jdfensty

Well, if someone's gotten one that recently, then that answers my question.  I guess it must be dropping.  It seems EXCEEDINGLY rare, though, for a Level 8 shield that's "pretty good" but still not as good as other more powerful/exotic devices that seem to drop easier.  

Nope, that's what I meant...must have killed the Bison 50x and never had anything other than the typical bio-parts and some missile ammo...I forget which, but something you can vendor-buy, not rare.   I know some drops are much more rare than others and it's stupid to compare them, but even so, that seems like a lot.  I killed the other spore miniboss there at Seeder 2 and got the ichor cannon after only about 5 tries, for example.   I don't think that bison drops that shield anymore.

Are we sure something's not broken?  Has anyone actually got one recently?   Because while I can't say 300 times, I think I can say without exaggeration I killed the bison 50 times in the last 3 weeks and also never saw one.  In that same time I managed to get 2 Taniwah's Prides and 2 Tatsu's Prides and only had to kill those dudes like 10 times for all 4.  I know you can't compare an L8 shield to and L4 and L5 device, so....uh, well, I don't know how to finish this sentence, because darn if I didn't just do exactly that.  :) But point is, yeah, I killed the Bison a crapload of times and also saw nothing.   I eventually just gave up and moved on.

The new patch did solve the problem in my XP SP3 VM.  Nicely done.  Thanks guys.

Same/similar issues here.     I have a Win7 SP1 x64 installation, where I occasionally open a Win XP SP3 x86 virtual machine.   Since the patch today, the Win 7 has continued to run the same as always, no noticeable difference.   The XP VM, which had no changes whatsoever to it other than the patch itself, I can't log in.   From watching Task Manager, I can see that the launcher is running, then the client.exe starts up, displays the anti-harassment policy.  When you click 'I Agree' the client.exe continues to run for about 30 seconds, then simply shuts down.  The launcher never comes back, and in the tray, the icon sticks on 'Login' and you cannot right-click and 'Terminate Client' though you can double-click and get the status window to pop up, so it's not frozen completely.   This is a throwaway VM so it has no antivirus, firewall, etc.  I could restore it back to before the patch, but I'm not going to bother because based on the other posts here I'm assuming something else is up from the patch....   JD

Wow, their datacenter (one of them anyway?) is just an hour away from here...we used to have our (my work, not "my") servers hosted down there actually.  Luckily they moved them to a mile away from me around the time I came to work here, so my middle of the night 'we need someone to go reboot' calls are not a 2 hour round trip....   This must be why I never get disconnected.   :blink:

Well, I haven't posted here in years, even tho I've peeked in now and then, other than a random reply a month or so ago.     But, long story short:  I just came across this 'cartoon' in a .PDF of the December 1969 issue of Playboy Magazine (yeah, yeah, I know...) and I actually had to stop, screenshot it, and come here and share. It seems like some Westwood designers also read that issue:     Not that I really feel the need to 'defend' myself, but, ok well I guess I do...   :)   I was just surfing through the new ebook uploads on a certain website (yar!) and saw a collection of every Playboy ever.  I'm only human, right?  Grabbed the first issue (historical interest only, really!) and also December 1969 as that's when I was born.   Honestly, the most interesting thing is all the retro-tech ads and car ads.  I didn't even think when I picked this issue, but of course it has the Christmas buying guide in it.  Disco balls and psychedelic lighting galore, or if that's not your thing - a Porsche 914 for $3500, or a 4-track reel to reel audio AND video recorder for $1100, take your pick!   As I said to my wife, "Honey, I won't even claim the old 'I only read it for the articles' with you, because I'm such a geek, I only read it for the ads...."

I've used both Dropbox and Google Drive, Google Drive is definitely better, 15G free, and you don't have to be a member to access files there, as you do (I think, anyway, when I used it) with Dropbox.   So basically with Dropbox if you put a file there and want your friend to get it, if you send them the link, they have to 'join' Dropbox.  I don't like to pimp online services to my friends, so I like Google Drive for that reason alone.  Factor in that it's much bigger free space, I don't see why it's not better.   (You don't need their app either, you can do it all via the website...the local app helps, but is not necessary, again, I think it might've been for Dropbox.)   JD  

Heya all. I have been playing a TE for the first time since live and have a suggestion for how the Hack Shields might work better. Currently, as far as I can determine, if you are successful at hacking shields you will take your target down to 50% shields from whatever it's at when you succeed. So it's great if you hit them at the start of combat, ok if you hit them a few rounds into combat, and pointless if you hack them at any point after you've blown off half their shields. So once you've hacked shields once, or blown off half their shields, this aspect of hacking is useless. Given that reactor hacking is also useless right now since AFAIK mobs don't actually have reactors, and device hacking also seems to have no effect, there's not much point in using hacking after you've hacked shields once or knocked down half thier shields. The only thing you might do is hack weapons offline. I can think of two things that would work better. One - have hacking just lop off half of whatever shields the mob has. Diminishing returns as you go, true, but still not useless. Even if he only has 10% shields left and you hack successfully you've got him at 5%. Two - have hacking actually take the shield offline, making any damage you do during the hack time go straight to hull damage. From reading the skill this is actually what I thought was going to happen anyway. It would be more "realistic" (insofar as that term makes any sense about a space fantasy game) as it would be like, say, Star Trek where they've hacked the command codes of the enemy and dropped their shields. (Can anyone say "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!!!!!!") If you got real lucky you could keep their sheilds down long enough to smash their hull completely. Or at the least when you finally blew away the shields there'd be some hull already gone. Something to consider anyway. JD

OK so I've always had this problem on my system ever since installing EnB. If I try to alt-tab back to Windows, the screen does not re-paint/refresh. By which I mean, even though I will now have the little-arrow pointer that shows me the desktop is actually active, what I see on my screen is a stillshot of whatever was happening when I alt-tabbed. I can alt-tab back to EnB fine. If I try it about 10 times it will finally work normally...maybe. Maybe it'll take 20 tries. It's very weird. But, I chalked it up to having a much higher end graphics card than existed back in the day and figured I was stuck with it. Yes I have the latest drivers, etc. It's an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260. ASked on chat numerous times nobody else ever had the issue that I know of. Figured it was just some NVIDIA thing since NVIDIA didn't even exist (kinda) in 2002. I did NOT have the problem on my spare box which had an old Celeron motherboard with onboard SiS graphics. I had to play it in 16bit mode, true, but all I did for dualboxing with that was use my JE to WH myself around, etc. No biggie. But that motherboard finally croaked over the weekend so I went into my parts-pit in the garage and found a AMD Sempron board and an AGP slot ATI Radeon 9550 card and got that up and running. And guess what - same problem. So now we have a Radeon chipset doing the same thing as the NVIDIA. And not a very high end card by any means, it's about what would have been the high end in 2002 probably. So has ANYONE else ever had this problem and found a fix for it?