SteelRat70

If things start wiping, your first point of interrogation or improvement should be your own choices or power usage, not other peoples. Chances are they'll be doing that themselves already. It is the height of arrogance to assume that when things go wrong it's everyone elses fault and not possibly your own; or at least to discount the possibility of you making mistakes along with other people as well.

How they play their character is their business, not yours. And whether they consider your suggestion as "a better way to play" it, is up to them, not you. Seriously what makes you the judge of how someone plays?

No. I tend to be more focussed on what I believe I should be doing, rather than what I believe other people should be doing. If people are doing things differently to what I expect, then I make it my business to try and adapt to that, instead of expecting them to play in a rigid manner that is predetermined by me. Also this game has been so hugely dumbed down since live, it's very rare that people not doing what they "should" be really matters anyway. And before anyone chimes in with "what about TF 'X' or enemy type 'Y'" I've yet to join a team that doesn't just steam roller through everything regardless of what ATs are present or how they're built. Certain support toons of mine are more or less obsolete now because by the time a key mob is either locked down or debuffed it's dead anyway. Reading through the patch notes, that power creep just keeps on truckin' with so called "Quality of Life" changes.

Whilst that is true, after playing the Hollows on the power crept "easy mode" we now have and suddenly reverting to a server that was running, say i6 code, I wonder how much of a culture shock there would be and how much re learning would be required?

I've read that "The Struggle" is what keeps us sane. We thrive on having problems to fix and difficulties to overcome. There are some thinkers who believe that not only is a problem free utopia the worst kind of hell for us humans, but that our world is nowhere near as messed up as the media et al would have us believe, it's just there are so many serious problems we've fixed we're actually trying to find new things to put right just to keep our sanity.

Hello deviants. I played on Defiant from around i6 - Tiger Slash (Cl / Reg), Man Tiger (Inv / SS), Viking Furnace (Fire / Axe), Amazon Thunder (Lec / Lec blaster), Illuzi-One, (Ill / Rad) and Luminesque (PB) were my mains blue side. I'd be amazed if any of my old SG the Amazon Stars were here after all this time!

..Update.. It has. Not a single freeze since changing those settings, where I was getting it within a few minutes of a mission start on a large team.. I guess I'm now in to changing them back one at a time to see if there's a particular culprit, but I suspect it's going to be a combination of settings.

Ah ok - common sense then, although offensive is fairly subjective and especially in this day and age. Touch wood, I've never had a character generic'd and probably the most offensive character name I ever had on live was called "FireKin R-Soul".

Having jumped back in after a bit of a hiatus, this has started happening to me too. I'm on a Ryzen 3600X and 5700XT card. Only thing I've noticed is that it only seems to happen in teams, especially higher level ones with all the whizz bang powers effects! Almost identical behaviour in that the the client locks up completely and the only way to free it up is an End Task through Task manager. The exe itself appears to still be running though as process resources (CPU, Disk, RAM etc) in Task manager are changing as if the game is still actually running in the background. I remember in days of old the settings that used to be the most resource heavy were things like bloom, particles, water effects and reflection quality. I've turned these down for now to see if that makes any difference.

I wonder how many acts of "kindness" genuinely come from a selfless or philanthropic pov. Most seem to be borne out of a want of coming across to other people as "nice" or "kind", rather than the act of kindness itself. Personally I think the old "treat other people how you'd like them to treat you" adage is a better way to go.

What names other than copyrighted characters and CoH signature characters are actively locked? Genuine question.

Whilst there were parts of the grind that were.. sub optimal, I think it was a necessary evil and I actually miss it. That's not because of the grind itself, but the situations that arose because of it. The Hollows was always a full zone. Teaming up just to do contact missions was kinda necessary to deal with the grind in a much nicer way. I logged in last night for the first time in ages and joined up with a team to run through the Hollows missions, culminating in Frosty. On the one hand, that last mission was notably easier than it was back on live, on the other there was a lot of great team chat and banter while we were sliding around on the icey bits of that map. Very reminiscent of live, and from my personal experience, seeming to be the exception now, rather than the rule. I'm not here to tell people how to play, but I do feel that since the introduction of AE and DFB, CoH lost the thing that made it great.

Update... I've also added the whole CoH folder to the exclusions on Windows Defender and I'm still getting the same behaviour. It appeared to be fine for about an hour this evening, and now I can't log in without the issue happening more or less immediately. Of course this may be related to the server issue that I can see at the top of the screen as I type this which is why shard transfers have been disabled! I guess we'll see.

I'll have a look at that, thank you. Couple of things that I've tried / found that appear to have made things a little more stable in the first instance, although I confess that I'm not entirely sure which of these have made any difference: * Moved from Cream Soda to Tequila - I was still using the recommended manifest url for homecoming, rather than the default Cream Soda one. * My network was being shown as a "Public" connection instead of "Private" - granted this is only generally to do with network discovery and resource sharing, so probably irrelevant. * Disabled Windows Firewall - Google searching suggested some ports needed to be opened to play CoH historically, but I've never had to make any direct changes in the past.

I have some very odd behaviour going on. Constant map server disconnects that are preceded by unresponsive power buttons or any kind of client interaction. I can see other players running around, even damaging auras causing damage numbers on surrounding mobs, but I can't do anything except quit the client and run around the map. It's obvious where the game server thinks my character is, due to aggroed mobs attacking where it thinks I am. My characters health will drop too, but nothing I can do about it. Ordinarily I would suspect my internet connection, but I can run a continuous ping to the IP lifted from the manifest and it doesn't drop a single packet when this happens. In addition it's happened when I've dual boxed where one client instance disconnects, but the other one is fine on the same machine. Local client files have been verified as OK as well. It's all very odd and appears to be getting worse. Has anyone else had similar experience of this? Are there any log files that I can check for some insight as to what might be going on?

There is PLENTY of content sub level 20. Come out of the sewers and go and find it.

Please explain to me how this statement makes you the paragon of agreeable democracy, rather than exactly the sort of person you're complaining about?

Some of these pro DFB responses really are golden in their bone headed idiocy. Irony #1 "I don't want to do Frost Fire for the n millionth time" .. but you're quite happy to run one mission from level 1 to level 22. Over and over again. Don't give me any argument at all about content variety, this is only about levelling as quickly as possible. Just admit its about the XP. Irony #2 "The OP is selfish and just wants everyone to play his way" No, he's identified that due to a massively imbalanced, repeatable trial, the early game is dominated by one particular way of play, which indirectly makes it more difficult for him and other players to play in other ways. I'm hoping the irony isn't lost on you. And don't give me the crap about "make your own team", "are you socially inept" - making non DFB teams sub level 20, whilst not impossible is significantly more difficult under the current set up. "It'll sort itself out as popularity for the game wanes" Nice head-in-the-sand response. If anything, the longer the game exists, the worse the problem will get. There is already a trend that this is the preferable way to play in the early levels and the longer it goes on unaddressed, it will soon be seen as the "only" way. I don't advocate nerfing DFB in to the ground, but I do think measures should be taken to encourage more variety. Early on in Homecomings life, before DFB was enabled, The Hollows, Kings Row, Skyway City, Steel Canyon ALL had healthy populations with all sorts of options available for people to enjoy the wealth of content CoH was always so famous for. That is the situation I, the OP and many others would like to see return.

Many of you are banging the drum of "options". The level of DFB grouping requests is such that for those of us who prefer not to run the same missions ad nauseum, options are limited. Last night (GMT) on TorchBearer, I spent 15 minutes trying to even get a single bite for a sub level 15, non DFB team. The one guy who joined, was located in the Sewer Network and promptly left once I told him the group was not for DFB. I have created a channel on TorchBearer called "NoDFB". If any of you want to run (especially sub lvl 20) teams that have nothing to do with the dispatch of giant snot balls in a pool of green slime or your spandex dry cleaning bills are getting beyond manageable, join that channel and see if we can get a large enough pool of like minded people together.

Whilst I agree with this to an extent, it is entirely possible to run mission teams for people that don't want to endlessly grind DFB ad nausuem. Perhaps it's better to take the bull by the horns and sort the problem yourself than to complain until the problem is changed to fit around you? Yesterday I ran a full 8 man team from about 2pm until 8pm and levelled a Sent from 12 to 21. Did some radios, Midnight Club arc and the start of an arc from one of the contacts inside MC (forget her name). This was purely pickups, not an organised group of friends. There was a good supply of people happy to join (even people who were above the level of the team - thank the superb exemplar system for that!), people came and went and I had a fair few global friend requests as a result. For me, that is the heart of not only MMOs in general, but what makes CoH so great. Few people want the responsibility of having "The Star", but when you take that initiative, you reap the rewards. (In case any of you reading this were on the team on Torchbearer run by Ranger-07.. I salute you all.. you were awesome.)

Interesting, thank you. For me, one of the sets defining powers (purely from the point of fun factor, rather than out and out performance) is Propel, so it's a little disappointing to learn that it under performs on Dominators. Although given that the Domi secondary is largely damage, that does kinda make sense from a balance point of view. What would you pair Grav with on a Domi then? (Note: I have no issue at all with critter toss'age. I intend to fully slot TK Thrust with KB IOs so that I can play Hellion Golf in Atlas Park)

General question regarding Grav control really. I've been reading around that it's the weakest set in terms of raw control, however it does still seem to be quite popular. Questions then are really: 1 - If it lacks the control options of the other sets, what else does it bring to the party? 2 - Are there any recommended pairings for either Domi or Controller that would give "satisfactory" performance (I'm talking can solo pretty well, but doesn't have to be a farm monster)? I have a low level Grav / Psi Domi, have read good things about Grav / Time Trolly's and do quite like the idea of the chaos and debris that a Grav / Storm would entail. Open to other options though and at a push I can make pretty much any combo stick thematically ;)

Add another Kent resident to that growing list. If we formed an SG, would we be "Kentish Supers" or "Supers of Kent" ?

The Hollows is one my favourite zones in the game. SO many good lessons can be learned there that will keep you in good stead for the rest of it. The Hollows is also awesome, simply because, Frostfire.

It means playing the only MMO I've ever really not only enjoyed, but loved. It's a beautiful illustration of how not only MMOs should be, but the dire position they're in now. My life has changed a whole lot since I started playing back in 2006 and for a long time I've not played video games at all. I will still play this one and it's "pick up and play for half an hour" suits my more active unplugged life style now as much as my square eyed one did 13 (yikes!) years ago.