I've been waiting for a patch to allow me to play the game without crashes to desktop.  I've tried just about every driver known to humanity, turning SLI on and off, reinstalling Direct X, and I still can't play.  I've got an Alienware 17x with 4GB, 280M cards in SLI, Vista 64 and I can't get the game to run for very long before a CTD happens.  Love the game, but not the crashes.  I'm thinking now it may have something to do with the sound drivers, but I can't find any updated drivers for my machine.

As a huge huge fan of Tolkein's work, I must say I agree with Tilt.  There is a depth to the Tolkein universe (including one of the most beautiful creation myths I have ever read) that shouldn't be messed with, imho -- it is moving enough and deep enough as it is.  It was offensive enough that the 2nd two movies in the Jackson series took such liberties with the text to keep themselves in the "blockbuster" realm, but now games (yes even you, LotRO), are further diluting the richness.  Many children and adolescents, most even, will never read the books and will take Jackson's Tolkein and Gaming's Tolkein as canonical Tolkein.  Something beautiful, unique and truly life-affirming is going away.

I understand the sentiment.  However, there are magical artifacts/items in the books, so one could just have the item be the source of the "wizard's" power.  Heck, one could say that Bilbo and Frodo were "wizards" in a loose sense due to their use of the one ring.

My Xbox gamertag is MurdoxJD.  I should be on this afternoon as I recover from surgery, and I'd be up for some private MP.  THe public MP drove me crazy last night with all the disappearing objects.

Yeah, I'm still trying to figure out what I can do with the money I'm earning killing the bad guys in Free Roam.  Another weird thing is that sometimes the dead guys drop ammo as loot, and sometimes nothing falls.  I'm only on level 3 at the moment.

Ok..just picked up the XBox version.  Gamertag is "MurdoxJD".  Did a little MP and leveled a couple of times somehow.  Still trying to figure out what I'm doing, and the disappearing characters/mounts/weapons is annoying.  Hopefully they iron that out soon.

I'm hoping to have the XBox version in my hands tomorrow.  Recovering from surgery, so I should have some time during the day.

I've had just a few issues here and there.  I, and many other people running 64-bit operating systems, can't seem to get Dragon Age to work very well as it sporadically crashes to desktop after playing for a while.  It's especially annoying to have this during a long cutscene that involves one or more fights, thus giving you no chance to save.  I'm on Vista 64-bit, with an Alienware M17x having 4GB Ram and 280M cards in SLI.  Strangely, other games by Bioware have not caused me any issues, so it's clearly something to do with the new engine in Dragon Age.

I can't see how the graphics are top notch in those Elementalist videos.  I would call that below average in this year.

It's better than GW1 but that's like literally 5 years old.

You've got to be smoking crack. 'Cause that looks top-notch.

What are yall comparing it to?  Maybe it's just me, but it certainly doesn't look as good as games like Crysis... and that is over 2 years old now.

Just some other recent games I've played that I think look better than that GW2 footage:  Just Cause 2, God of War 3, Assassin's Creed 2, Uncharted 2, etc

Yeah I know a couple of those are console games, but keep in mind that consoles actually have worse graphics than top-notch PC games.

I'm not sure what everyone else is comparing it to, but I'm comparing it to other MMORPGs.  Looks very good to me -- especially the animation, which is often more important than the graphics at the end of the day.

Nice.  What class are you playing?

The Wanderers are still going on the Antonia Bayle server.  If you're interested in joining up, send me a pst or post here.  I've been pretty busy with work recently, so my time has been limited the last couple of weeks, but I'm still enjoying it and looking forward to New Halas.

I'm crashing fairly often after applying the 1.03 patch on my tripped out laptop.  Looking at the Bioware technical forums, it appears plenty of other people are experiencing the same issues. 

As everyone here seems to be having a good experience with the game, I'm curious about your computer systems, especially the graphics card and drivers you're using?

Well, we just got our guild hall.  Needs a little decorating but looks awesome.  New members are always welcome.  We're just capping out at level 40, which is pretty easy to get to with some grouping.  As an example, I went from 24 to 30 on one of my characters in a single dungeon grouped with guildmates.  This week we will cap at 42. 

You can try it out for free, and feel free to send a tell to Skya or Vulnvavia if you get in the game.  We're all having a ball.

Just for record, I too have it from Impulse running on a Core2 Duo and a single GTX260 with no issues. I'd be surprised the quad is the culprit, I'd lean more towards SLI instead... but that's just a guess. 

Yeah, I tried turning off SLI too, and it still suffered the same problems.  Seems to happen when something needs to "load," whether it's a transition to another area, or some party dialog.  I've used verify a few times on Stardock, so I'm thinking maybe I'll suffer through a complete reinstall.  Wondering if I can uninstall through Stardock or not because I have so much DLC installed. It might not catch all of it.

Were both of you using quad cores?  I've got a quad core with nVidia 280M cards in SLI.  Maybe I need to update the nVidia drivers.

If I reinstall, I wonder if I have to do anything about my saved games.

Reason I ask is because I've been having tons of crashing to desktop issues with the game.  Also, strangely, when I run the "verify install" through Impulse on the game, it always wants to update the game, so I'm wondering if there is some issue with the install.

I've tried various "fixes" to see if I can get the game to run smoothly, but nothing seems to work.  I've tried using one and two cores instead of all four in my quad-core cpu.  I've tried SLI and no SLI.  Often I crash within 30 minutes in the game and it can happen at any time.  I have to save after every encounter, whether it be PC or NPC.

I wonder if the experimental rules would work in a new MMO?  What's the next big MMO we could potentially test with, Old Republic, Guild Wars 2?  Hardcore players would get really impatient (myself included particularly with something new and shiny) so I guess we might just apply the restriction to an alt toon.

I think the problem with a new MMORPG is that there isn't that alternative way to advance when you hit the "guild cap".  In EQ2 there are tons of options -- crafting, AA experience, mentoring, leveling down -- all of which help a guild stay together, whether that player is casual or not.

Hope to see you there!  I gained 8 levels on my Fury last night it one dungeon crawl of maybe 1.5 hours, so I'm now sitting at 29.  Also have my level 34 necro.  It's pretty quick getting to our current guild main level cap of 33-35, so definitely come back and join us.  It's a lot of fun just switching all experience gained into AA experience once you reach the guild cap.  The AA talent lines are very deep at this point in time, and we're getting some more today with the release of the expansion.

I think I'm done with Aion and won't be going back to it.  PLaying EQ2 now, and it's just much more fun.  Other than graphics and the flying, I feel EQ2 beats it in every department.  Particularly in the complexity department.  Not to mention you have so many different races and classes to choose from.  It goes back to the issue that plagues most new MMORPGs -- they can't possibly have the depth that an older game has when they first come out.  At least I haven't seen one yet that has. 

So far I'm having a lot of fun with EQ2.  Still my favorite of all the MMORPGs out there, especially in its current form.

you mean a MMO where PvE doesn't get fucked over by PvP balancing?  I'd play.

There is a simple yet complicated solution to this, and it doesn't require eliminating either playstyle.  The solution is to eliminate the whole "threat mechanic", and program all npcs to act like humans were playing them.  No longer can the warrior spam two or three skills to get the mobs to "snap back to him".  No longer is the boss going to be fooled by the guy who is shouting at him yet cannot even land a blow that hurts... the boss is going for the damned healer, just like a human would.  The problem with PvE isn't PvP.  The problem with PvE is PvE!!!

Blizzard implemented one encounter in the Argent Crusade dungeon where the mobs were "human npcs".  They were in fact npc members of the opposing faction that your raid had to fight.  The fight had NO threat table at all, and it played out like a PvP free for all.  There was no taunting; you had to root and stun.  Focus fire on the wrong champ, and the pally would sit in the corner and spam flash heals that were impossible to overcome... and then he'd bubble.  I played this encounter on both a PvP server and a PvE server.  As expected on the PvP server, it didn't take much effort to get everyone organized during the fight and it went quite smoothly.  On the PvE server, the fight caused many wipes.

I know why the threat mechanic was originally developed -- it was another mechanic designed to abstract the turn-based nature of early MUDs and MMOs.  With the bandwidth increasing to the point where rounds are shorter, come in quick succession, and player skill can be highlighted, there is no reason to continue with this archaic mechanic.  PvP and PvE can be one single ruleset, and once that happens you can differentiate classes from the same base.

These are all great ideas.  I think the problem was in trying to make additional classes worthwhile (such as the rogue melee dps classes).  In reality, the brawny tanks are likely going to be capable of doing tremendous damage to you if you just turn your back on them and attack the healer or mage.  One could argue that it should be the most damage of any "class."  This is why, in reality, I would be forced to focus on the tank, because I need to defend myself.  However, because utility skills are so under-utilized in most MMORPGS (DDO is a bit of an exception here), rogues and similar classes have generally all taken the mantle as superior melee dps classes.  Doesn't make much sense to me, in all honesty, but the tank's taunt has effectively allowed it to function similarly without being the big dpser it should be.  It's just difficult to fathom how to balance the classes effectively without the "taunt."  Interesting topic.

I very rarely PvP in any MMOG. I also don't play deathmatch shooter games for the same reason. I think the reason isn't that its PvP, but rather the format of the conflict.

In a deathmatch shooter game you respawn, shoot everything you can, die, respawn again, repeated over and over until some goal is reached. The winner (at least the perceived winner) is determined by kill and death counters. Something has always seemed fundamentally wrong with all that. Maybe its the way it trivializes death. Maybe its the way it glorifies personal acheivement over team achievement.

I would prefer no PvP to that trivial mini-game style PvP. Also, being a collectible card game junkie, I would prefer a well integrated CCG as a means of player competition over traditional PvP. I'm thinking something along the lines of the CCG in KOTOR, but with the strategic depth of MtG.

EQ2 has what you're looking for.  I tried it out a bit, and the Legends of Norrath card game, which you can play against folks while you are playing EQ2, is pretty solid if you actually take a little time to learn how to play.

Thats how ALL of the content is organized.  Grouping can be set up as auto or (if you are like me) for you to approve it every time (because PUGs suck).  There isn't a whole lot of typing going on outsize of zone spam (turn it off & save your sanity) primarily because it is a full time job for both hands to fight your ship, this is why voice would be great. 


For everybody else, what ship are you going with tomorrow?  I liked the escort however its kinda 1-dimensional. I've been thinking science -would like the take of those who are using that ship now. 

You'd think they'd have voice at the start these days.  Heck, even EQ2 and DDO are voice enabled.  Must be a licensing issue.

[This Weekend's Down Time]

I'm having too much fun giving EQ2 a spin again with the Wanderers, but I thought I'd ask -- is STO any good?  It's hard for me to tell reading the posts.  I barely made it a month in CO, and Aion lasted about 2 before the grind got to me, so I'm a bit reluctant to buy into another new MMORPG.  Plus, EQ2 is a lot of fun and has significant depth no new MMORPG will have.

If you're not a "forgiving" player, I'd consider keeping away at least for a month or two in hopes they'll find a way to stabilize the servers. Fundamentally, I thoroughly enjoy the game.

If one wants "Everquest with space ships" or "WoW with Away Teams," then I think one is only setting oneself up for disappointment just like folks wanting "Eve Online with the ST ip," Bridge Commander MMO or Freelancer with Starships.  If one liked how City of Heroes door-mission-instances worked, one might like this.

Most of my complaints are simply about stability and lingering bugs...

On THAT note, the executive producer finally chimed in about the weekend's troubles:
This Weekend's Down Time
http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?p=1852789#post1852789

We had some issues this weekend that brought the servers down a couple times. This was due, in large part, to lots of people claiming items from the C-Store and an unrelated bug on the back-end. We've been working all weekend to sort these issues out and we should have some fixes rolled out later today.

We're continuing to work on server performance and stability, too. We're constantly squeezing more and more out of every little bit of processor power we have.

These fixes will go a long way in better preparing us for the inevitable rush tomorrow and this coming weekend. Thanks for bearing with us during this time.

I know this weekend was rough, but be sure that the team here at Cryptic is entirely focused on getting any issue we find resolved and fixed as soon as possible.

Thanks again for your patience.

That's nice but imho he probably should've said something along these lines about this time yesterday, or Saturday even.

Hmm.  Well, I actually did like the instanced door missions in CoH.  Is that how a lot of the group content is organized?

I'm having too much fun giving EQ2 a spin again with the Wanderers, but I thought I'd ask -- is STO any good?  It's hard for me to tell reading the posts.  I barely made it a month in CO, and Aion lasted about 2 before the grind got to me, so I'm a bit reluctant to buy into another new MMORPG.  Plus, EQ2 is a lot of fun and has significant depth no new MMORPG will have.

Sorry to hear you're having problems.  I've never had any problems with SOE, and I've always been able to cancel my various subscriptions online without any difficulty.

This seems kind of silly, but I've been trying to figure out how to set-up Steam to install games on my storage drive but I can't figure out where those settings are in Steam.  Anybody know?

Torn on what to buy.  So many good deals.

Left For Dead 2: 33.49
Fallout 3 GOTY (got it for Xbox, but thinking of getting it on my laptop):37.49
Borderlands: 33.49
Batman Arkham Asylum: 33.49
King's Bounty: Gold Edition: 30.14

What should I get?  =)


Still waiting for a deal on Mass Effect so I can complete it on my computer for ME2, but I'm not looking forward to all those planet explorations in the moon buggy again.  That part got old fast.

I'm all game for this and have everything installed.  Just waiting to resubscribe, which I plan to do shortly.

Interesting idea.  One of several reasons I did not renew Aion recently was because many people in my guild outleveled me.  Our "leader" power leveled himself to 50 while the next closest members were not even level 40 yet!?  I played EQ2 back in mid '06 and early '07 on Oasis.  I'd consider joining you guys but it looks like I'd have to create a new account to get the 60 days as part of the $20 deal.  Do I need to create a Wanderers account to see the thread there?  The link takes me to the login screen.

Edit - according to an EQ2 forum post Antonia Bayle is an RP server.  How heavily do you see that being enforced in the guild?

One wonderful thing about EQ2 is the mentoring system.  It allows any other character to delevel to your level and experience content at that level.  Makes it so you can always group with people.  Also, the ability to select exactly what balance of AA experience versus adventuring experience exists is also great.  You can choose to stop getting adventuring experience when you adventure with someone catching up, yet continue to get AA experience instead.  Really good stuff.

As an aside, in case you didn't know, unlike in WOW, good, neutral, and evil characters can all group together.  It just affects your city alignments and what towns you can go to.  Once you have a guild house it's largely not that relevant or much of an inconvenience.

Well, the video is great.  Too bad the game is really only a shell of that right now.  I know it's vision of the future, but many of these features would have been nice at release, and by the time they add them you kind of wonder what player-base will be able to take advantage of them.  As most people still playing seem to be nearing maximum level, it seems a bit odd to pack in so much new content across the board.

Have fun with it all and let us know how it turns out. EQ2 is one of those MMOs I pop back onto every so often actually. It's old by today's standards, but there's still a ton of great game inside.

The funny thing is that although it's old, it still is ahead of its time with many of its features, such as mentoring for one, and the flexibility of its AA and experience lines and how you can adjust it on the fly, for another.  The graphics aren't even really that bad, although games like Aion clearly surpass it.

Hmm..this sounds kind of interesting.  I've been looking for a reason to get back into EQ2, and this could be one way.  When is everyone starting and what server?  Most of my characters are on Lucan D'Lere.

I feel silly, but how do you access the console?  Now that the Steam verison will have access I'm going to try it out.

Hopefully the patch fixes the AA problem I have where the game reboots whenever I try to turn AA on and its deselected once its up and running again.

I imagine maybe some sort of DDO type of thing with plenty of story based instances.  But I'm not a fan of instancing. 

DDO was pretty solid on story.  The one thing that really doomed it for most people is that after you run through the dungeon once, the thrill is gone because most of the tactics that make it so interesting are out the window.  Example -- traps are all in the same place, so you see people just telling the rogue -- look here!  DDO's instances are not really designed like WoW or other raid dungeons, where the main strategy is to determine how to take down the bosses and you are looking for certain loot to drop. It also doesn't really have any PvP to speak of.  If they had a way to generate a somewhat RANDOM dungeon (at least trap placement and such) each time you ran at least some quests, DDO would really be a cut above.

There is still an opening for a game to take some of the best features of the MMORPGs out there and get them into one game.

Here are just a few thoughts from some MMORPGs that are still fresh in my mind.  I'm sure someone else can add to it.

EQ2-  Mentoring, stories and lore, heritage questlines, Raids, appearance armor slots, group content; house decorations and achievements, talents.
WoW- Lore, Presentation, Map and "seamlessness" of the world, Mix of PvP, Raids, mounts, group instances with defined bosses, talent system.
Vanguard- boats, housing.
Warhammer- Public quests, way it brings groups together was fairly easy wiht open groups showing up on screen, PvP open region with quests.
Fallen Earth- Crafting system, interesting mount system.
DDO- Quest sharing, dungeons with traps rogues need to disable.
Aion- Flying, graphics, PvP open region with quests.

Just some ideas.

Falchion, was wondering what happened to you (my character is Sphinx).  I'm planning to get back and play some, but Dragon Age may take some of my time away.  Plus I'm waiting for the cost of "Curse of Roots" to come down to sane levels.

Yip I'm back steady.  I do have Dragon Age coming, but I'll still be logging in nightly to Aion.  I see there're a few of us still logging in, but all at different times.  I think Falc moved to another guild.  I suggest we find out what that legion was and move with him ... if it's a decent, alive legion!  I put in several hours last night, I just find Aion very therapeutic. There's kind of a routine I've got going, as a almost 24 temp, I really have no real fear of dying soloing quests, gathering etc.  I like that.  I like the combat, the feel and look of the game, and the abundance of quests and things to do.  So I'm sticking with it.  As MMORPGs tend to pay you back by slow, steady progress and consistent logging in I'll try to do that.    They aren't games you can "save" and come back to in a month as easily as an SRPG.

Sounds like a plan.  And as I'm waiting for Dragon Age to get patches so the random crashing on Vista 64 will stop, I should have some more time to play Aion.

Sadly, I've been getting some random crashes in Windows Vista 64-bit (essentially I get a "Dragon Age has stopped responding" error or something similar and it closes the program.  Looks like lots of people are experiencing random crashes in 64 bit versions of the various Windows operating systems.

Falchion, was wondering what happened to you (my character is Sphinx).  I'm planning to get back and play some, but Dragon Age may take some of my time away.  Plus I'm waiting for the cost of "Curse of Roots" to come down to sane levels.

[AVG]

It doesn't seem to like AVG in particular for some reason, I had no problems getting it downloaded from Impulse at almost 2MB/s with Avast running.

Hehe.  And I used to use Avast until it started having issues with another game I was running.  Maybe it IS time to try antiviri -- anyone have a link to where to download it?   

I peaked at 1.5 MB/S or so once AVG was gone.  That's about the limit to what I can generally expect through Time Warner.

I'm about ready to give up.  Downloaded the file again this morning.  Let it finish, clicked install after the verify finished ok.  It started downloading again instead.  So I'm now downloading the 8GB file for the third time.  With two bad installs.  Thanks Impulse...

Eric, I got the Impulse version to finally start working this morning, although I haven't had anytime to play.  I had to totally uninstall my AVG virus checker -- simply disabling it was not enough.  In fact, after I uninstalled it, my download speeds through Impulse shot up to 1.2 MB/S from a measly 300 KB/S.  So, it does not like virus checking programs, and it is likely picky with some other installed software running in the background (this was also confirmed by a Stardock support specialist on one of the Stardock forum threads).

Of course, once I got it downloaded, the story was not over.  I still had to do the fix that I believe Ceekay posted a link to a page or so back in the thread.  I had to download the Zoombie file, run it, and then I manually clicked on and ran the Dragon Age updater file in that directory.  I left it open in the background, and then finally when I was in game the DLC suddenly appeared and started downloading.  Maybe they've fixed that by now, but all in all, I think I earned back in time any money I may have saved through Impulse.

Yeah it's downloading the whole thing.  After the verification process it gives me the error.  I am now trying to disable AVG as I let it run overnight.  After reading through tons of posts on Stardock I stumbled across a post by a Stardock CS person saying AVG and Impulse don't run too well together.  I hope this solves it, but what a headache.  Plus, based on the forums I've been looking at, a whole HOST of problems still potentially face me after I get the stupid file downloaded.  Most people are having problems AFTER they download the file! :-/