Originally posted by dude990

Unique Buddy Key:
CCBH9-XEXPU-8HBYL-CHEMV-7XXE7

This product key is already active, it cannot be used again.

Not by me though, whoever used it could have had the courtesy of posting imo.

The last time I used my CC for AO, it worked instantaneously.

Are you sure that you didn't make a mistake somewhere? If you made a mistake, it will be "pending payment" for forever.

If you made a mistake, you can probably try again by canceling the "pending payment", deleting your "my payment options" and redo everything from scratch.

Much of the lag in AO is caused by HD searchtimes for items (armor etc, that's why it's worse in Borealis or large raids) in ResourceDatabase.dat. This is one file of about 1gb, but with windows it will quickly become fragmented quite badly.

Many players do the following to fix it: forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php

Originally posted by Means

 

Macrosun still found time this week to start work on an in-game mail system.

 

Means is the game director, Macrosun a dev. The quote is from last friday: forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php

Some players may think a mail system to be "WoWish" and thus bad, but that doesn't mean the developers agree with that viewpoint.

Other than that I think AO has some of the more displeasant forums I have encountered, but definetely not the worst. The forums are also not representative of the game, all in all I've found the AO community to be kind and helpful for the most part. Lowlevels is unfortunately another story because the rotten apples can get away with a lot because of being anonymous, which makes them more vocal/abusive.

Someone from FC should really be making a collection of all anarchypatcher.exe related problems on the official forums, this has been going on for years now ...

Something that may help you:

forums.anarchy-online.com/showthread.php (linux users encountering your exact same problem)

The forums have been in a constant uproar since FC implemented the customer feedback system of "scream the loudest and the most and you'll be heard, be quiet and reasonable and you'll be ignored". There has been no unusual increase in forum pvp since it was announced that special attacks would be changed.

About the future changes, little is known atm and in the mean time FC are apparently nerfing and boosting things at random. It doesn't help either that the devs themselves are not that knowledgeable about the game (relatively speaking compared to many of their players), base their decisions on impressions rather than ratio and also often do not realize the repercussions their changes have. They are indeed making it pretty hard for the players to keep any faith in them (if they had some left that is, personally I've been a cynical bastard for years now when it comes to FC).

For over a year I have had a problem with the AO patcher malfunctioniong (checksum error). I circumventend it by running the patches with windows Run, without starting up the patcher so AO's patcher couldn't mess up. When I switched PCs, the problem disappeared.

Anarchypatcher.exe has had problems for a long time now for many people, so you're definetely not the first to have problems getting into the game.

However, for us to help you; a bit more information is probably helpful:

Patch n° downloaded/old AO client version?

Standard installation path or not?

Does the "end user agreement" open after running anarchy.exe?

Does "Anarchy Online - Local Version (patch n°)" open?

Does the patcher give an error message? Which one?

Does your firewall block access to the internet from the launcher point (firewall history)?

Can you see the servers (Atlantean is default) after patching and logging in?

Originally posted by arrowotwood

Originally posted by Delanor

Originally posted by Brezjnev

I have been following TCoS for years now and only gave up on the game when the ip locks were announced.

From what I understood at the time, the Benelux and Scandinavia would be separate from the rest of the world, which is simply not a big enough population to sustain any niche mmo. And which would no longer allow me to play with international guilds.

So my question is: Is there a way now to legally (no proxys) play on an international server as a Benelux player?

Your question confuses me. It has always been possible to play the international servers as a Benelux player without proxies. It is now, since Acclaims open beta, for everyone possible to play the international servers.

The whole thing with IP blocking confused everyone and made everyone pretty upset messing up the initial launch of the game in several countries in Europe. Nevertheless we'd like to welcome you on the international (also known as the EU) servers via: https://eu-players.tcos.com/ !

 

So these Benelux & Scandinavian servers were the international servers all along, too bad that the rest of the world happened to be blocked by ip locks ... ;)

It's really good to hear that this is no longer the case tbh, I'll give tcos a go this month.

I have been following TCoS for years now and only gave up on the game when the ip locks were announced.

From what I understood at the time, the Benelux and Scandinavia would be separate from the rest of the world, which is simply not a big enough population to sustain any niche mmo. And which would no longer allow me to play with international guilds.

So my question is: Is there a way now to legally (no proxys) play on an international server as a Benelux player?

Originally posted by Khenthir

Case in point:

 

The previous poster clearly is one of those who "have to reach endgame by yesterday", and becomes a bitter burnout by grinding high-XP mobs 24/7 instead of trying to enjoy the game.

Is he really? Or do you only try to put him in a bad light because his opinion doesn't comply with what you think others should be thinking?

Case in point:

I have played AO for several years now, with nearly my entire focus on one character and always taking it easy. I've always tried to avoid grinding anything as much as possible. After all these years I still don't have a max level character. But I still agree, with the person you claim to be a 24/7 hardcore grinder, that AO without SL was a much nicer game. I like it more without the grind upon grinds that were added with SL and later expansions.

The latest booster (Legacy of Everquest) is a total disaster in that respect. It has 3 team instances where all the loot drops. But accessing these isn't easy* : first you need to complete every single other quest that came with the booster, and on several occasions grind for several items/mobs. The quests themselves are long, boring and tedious** and offer no reward till you complete them, then you get one item for both questlines and access to one of the final 3 areas. After doing 2 of these final areas once each (so after completing all 2 quest chains) you finally get access to the final area.

These 3 final areas take about 10 minutes each to complete, a fraction of what it takes to complete all previous quests, yet all loot comes from here. Then players would have to repeatedly redo these areas to get the loot they want. How many times would the players have to redo an area to get everything they want? With the latest droprate numbers I've heard, it's about 72 times (1/12 dropchance for HHaB upgrade item, 6 teammembers). That's what I call grindy.

*Well, literally it is easy, for the most part there's not all that much challenge to be had in the quests apart from how grindy they are.

**Certainly the one in Arid Rift, there the tedium is traveling time and while Arid Rift itself is a rather small zone, FC tried to squeeze as much traveling time into as little space as possible. When you finally get a quest that is close to the zones entrance, the questgiver himself will be on the other side of the map. Unfortunately they don't have mobile phones in the future so you once again need to run/grind back and forth the entire map to complete your quest. All quests are timed, so you need to complete a single quest ( 1 get to questgiver; 2 get to questplace; 3 complete quest; 4 get back to questgiver) in a single playing session, making it so that casual players are months behind the 24/7 players while having to invest much more /played time into the quest in order to complete it.

The use of appartments is still as marginal as it ever was before. The last time I've seen the inside of someone elses appartment was over 2 years ago.

AI (Alien Invasion) cities never really took off as a social meeting place. Although with bars, a parliament room, a brawl arena and a swimming pool, it's pretty clear that FC had intended them to be a social gathering ground. When they were first released, it was still possible to get froobs and non-org members inside the buildings and my organisation used it for gatherings/parties. Later on FC cealed off this "exploit", removing any social applications it could have had. Nowadays the sky bar (outside, so no admission needed) or a rooftop of one the buildings are still used to keep organisation or inter-organisation meetings. Personally I don't know of any parties that were held at an AI city in the past 2 years.

Most organisations chose one backyard garden (the small area after one of the old starting areas) as a social gathering place for the organisation: a place to keep mules and return back to when you pass through one of the major hubs. Parties are usually held in Reets Retreat.

Out of curiousity, how did you determine the precise number of people involved in that TL7 tower battle? That's actually pretty high considering how low the pops are on the servers. But, compared to most MMO's it's not very high. At any given time EVE Online has 20-30,000 people playing and battles can feature literally... 300-400 players. I've heard of even bigger battles. Actually, have seen video on youtube of those battles. In WAR, during RVR during a decent time of the day you can get a random RVR Battle with 150-300 people.

Most likely by seeing how many players where in each sides chat bot. If I'm in the clan bot, it's easy to know how many are in it. All I need to do then is ask an omni friend how many are in their bot and I'dd know the numbers involved on each side.

Eve is an online pvp spaceship game, with one world, as such it's not really comparable to a classic 3rd person mmorpg.

WAR was build for large scale pvp fights, AO has always been more of a pve game (with unfortunately some very poor coding behind it).

Your 2 examples are not typical for "most MMO's" either, I'm pretty sure that if one went to check out CoX, EQ, EQ2, WoW, Ryzom, Lotr,... ; that he'dd find that AO's 150 people involved in one fight isn't all that bad.

I have a 9800GTX+ (with pretty recent drivers) and I can run AO without doing anything special.

Originally posted by 3on1

Originally posted by hobo9766

 

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Originally posted by 3on1
care to elaborate on what has gotten worse? :p anyway im kinda on a breaking point with this game (again), i kinda want to play something else. ;p

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The quality of the customer service of course.

 

nah.. its been crappy since AO released. a booster/expansions always brings bugs and therefore more petitions, no matter how well its tested. they actually didnt rush the release of this (mayb they learned of aoc! omg)
 

Maybe they didn't rush it, but they still left atleast 2 obvious new bugs/exploits/game-design-flaws/features (depends on the viewpoint of whoever you're speaking against, and with FCs wonderful customer service there is no way to know for sure if something is an exploit or not) with Notum Wars in game, that were predicted and then tested during beta. Resulting in tl7 Notum Wars still being dead.

If there is one thing that you can rely for on FC, it is to fail at any given opportunity. FailCom has scored one more for the home team.

There's 2 possible reasons that I can think off:

1) You play on a low population server, where nearly everyone that pvp'ed has transferred their pvp toons to Freedom (or one of the other servers with somewhat active zone pvp).

2) I13 really was the nail in the coffin for CoX' pvp. I have no way to check this myself since I'm no longer playing because I13 killed pvp for me.

In case you're wondering what I13 was to pvp, I'll quote myself:

"With I13 NCsoft has done their own personal mini-NGE (see Star Wars Galaxies) when trying to "fix" CoX pvp. The game mechanics were completely changed (for pvp only) by replacing the old unbalanced system with an entirely new unbalanced (+severely broken) system.

In the proceedings the red names managed to tell their existing pvp crowd that they were meaningless and that they didn't want them around anyways. At the same time Ex Libris attempted to put the blame for the fact that obviously broken (or just severely unbalanced) gameplay elements made it onto live on the naughty pvp'ers that were running amock on the closed beta boards. It's not like NCsoft could have suspended those players' access to those closed boards, or that most of those broken gameplay elements were actually already reported on those very same closed beta boards by many people out of that same naughty pvp crowd.

Why the devs would want pvp to have different pvp mechanics than pve is beyond me as well, if I wanted to go play a different game, I already could do just that.

That said, my personal number 1 change has to be that with I13 the devs tried to reinvent the pvp game mechanics and failed miserably."

 Reply to the OP: the same as Zorvan.

Originally posted by hidden1

Are they really revamping the AO graphics engine? hmmm I might consider it if so.  -snip-

 They are upgrading the graphics engine from dx7 to dx9. So the old clunky character models + textures will continue to be used, but the game will still look way better than it does now because of the extra graphical bling that dx9 allows.

Before you ask when this will go life, originally FC had said around the end of summer '08, which was way too optimistic considering how messy AOs code is (Funcom^tm). Dunno if FC has announced a new release goal yet, but officially the graphics update is still in the pipeline.

Originally posted by Beatnik59 

1)  Can I lay down an individual lair?  Reason I ask is so I can create stuff (and generally just hang out with my evil self).

You still need to create a personal SG for this.

2)  Is there more solo stuff to do?

Was there a lack of it before?

Soloing is still AT-dependant.

Ouroboros may count as a lot of extra solo content, wether you'll find it compelling enough to engange in it a lot is another question (I didn't :p): cityofheroes.wikia.com/wiki/Ouroboros

3)  Name the three biggest changes since about summer, 2005.

Summer 2005, before CoV release? Dunno why you post in the CoV forum then ;). I'm going to give you my top 3 since issue 7 (I think it was issue 7 that introduced level 50 villains and Grandville+RV, correct me if I'm wrong). And if you must know, I think the biggest change to CoV before I7 must have been the release of CoV (I just couldn't resist :p).

My personal top 3:

1) With I13 NCsoft has done their own personal mini-NGE (see Star Wars Galaxies) when trying to "fix" CoX pvp. The game mechanics were completely changed (for pvp only) by replacing the old unbalanced system with an entirely new unbalanced (+severely broken) system.

In the proceedings the red names managed to tell their existing pvp crowd that they were meaningless and that they didn't want them around anyways. At the same time Ex Libris attempted to put the blame for the fact that obviously broken (or just severely unbalanced) gameplay elements made it onto live on the naughty pvp'ers that were running amock on the closed beta boards. It's not like NCsoft could have suspended those players' access to those closed boards, or that most of those broken gameplay elements were actually already reported on those very same closed beta boards by many people out of that same naughty pvp crowd.

Why the devs would want pvp to have different pvp mechanics than pve is beyond me as well, if I wanted to go play a different game, I already could do just that.

That said, my personal number 1 change has to be that with I13 the devs tried to reinvent the pvp game mechanics and failed miserably.

2) The invention system. It's CoX version of rare loot. This also introduced the curse that all mmorpgs with rare loot suffer: RMT spam, rampant farming, elitism,... But it also allowed for entirely new levels of customization and tremendously increased the power of player characters.

3) The auction houses: Wentworth's or Black Market.

Originally posted by raizzeen

city of heroes and city of villains the same game just diffrent faction starting stuff so to say? and is the game mostly solo where you just bash everything down? and most of all is the population at least medium so to say? game seems pretty active from reading the game forums and other areas

Most of the pve content is different for villains and heroes (the game mechanics are exactly the same though). Only the last few issues the devs have been releasing shared pve zones. Pvp zones are shared between heroes and villains, because it's mostly heroes vs villains :p

One of the strong point of CoX is the teaming for various reasons. You'll find it very easy to find pick-up teams on most servers. Max 8 persons in a team + spawns adjust to team size: teaming is probably the way to go for xp and direct credits. Every AT (archetype = class) can solo, some a lot better than others, but mission difficulty is adjustable.

Population is server dependent, there's 2 servers (Virtue and Freedom) that often cap the server limit.

The most common use of 2 accounts I've seen, is to duallog a blaster with an empath in pvp zones: empath stays at base and refreshes his buffs on the blaster whenever needed. Very powerful combo.

Nowadays it is 1 key, 1 subscription and 1 client for CoV and CoH together. Mmorpg.com should just merge their forums already and stop confusing people :)

Don't forget to take benefit from the trial: www.cityofheroes.com/trial/