All Posts by Riker99

Class Balance.

I see many people buying a second account to farm for PvP experience (kill their other character over and over). Or, simply having their friend with an equally leveled character let him kill him for a while.

They need some type of reduction if you kill the same person over and over, like WoW had.

I think the "hardcore" nature of the PvP system right now will be gone soon after the whiners get a taste of it.

I wouldn't bother switching for DX10 at the moment. I am on Vista and I run everything using DX9.

Either games have not utilized DX10 to the fullest yet, or DX10 still needs more work, but I typically have lower performance and graphical quality when running on DX10.

XP should be more stable than Vista, however I have gotten great stability on Vista with the OB, as well as on XP.

Once a game shows me better performance or significantly superior graphical quality using DX10, I will consider using it.

Until then, its DX9 all the way.

Cheers,

Riker99

Originally posted by peaceandlove

My knob

I find the maturity and informative content of your post superior.

Hello all,

I really like the game, and the recent patches have improved performance for me significantly.

However, once they get all of the game-breaking issues out of the way, there are definately some things that I think need "polish".

Most of these things relate to the interface.

1) Statsistics and their effect on damage, health regeneration, attack rating etc. need to be clearly defined and displayed. Otherwise, we know we have +20 Strength that we think increases our damage, but we have no idea by how much. World of Warcraft is a good example of how this should be: you simply mouse over the stat to get the effect.

2) The PvP Minigame interface needs more options such as: Give me ANY game at all and give me ANY map for this game type. It is going to be a real pain to queue for a specific map AND game type, and I predict coordination would be needed to get a match going, as it is in the OB right now (spamming global).

3) I have no idea what the purpose of skill points will be as we have them in abundance in the first 13 levels. Clear descriptions of each skill will be requried, as well as the effect that adding more skill points has. Currently, for some of the skills this is defined (bandaging) but not for others (climbing).

4) Social interface polish. It is a real pain to try to invite somone to your party or add them to your friends list currently. Having a /invite and /befriend command would help this alot, as well as it being an option on a context menu when you right click them.

5) General interface polish. The interface is okay now, but it just doesn't "feel" that easy to use. I find that the buttons for skills in the skills pane are far too big, require excessive scrolling of that window. Another issue I see a lot is the description of items from mousing over them ending up off the screen due to the location of the item. This will be a real pain when trying to choose the best quest reward and you can't tell what the item is.

If some of these are already in closed beta, then forgive me for pointing them out in the open beta.

I can't see any of these issues being too hard to polish, and most will probably be done by release or soon after, if beta testers have provided proper feedback.

Cheers,

Riker99

Haha, I fell through the Thirsty Dog once last night before the patch.

An assertion failed while loading Toratge night-time from Tina and I attempted to continue.

When I loaded, I was in the water underneath the Thirsty Dog.

The funniest thing: All the NPCs from the Thirsty Dog were standing on the bottom of the Ocean.

I managed to swim to them before drowning.

Cheers,

Riker99

Hello all,

As of the time of writing this, the servers are down for the application of the changes for the end of the open beta event.

This means that when the server comes back up, all your characters you had at LV 2 or above will be LV 20, and the PvP ruleset will be free for all.

Cheers,

Riker99

I was running on High with about 40FPS in Tortage before the patch, now its about 45-50FPS, but the game itself looks a lot better for me after the patch. The lighting and fog effects are definitely better now, and the game has the real gritty visual style to it now.

My loading times have reduced drastically as well, about 5 seconds loading Tortage down from about 30 seconds. Small areas like Taverns and caves load almost instantly now.

I was 100% looking forward to this game before the patch, now its like 500% dynamite!

Cheers,

Riker99

I don't believe so.

I had two monitors at work, with one on adapted VGA and the other on DVI and never really noticed a difference between the picture qualities.

If you want to use pure DVI you'll need a monitor with a DVI connector, which means returning the one you have that doesn't have one.

I think thats more hassle than its worth for an infinitessimal increase in picture quality.

Cheers,

Riker99

Get a DVI to VGA adapter?

Most video cards come with one in the box, and if yours doesn't come with one, you can get them for a few bucks at any decent computer shop.

I don't think you'll notice any picture quality difference between pure DVI and adapted VGA.

Cheers,

Riker99

Questions for the OP:

What OS are you running? (XP or Vista, 32 or 64 bit)

What DX version are you trying to use when playing? (DX9 or DX10)

Have you tried beta versions of drivers from ATI?

I am running 32 bit Vista using DX9 and have nVidia's latest beta driver and crash very rarely, and overall performance is very smooth even on High settings.

My computer specifications are a little lower than yours in terms of processor speed (Q6600), I also have 4GB RAM, and I am running a GeForce 8800 GT.

If you are trying to use DX10, try DX9. If you are using a 64 bit OS, perhaps that is causing issues. If you are not using beta drivers, try them out and see if they help.

Cheers,

Riker99

I have two computers, one XP and one Vista(32bit).

The XP computer:

Intel Core 2 Duo (~2.2GHz a core)

1GB RAM

nVidia GeForce 7900 GT (512MB)

Performance: Can play on absolute minimum graphics with shader model 2.0 fairly well, but lots of stuttering in Tortage daytime due to other players etc. Probably 20FPS in Tortage and 30-40 elsewhere. The RAM is really a huge bottleneck on this machine.

The Vista computer:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (~2.4GHz a core)

4GB RAM

nVidia GeForce 8800 GT (512MB)

Performance: Can run on High settings very well. About 40FPS in Tortage daytime with players running around. Elsewhere in the world, FPS ranged from 50-60FPS. AoC was consuming 1.4GB of RAM while sitting in Tortage on High settings.

NOTE: The resolution used for both these tests was the lowest (1024x768). Also, both were using DX9.

Conclusion: Vista does not appear to have inherent performance flaws running AoC using DX9. Results using DX10 may vary... I will try later today.

Cheers,

Riker99

You fail english... thats very possible.

Originally posted by ParkCarsHere

My question to the OP: Is that Torrent that you linked a good one, or have you not tested it? I would be interested in using a torrent, since those are usually much better and faster... although I am very cautious of downloading torrents.

The torrent I linked is the best one I found in terms of seeds and seeming to be complete and malware free.

I did not download the entire torrent and install it, I only downloaded about 4% of it while waiting in the queue for FilePlanet. I saw the FilePlanet download going much much faster, so I paused the torrent for the time being to free up bandwidth.

Therefore I cannot guarantee the torrent works or is malware free.

I am personally downloading from FilePlanet and then planning to use the torrent to fix corrupt files if I have them, as it would be a real pain to download 12GB again in hopes of not getting any corruption.

Cheers,

Riker99

Hmm, well then my post applies only to people who got their keys from FilePlanet directly.

I do not guarantee the vailidity of my post for the beta keys given out by MMORPG.com.

Cheers,

Riker99

I think competiton is good, and as you said, forces growth in the competing games to attempt to win more market share.

A WoW-opoly is not good for the genre.

I believe that the beta keys given out by MMORPG.com were Open Beta keys, and as such the client is the same.

Somone please correct me if these were in fact closed beta keys, although I highly doubt this is the case.

The original post was made due to a number of people recieving Open Beta keys from FilePlanet opening the keys to all members, paid or not.

Cheers,

Riker99

Hi Guys,

I posted this in another thread but I think it will get lost there, and can help people out.

You can use torrents to download the client, the one I tested being here.

This APPEARS to be the same as the FilePlanet download, however nobody can guarantee there is no malware or keyloggers in the software.

I got a max of around 700kb/s and an average of around 100kb/s using the torrent above, and downloaded about 4% of it while waiting in line for the FilePlanet download.

The FilePlanet download goes well over 1MB/s with my average being around 1.5MB/s.

As you can see, the wait is probably well worth it, as it has superior speed and you know this software is malware-free.

My reccomendation:

Wait in line to use the FilePlanet download, and then use the torrent to fix any corrupt files if you have them. I reccomend uTorrent as a client for doing this, as it lets you pick EXACTLY which files you want to download from the list the torrent contains.

Cheers,

Riker99