players wanted in. I explained that since I was going ot be TF star holder at L31, the TF content would be L35, and since I was doing +4, the critters would be L39. Thats right, +8 critters! The people all acknowledged the challenge, I set the TF to 2 hours/5 deaths, and we were off. Sure enough, the very first group of Crey were deepest purple, L39s. They were mean! The brutes and tanks flailed hopelessly, the dominator and controller were unable to hold them, and my puny L31 blasteryness was ineffective. Within 30 seconds we had exceeded the allowable death count, and after 10 more seconds a team wipe was achieved -- zero critters were taken down. It was remarkably funny. We did not even try again, instead we did a +3 Manticore with a L50 leading (so the critters were 38 and we were 35), it was EASY MODE and we cruised through in 41 minutes. So next time some uber-tank claims to be able to solo Manticore, offer up the challenge of doing the TF at +4 with a L30 leader. That will wipe the smile from their dial. (please excuse typos, I have no feeling in my fingertips and hit multiple keys, typing is hard)

As of today's patch (Oct 6 2020) this no longer works. any solutions?

Reallky would like to see a solution tto this, entering password each time is ^%$#@! tedious,

When this problem first started, I was 100% reliable connection to Reunion server (EU), and very flaky to NA servers (Torchbearer, Everlasting etc). The unreliability was found when zoning (the progress bar would not move, eventually messages like 'no DBServer found' or 'No Mapserver found'. Then it would let me logon, but upon selecting any character on any NA server, it would freeze. I originally got by this problem by using a VPN connection, (NordVPN) setting it to Canada, and that would occasionally work reliably for a session, but the next time I connected via VPN I experiences the 'no DBserver' nonesense. Eventually I used my cell phone internet connection over a WIFI->USB adapter, and it worked flawlessly, every session was fine, 0 disconnects, 0 'DBServer errors' and 0 No Mapserver. Switching back to my cable internet provider, and all the problems came back. This situation continued until early July, when it seemed to be resolved. Again, the problem resurfaced in the past four days. Logging on would lead to a character list that was non-responsive. A different session, I could logon my character but going to the Supergroup base would 100% fail with No Mapserver error. Switching from my normal internet to cell internet (different internet service provider) and the problems go away. There is all this nonsense advice being offered of updating drivers / reloading windows / turning off antivirus / modifying files / reloading manifest / reloading entire game, and that doesn't help. 100% of the time I can connect reliably to the EU server. Which is in a different country. The datacentre or network setup in Canada seems (to me) to be the culprit. My cable internet is pretty solid, 90Mbps download 35Mbps upload, and is perfectly reliable for streaming youtube, netflix, and playing other network games. I have tried a wireshark capture, but I have zero idea how to read the information it offers. :/

Yay for patch notes. **YAY** for CoH.

It is genuinely exciting seeing things happening to make this a permanent revival.