Doctor

Fundamental problem: Trade XP for trade goods is based on profit. Increasing the profit to a level where XP makes sense causes trade routes to create millions of credits per hour, eclipsing any other form of income generation. Trade XP from combat is superior to trade routes all the way to TL 50, assuming you have alts that are good at combat (PW/TW or multiple combat chars). Gating path 1: Make trade XP, for trade items >= lvl 6, scale with the item level. The core idea being that from TL 25 to TL 45 you would only increase the credits/hr from ~180k to ~360k (because trade runs can be multiboxed and combat doesn't scale the same way, so 6 * 360 = 2.1m/hr, which is 1/2 what combat can earn). but letting the trade level of the item make up for the slack in XP gain. This would be a new line of trade items starting at level 6 -> 9 (if needed). The other gate on this would be the sheer cost of the items. The level 6 items would cost around 1 million credits each, and only turn a 1100 or so credit profit, but they would offer nearly double the XP of the current IS->61 trade route (and that is why the item level would have to factor in at and above lvl 6). Level 7 trade items would be something that would kick in around TL 35, and cost 2 million each. (the actual cost would be a calculation of how long it would take to go from TL25-35 doing just trade runs, and the total profit expected during that time; the idea being you roll all your profits into affording the next best tier). Same patter for level 8 and 9 goods. It's also possible to just make the trade vendors refuse to speak to you unless you have TL35. Maybe make it part of a questline where you are 'trusted' to carry these expensive and rare goods. I'm ALL FOR making this something that has to be earned, rather than having brand newbies power leveling with it. Gating path 2: Give tradesmen a new ability, or line of devices, similar to the Polar Express, where they can carry 2, 3, 4, maybe up to 9 deep ONLY for trade goods. Or maybe make it a 7 level skill: TL0 / lvl 1: Allows you to carry 2 trade items per cargo slot in all slots. TL15 / lvl 2: Allows you to carry 3 trade items per cargo slot in all slots. TL25 / lvl 3: Allows you to carry 4 trade items per cargo slot in all slots. Also allows ores to stack to 600 instead of 300. TL35 / lvl 4: Allows you to carry 6 trade items per cargo slot in all slots. Allows ores to stack to 900. TL45 / lvl 5: Allows you to carry 9 trade items per cargo slot in all slots. Ores stack to 1200. Ammo can stack to 3x its normal stack size. At 9 stacks, the IS->61 route would print 1.6 million/hr, which is around 1/3 what a combat class can make using Shield Nova to farm low level mobs. So, from an income generation standpoint, it is not a big problem. Closing thoughts: Even if the skill only ever affected trade goods, that'd be fine. My overall goal is...frankly, until TL 25, it makes *way* more sense to level trade with a high level combat group (by looting their drops) than trade runs. Combat makes around 4-5 million credits/hr, trade makes 180,000. Combat can get you TL 21->25 in 1 hour, trade runs take almost 5 hours to do the same thing. I just want tradesmen to actually be masters of trading. And their cargo holds to be truly best-in-class. I want a tradesman to be able to level by trading in the same way a combat group can. And keep in mind, combat gets you trade and combat XP both, as well as more credits than trade runs. The only thing combat would be slower at is actual combat XP.

The other thread wasn't the right place to say it, but what I have is a C++ version of the server. I remember it being 2009 when I was playing and had the server source. But that was also long enough ago that who knows. Maybe I'm crazy. What I have is a full source code and DB copy. I could run an active multiplayer server (granted, nowhere near as complete as what yall have) right now. Well, if I felt like reinstalling visual studio. It's got tons of bugs, and doesn't stay up anywhere near as long as your current server. This is not me bragging or being abrasive. I am simply laying out facts. You're one guy. You have a life. I'd hate having to support this game 24x7 too; I've been on-call a lot, I hated it. What was being offered, fundamentally, was yet another door people could knock on when you were off doing life stuff. Maybe I would be in a place to fix it while you were away. I get it, you get abused constantly. I was not being mean. Here (was) net7.cpp // Net7.cpp #include "Net7.h" #include "ServerManager.h" #include "UDPConnection.h" //DIMA: I don't think these are needed #define MASTER_INSTANCE_MUTEX_NAME "Net7 Master Server Instance Mutex" #define SECTOR_INSTANCE_MUTEX_NAME "Net7 Sector Server port %d Instance Mutex" #pragma comment(lib, "wsock32.lib") #pragma comment(lib, "libmySQL.lib") #pragma comment(lib, "ssleay32.lib") #pragma comment(lib, "libeay32.lib") #pragma comment(lib, "lua.lib") #pragma comment(lib, "luabind.lib") char g_MySQL_User[MAX_PATH]; char g_MySQL_Pass[MAX_PATH]; char g_MySQL_Host[MAX_PATH]; char g_Galaxy_Name[MAX_PATH]; int g_DASE = 0; char g_LogFilename[MAX_PATH]; char g_InternalIP[MAX_PATH]; char g_DomainName[MAX_PATH]; unsigned long g_StartTick; long g_Sector_Start = 973; long g_Max_Space_Sector = 9000; //2210; bool g_Debug = false; bool g_ServerShutdown = false; // Terminated the global Server ServerManager * g_ServerMgr = 0; GMemoryHandler * g_GlobMemMgr = 0; PlayerManager * g_PlayerMgr = 0; StringManager * g_StringMgr = 0; ItemBaseManager * g_ItemBaseMgr = 0; AccountManager * g_AccountMgr = 0; SaveManager * g_SaveMgr = 0; void Usage() { printf("Net7 Usage:\n\n"); printf("to run the main server:\n"); printf(" Net7 /MASTER /ADDRESS:(ip address)\n\n"); printf("to run a sector server:\n"); printf(" Net7 /PORT:3500 /ADDRESS:(ip address) /MAX_SECTORS:(num sectors) /ALTSECTORS\n\n"); } int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { // Let the user know when this was compiled for reference purposes printf("Net7: Built on %s, at %s\n\n",__DATE__, __TIME__); g_StartTick = GetTickCount(); bool standalone = false; bool master_server = false; bool sector_server = false; long port = SECTOR_SERVER_PORT; char address[32]; char *domain = ""; char *max_sectors_str = new char[4]; char *server_name; char mutex_name[80]; //sprintf(max_sectors_str, "10"); //sprintf(max_sectors_str, "74"); sprintf(max_sectors_str,"300"); g_MySQL_User[0] = 0; g_MySQL_Pass[0] = 0; g_Galaxy_Name[0] = 0; g_DASE = false; srand((unsigned)GetNet7TickCount()); FILE *f = fopen(CONFIG_FILE, "r"); if (f) { fseek(f, 0, SEEK_END); long file_size = ftell(f); fseek(f, 0, SEEK_SET); char *data = new char[file_size + 1]; if (data) { char *Info; char *VarName; long size = fread(data, 1, file_size, f); data[size] = 0; VarName = strtok(data, "="); Info = strtok(NULL, "\n"); do { if (!_strcmpi(VarName, "domain")) { strcpy(g_DomainName, Info); } if (!_strcmpi(VarName, "internal_ip")) { strcpy(g_InternalIP, Info); } if (!_strcmpi(VarName, "mysql_user")) { strcpy(g_MySQL_User, Info); } if (!_strcmpi(VarName, "mysql_pass")) { strcpy(g_MySQL_Pass, Info); } if (!_strcmpi(VarName, "mysql_host")) { strcpy(g_MySQL_Host, Info); } if (!_strcmpi(VarName, "galaxy_name")) { strcpy(g_Galaxy_Name, Info); } if (!_strcmpi(VarName, "use_dase")) { g_DASE = atoi(Info); } VarName = strtok(NULL, "="); Info = strtok(NULL, "\n"); } while(Info != NULL); delete [] data; } fclose(f); } else { char filedata[128]; printf("Error opening %s\n", CONFIG_FILE); sprintf(g_DomainName, "local.net-7.org"); sprintf(filedata, "domain=local.net-7.org\nmysql_user=enb\nmysql_pass=enbserver\nmysql_host=localhost:3307\nmysql_db=net7\ngalaxy_name=Cassiopeia"); f = fopen(CONFIG_FILE, "w"); fwrite(filedata,1,strlen(filedata),f); fclose(f); } // if no galaxy name set one! if (g_Galaxy_Name[0] == 0) strcpy(g_Galaxy_Name, "Cassiopeia"); #ifdef SQL_ENABLE printf("MySQL: Host: %s, User: %s\n", g_MySQL_Host, g_MySQL_User); #endif // No arguments indicate a standalone server via localhost for (int i = 1; i < argc; i++) { if ((strncmp(argv[i], "/DOMAIN:", 8) == 0)) { domain = argv[i] + 8; } else if ((strncmp(argv[i], "/MASTER", 7) == 0) && !master_server) { master_server = true; server_name = "Master Server"; strcpy(mutex_name, MASTER_INSTANCE_MUTEX_NAME); sprintf(g_LogFilename, "%sNet7_server", SERVER_LOGS_PATH); LogMessage("Net7 Master Server (Auth:%d, Global:%d, Master:%d)\n", SSL_PORT, GLOBAL_SERVER_PORT, MASTER_SERVER_PORT); } else if ((strncmp(argv[i], "/PORT:", 6) == 0) && !sector_server) { sector_server = true; port = atoi(argv[i] + 6); sprintf(mutex_name, SECTOR_INSTANCE_MUTEX_NAME, port); server_name = "Sector Server"; sprintf(g_LogFilename, "%ssector_server_port_%d", SERVER_LOGS_PATH, port); LogMessage("Net7 Sector Server (Port %d)\n", port); } else if ((strncmp(argv[i], "/MAX_SECTORS:", 13) == 0) && sector_server) { max_sectors_str = argv[i] + 13; g_Max_Space_Sector = 4595; } else if (strncmp(argv[i], "/ALTSECTORS",11) == 0) { g_Sector_Start = 1910; g_Max_Space_Sector = 4595; } else if (strncmp(argv[i], "/ALLSECTORS",11) == 0) { g_Sector_Start = 973; g_Max_Space_Sector = 4595; sprintf(max_sectors_str, "300"); printf("ALL SECTORS flag\n"); } else if (strncmp(argv[i], "/STARTSECTOR:",13) == 0) { g_Sector_Start = atoi(argv[i]+13); printf("Starting at Sector %d\n", g_Sector_Start); } else if (strncmp(argv[i], "/DEBUG", 6) == 0) { g_Debug = true; printf("DEBUG flag\n"); } else { printf("Unrecognized switch: '%s'\n", argv[i]); Usage(); return(1); } } printf("Domain set to: %s\n", g_DomainName); #ifdef WIN32 // Winsock startup WSADATA wsaData = {NULL}; WSAStartup(MAKEWORD(2, 2), &wsaData); #endif if (strlen(domain)>0) strcpy(g_DomainName, domain); struct hostent * host = gethostbyname(g_DomainName); if (!host) { int err = WSAGetLastError(); printf("Unable to resolve IP address for %s (error=%d)\n", g_DomainName, err); return(1); } unsigned char *ip = (unsigned char *) host->h_addr; sprintf(address, "%d.%d.%d.%d", ip[0], ip[1], ip[2], ip[3]); if (!master_server && !sector_server) { sprintf(g_LogFilename, "%sNet7_server", SERVER_LOGS_PATH); LogMessage("Net7 Standalone Server (Auth:%d, Global:%d, Master:%d \n\tMaxSectors: %s Version: %d.%d-%s%s Build %d)\n", SSL_PORT, GLOBAL_SERVER_PORT, MASTER_SERVER_PORT, max_sectors_str, UPPER_VER, LOWER_VER, VER_TYPE, SQL_ACCOUNT_STRING, BUILD_VER); standalone = true; LogMessage("Net7 IP addr = %s\n", address); } if (master_server && sector_server) { printf("Can't combine /MASTER and /PORT switches\n"); Usage(); return(1); } unsigned long ip_address_internal = inet_addr(g_InternalIP); unsigned long ip_address = inet_addr(address); long max_sectors = atoi(max_sectors_str); if ((port < 3500) || (port > 32767)) { printf("Invalid /PORT specified for Sector Server\n"); return(1); } if ((max_sectors < 1) || (max_sectors > 300)) { printf("Invalid /MAX_SECTORS specified for Sector Server\n"); return(1); } #ifdef WIN32 // First, make sure we only have one instance of the Global Server running HANDLE instance_mutex = ::CreateMutex(NULL, TRUE, mutex_name); if (instance_mutex == INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE) { ::MessageBox(NULL, "Error creating instance mutex", "Net7", MB_ICONERROR); return(1); } // if we did not create this mutex then .. another instance // is already running if (::GetLastError() == ERROR_ALREADY_EXISTS) { // close the mutex ::CloseHandle(instance_mutex); ::MessageBox(NULL, "Another instance of the Net-7 Server is already running", "Net7", MB_ICONERROR); return(1); } #endif // Delete the previous log file and start a new one //DeleteFile(g_LogFilename); ServerManager server_mgr(master_server, ip_address, (short) port, (short) max_sectors, standalone, ip_address_internal); server_mgr.SetPlayerMgrGlobalMemoryHandler(); //MVAS Login UDP connection - needs to be done after global memory manager setup. UDP_Connection MVASauth(MVAS_LOGIN_PORT, &server_mgr, CONNECTION_TYPE_MVAS_TO_PROXY); server_mgr.SetUDPConnection(&MVASauth); MVASauth.SetServerManager(&server_mgr); server_mgr.RunServer(); #ifdef WIN32 // Winsock cleanup WSACleanup(); #endif #ifdef WIN32 ::CloseHandle(instance_mutex); #endif return 0; } unsigned long GetNet7TickCount() { return (GetTickCount() - g_StartTick); } // Functions added for Linux port #ifndef WIN32 unsigned long GetCurrentDirectory(unsigned long size, char *path) { if (getcwd(path, size) < 0) { return 0; } return (strlen(path)); } int SetCurrentDirectory(const char *path) { if (chdir(path) < 0) { return 0; } return 1; } void Sleep(unsigned long dwMilliseconds) { usleep((unsigned int) dwMilliseconds * 1000); } bool DeleteFile(const char *file) { return (!remove(file)); } long GetTickCount() { timeval tv; gettimeofday(&tv, 0); return (tv.tv_sec * 1000) + (tv.tv_usec / 1000); } #endif

I'm retired, and if being a 'game dev' means I can whip the hamsters into working again in < 9 hours, so be it. I used to run my own local copy of the EMU back in 2009 when the source code wasn't closed. I doubt most of that code is still in use, but regardless...I know how it *used* to work. It's still down, btw.

Why I feel like reporting these is a waste of time: 1. 'Real issue, specifically the tool tip is wrong.' -> outcome from my point of view: Devs will always side with whatever makes life harder for you. When you find a bug, they will pick the most soul-crushing outcome. 2. No bug -- report wasted. Outcome: Every time I find a lvl 9 ore I can continue to expect half of them to be lvl 8s. Finding level 9s stop being special and becomes something bland because there is no way to count on anything good coming from any source it's supposed to. Said another way, you gave me a carrot on a stick, and then took away the carrot, and wonder why I have no desire to do anything. 3. Legit bug! Yay! 4. Based on 1 and 2, why? So you could take something away that's actually useful? I'd like the game fixed as much as you, but I want it fun too. Here, I'll give you a carrot on a stick too, make a waterloo V, equip it, buff yourself, then power down. Have fun. 5. 'No bug. We'll use them later...maybe.' Outcome: same problem as the ore example above. I see something and say "Oh goodie, a stick!" and then find out there's no carrot. It doesn't make me find something else, it makes me hate you for lacking good game design. When was the last time you played a game where doors opened into giant middle fingers or guns killed you instead of your enemies and then the game laughed at you for daring to think mechanics were going to work as they do in literally every other video game? Or how about the last time you picked up a paperback book and it was written in 4 point font. Or in Comic Sans. Or with rainbow text. These conventions exist for a reason. I've seen the dev tools. If your tools cannot let you write down where it is now and then put it back, improve them, because that shit is totally possible. 6. Bug...maybe. So in the end, 2 things get fixed. 4 things remain the same. By helping you I force everyone, myself included, to encourage you to continue having bad game design as an argument against fixing things. *sigh* This is why I feel like I'm wasting my time. I find bugs for a living. Literally my actual fucking big-boy job is finding bugs in multi-million dollar equipment. I come here to relax. I find the same attitudes I find at work. "It's not our problem, it is *their* problem." "Ok, we'll fix it by changing the spec!" "That's not a bug, it's working as intended...nevermind what the rest of the industry/IEEE/T10/etc say! We r teh spekle snowflak!" It's exhausting. I chase these assholes down at work so your clouds and cell phones keep working. I come here and I have no big stick to smack you with because I am not a critical part of your organization. I left once for a year, I guess it's time for another hiatus. It's not good for you or me that I get this stressed out over a game whose client is so old it's basically held together with bubble gum and hope at this point. >.<

Also, since the cloaking one is so easy to prove...have a video!

JE Cloak: Nope. Fly at warp with a lvl 3 or 4 reactor, activate rank 6 cloak, watch a huge chunk of your reactor disappear and stay gone. I don't demand lvl 9 (or any other level) be chock full of certain ores. But I do think it is really dumb that a level 9 roid only contains lvl 8 ores and 0 lvl 9 ores. This happens very frequently, and I don't believe that every.single.field I've found (including several I didn't put on the wiki as a control group) are all being cherry picked. I have never ranked up the powerdown skill above rank 1. The behavior can be recreated with a new character (lvl 0 -- or whatever lvl you are when you get Powerdown), assuming you can get appropriate buffs on the character. I opened a bug about the job terminals as well and was told it was working as intended. But it makes no sense to have job terminals with no jobs. Just remove the terminal. *sigh* Just use another comp then. Digiapogee, Anthor, CE3K, just...use something that instantly tells people 'not store bought'. Don't mess up trends that exist in the entire rest of the game purely because you want something to be difficult to build. It's like me taking your personal car and swapping the positions of the fuel fill hole and oil dipstick. It makes no sense, and literally every person on the planet hates your special snowflake of a car. Same principle.

Which of these are bugs and which are 'working as intended'. At best we'll agree to disagree on 'working as intended'. JE Cloak lvl 6 consumes 250 power on activation. Tooltip says it should consume 0. Ima go ahead and assume lvl 7 consumes 500 power, because, ya know, standardized code? Level 9 asteroids (and all other levels > 1) sometimes (frequently) containing 0 lvl 9 ores, only lower level ones. IE: lvl 5 roid has only lvl 3/4 ores. Lvl 3 roid only has 1/2, etc. Level 9 hulks have less (10-30) Debris than their lvl 8 counterparts (45-55). This is not offset by Wrecked Slag or any other loot. PS Powerdown skill allowing recharge of shields/reactor despite being rank 1 (0 recharge allowed). Additionally, reactor and shield can be drained under certain circumstances as well by the same issue. Job terminals in star bases that have no jobs. (Why have a job terminal then? I know you can put them in and take them out. Why not just take out the ones that don't list any jobs?) Evolver PrimerMax 3000 is not sold by any vendors, despite having Evolver in the name and literally all other Evolver parts being vendor-sold. I've re-checked all of these since the patch. They are all still persistent.

1% difference on quality loses me 15.8 recharge?! I'm hoping it's a display glitch...*goes outside to test* 200%: 3366 recharged in 53.38 seconds 199%: 3366 recharged in 53.38 seconds *phew* ok. Just a display bug. Scared me for a minute there.

Ah E&B emulator. Where we ressurect an old game, keeping the flaws everyone agreed it had in live, so we can sit on a forum and bitch about pixels for four pages. Why? Because the devs want epic loot to be rare. Can we all stop and laugh at the insanity of this debate? This fighting is over a problem that exists only because it is allowed to continue existing. The players are not to blame for a problem they did not create and do not maintain. Treaties and agreements have their place, but the fact that people have heartburn over this is not the players' fault.   This raid has been here for years. I think any legitimate claim to the loot needing to still be rare 3+ years on is...long since dead. Feel free to continue feeling bitter, but...at least admit I'm correct.

I wrote a thing to deal with the nested dependencies that define agrippa (seriously, I don't want to think about how many Vodka I need to build 15 Flechettes, 3 reactors, and a couple shields/devices, plus other turn ins and whatever else!) Or, in the case of Stage III Encryptions, I don't want to have to figure out how many bits I need to make X SOOAs, which means X Hull Mesh, and Collegia Auth bits. Bleh!   http://net-7.org/wiki/index.php?title=Agrippa_Material_Requirement_Script<--so there's my work. Feel free to add missing recipies, such as Flechette Beta/Gamma.

Thanks.

Can anyone confirm/deny that once you've completed stage 1 Agrippa, stages 2/3 can be started/completed without issue with HU135/OL150? Or is there still an optimal time to do stage 2/3 prior to hitting 150?

Aren't hardpoints typically defined in the game clients, not by the servers?

Ah! Hello other super-active wiki member person! Good to know your forum name. Every time I logged in to use my admin rights they were gone. :p I was going to clean up some dangling pages (redirects that shouldn't exist). That said, I agree with you. One admin would barely need to lift a finger to keep tabs on what is happening. The activity log I posted shows just how few people really contribute. :p

Actually Kingdud still logs in and makes sure everything is sane. He promoted Croddam and I to admins since we are the two who are the most active, then someone on the dev team took away our admin rights on the database side (left no logs in wiki user rights log, which means someone with database access flipped some bits, or rolled back a database snapshot). So I mean, I understand he went AWOL and isn't a wonderful person to the other devs, but...overtkill, to my knowledge, has never made a single commit to the wiki (if he has, what username?) Failing that, pick someone who actually contributes to the thing. :P   edit: Here's the active user's list for the wiki   http://net-7.org/wiki/index.php?title=Special%3AActiveUsers   (I re-ordered the list below to be in order of number)     Croddam  [192 actions in the last 30 days]     Doctor [52 actions in the last 30 days]     Hexersup [6 actions in the last 30 days]     Kingdud [3 actions in the last 30 days] (blocked)     Prrekoorb [2 actions in the last 30 days]     Wxguesser26 [2 actions in the last 30 days]     Cantrec [1 action in the last 30 days]     Shaddex [1 action in the last 30 days]     FireRibs [1 action in the last 30 days]

The wiki has a list of farming spots, though none of them are above lvl 30 or so. High level players feel free to contribute!

http://net-7.org/wiki/index.php?title=Crossbow_II http://net-7.org/wiki/index.php?title=Crossbow_V   Apparently no one has put in where the 3 and 4 crossbows drop. :(

There's also a wiki for this stuff. Net-7.org/wiki   Personally, I didn't find enb.ca that useful. The info was true during live, but the devs have diverged from that where they felt like it.

Smedley...Oh, the Planetside 2 guy. Well then.   So...no one has mentioned EVE in this. It is touted as a sandbox, but the funny thing is, the content defines the sandbox. The same (to a much lesser degree) is true in Planetside. "Sovreignty mechanics now work this way." and so the regions of space worth living in (in EVE) change, and wars are fought, industry is fueled, etc. The sandbox occurs because the mechanics, that is...the content, of the game changes to bring about entropy. They leave it to the players to figure out what to do with that entropy. PS2 changes in that weapons are added or rebalanced, but let's be fair, PS2 is just something you play to shoot people. It's apples an space ships comparion.   As for WoW, as far as content driven MMOs go it is king in the western world. Lineage II, with the Korean factor added in, was the nearest neighbor. But content driven MMOs *are* unsustainable. I've spent more time NOT playing WoW than I did playing it. I got MoP for $7 and 'beat' it in 2 months. I wanted to know the storyline of the pandas, and it took me about 6 weeks to do that. I ran every question in the expansion, leveled up a few different characters to max, got a bit of raid gear so I could see all the raids in the game...and then I was done.   WoW had 12 million subs *very* briefly during WOTLK, arguably their best expansion pack. http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-1.png <--right now they have about 8 million subs, which is very near the number of subs during Vanilla. Having played so intermittently over the years of WoW I have watched the playerbase change. I used to find common ground with my fellow players, people motivated to see new stuff and try new things. Now...99% of the people who play do it to be social. "Well it *is* an MMO!" Right, but not everyone gets along with everyone else.   I only kept my sub going for 2 months because while they have dummed down the mechanics of the game a lot, they did what they have done with Starcraft and most other blizzard games: "Easy to learn, difficult to master." Say what you want, but run your WoW character through simulationcraft, then compare your own log parses and if you aren't within 3% of the DPS simulation craft says your gear can output...congratulations! You are exactly average at WoW! The top 10 guilds? All of their players are within a few % of what their gear is theoretically capable of. Most WoW players only utilize about 50-70% of the capability of their gear. This is the very definition of difficult to master.   To that end, I was average, but above the common average. I didn't find it fun to go on drunken raids, wipe all night because people couldn't focus, etc. I am objective based, so the concept of standing in Orgrimmar and doing nothing is an anathema to me.   All these words to say...yes. MMOs that are content driven are untenable. The most successful models are the sandboxes where the content drives the activities of the sandbox by giving the sandbox a reason to change. Want that in E&B terms?   What if trade runs weren't static, and the level 1 items everyone ignores in Earth Station were worth 4000 credits in Trader's Fort, because no one ever ran the item there? What if raiding the red dragon base in Aragoth Prime removed some number of rare spawns (tatsu, chang, etc) and also cut in half the number of Red Dragon seen in the game? What if activating the Cooper Gate doubled the number of Tengu, and their wander ranges, every time, on a one week cooldown? What if asteroid fields weren't static (fields frequently mined out became lower level, low level fields rarely mined out became high level fields, or the rarely mined fields got larger, or respawned faster {might be easier to just keep a counter and insta-spawn new roids when old ones are mined via a counter}, or closer together (gravity effect))? With the raid content, you'd need EVE style PvP to allow factions to fight over the right to hurt other's playstyles, which E&B wasn't about. But the economic sandboxes (ore, trade) would be doable. Either way, those examples stand to show you that "this is the fundamental change in thinking about what defines content if you want to have a sandbox game instead of a content-driven game."   Sandboxes still need sand, and they also need goals for non-creative players, like me, to imagine as attainable with the sand in the box. These are the roles of a game dev in a sandbox game.   Actually...wait. No. You wouldn't need PvP, use the economic systems to allow players to counteract the actions of the raiders. IE: Red Dragon base was destroyed, but if 1,000,000 units of construction materials from any trade vendor that sells them are brought to Chernavog Station then the RD effects will cease to impact the playerbase at large. {bad specific example, but do you see the theory?}  

On live, I remember being able to run Shield Nova and Shield Sap at the same time on my PW. SN being a 'non-blocking' skill. I can't do this on my PW anymore. Nor can my PP recharge shields while shield nova-ing. I guessed this was because someone said/assumed/believed that being able to recharge shields while running shield nova was OP, but am I right? If it is a bug, I'd love to use shield nova and shield sap together, if it isn't...well..*sigh*

I know of two (three, technically) ways to do this: WindowsBorderlessGaming (it's a .exe file I found...I think on the steam forums) Autohotkey/Hotkeynet can both move windows around. The code for that, in autohotkey, is something like: ;Ctrl + Shift + 6 = move window to monitor 2 ^+6:: WinGet, Id, ID, A WinMove, ahk_id %Id%,,1920,0   The above will move the active window (at the time the hotkey is pressed) to (assuming they are 1920x1080 monitors) the second window.

C:\ProgramData\Westwood Studios\Earth and Beyond\Character and Starship Creator <--at least on Windows 7, that is where the Starship Creator stores your character files. They are inside the .dat files. The files are loaded, in order, by name. Meaning that if you want to only have to make a single character, but have that character show up in slot 5 instead of slot 1: Rename Avatar1.dat to Avatar5.dat Create 4 new files, call them "Avatar1.dat", "Avatar2.dat", etc and move Load up E&B, poof, you're Starship creator character will now magically appear in slot 5 instead of slot1.