That would be a plausible excuse IF they were actually doing the damage of one of the millions of regular torpedoes that have no problems being rendered.

Why don't we put it to a test? Everyone who's been affected by the invisitorp, post your video card. If it truly is, as you say, a "graphics card issue", then the range of affected players would be limited. If instead it encompasses a wide range of brands, series and chipsets as we have predicted, then this excuse is effectively debunked.

I'll start: nVidia GeForce GTX 570 1280MB GDDR5
Driver 296.10

The invisibility of the torpedoes would be just fine if they didn't deal the amount of damage they did. I'll give Cryptic the Thaloron Mines and the B'Ger Uber-Torpedo, but that's the only thing acceptable in terms of instant-death effects. Non-Targetable random torpedoes that may or may not be rendered but kill ships through full shields are not okay. In fact, not even through 50 % shields and hull, I think.

Increasing the difficulty of PvE missions does not require increasing the frustration factor by uncontrollable variables, and is indeed counter-productive.

For testing, t hey should just hardcode something like:

if (damage > 90000 && isFromNPC(damageSource)) {
damage = 90000;
::std::cerr << "Unexpected high damage taken from" << damageSource;
}

Mustrum "Pseudo Code is awesome, I don't need to worry about the performance hits" Ridcully

It's not a graphics card issue, nor is it any sort of user-end hardware issue, the guy doesn't know what he's talking about--i.e. nonsense.

This is true , It was on STOked when Al Rivera (memory serves me) from Cryptic explained to us the Priority the torpedos in STF's from the Borg, work and affect video cards. Also, I personaly have an issue when a player "pukes" engine plasma in an STF. It chokes my video card if I am close to it, causing "rubberbanding".

I understand the frustration. Yet it is a defendable attack. Not all Ships can "Fully" defend against this due to the amount of Boff power slots.

First, BfW works better than trying to target them directly. Furthermore, BfW has a damage buff and rotates targets indiscriminately.

Second, there are several Boff and DoFF Abilities when stacked, defend well enough to provide a "I survived!!" with a sliver of health left. Better to survive than take a death penalty.

Yesterday I ran Infected space elite. We deal with the las Tac cube. Suddenly I saw a plasma torpedo come in to me. I tried to shot it but no way. Suddenly it disappear and I thought it was not for me. 2 second later. One shot! My ship was 100% shield, 100% hull. I was hit by something more than 100k damage. I don't remind how much exactly This torpedoes became invisible before one shot me. It's crazy!

There's a few more proactive ways too.

The Automated Defence Turret , or Eject Warp Plasma (or the equivalent from a Vent Theta Console), or Gravity Well, or Tyken's Rift.

Aside from the Vent Theta console (via the pack) they're not always going to be available to everyone though.

If an invisible torpedo that can crit you to death can happen at any time, it's hard to be prepared in any form. Your counters may be on cooldown, after all.

Hard but not impossible. The Automated Defence Turret, for example, is always-on if you happen to have one and have slotted it (admittedly when I last tested this its accuracy was not the best). Likewise if you have multiple copies of Tyken's Rift and/or Gravity Well, you can cycle them one after the other on a Cube to achieve a considerable uptime. I have a Nebula build which does this as a byproduct of inflicting its DPS. Dropping a patch of warp plasma and then backing into it can also work - plasma lingers for quite a long time.

Or you can slot two or three sets of Monotanium Alloy and just heal through the damage. My Fleet Escort used to use this method until I just stopped caring about dying. After all, if I'm hugging the cube, a heavy torp hit on me will hurt the cube too. Sometimes I'll live and it won't.

Are we even sure that an invisitorp can be targeted? It's one thing if only the effect is being dropped, but supposing the engine removes it from whatever internal lists determine what people can and can't targeted. And that may or may not affect area effects like Fire At Will. We don't know, and it doesn't seem like this issue is getting the attention it deserves.

I think it's a legitimate concern. These torps are invisible. It is incredibly difficult -- even impossible -- to empirically determine on the client side that even our automated defenses are working against them. We don't know because we don't see anything.

And even if, that's still pretty unacceptable, quite frankly. This is happening to people who have new cards with significant capabilities. Can the engine at least render basic no-frills FX for things after it hits the cap? Or at the very least, knock older FX off the rendering list in favor of recently added effects?

There's the whole question as well of what happens in KA space with "double tapped" thalaron bursts from Donatra. If the weapons in one STF are malfunctioning it isn't a stretch to wonder if something similar happens on other STFs. For all we know these aren't invisitorps but insta-torps that hit you before the FX even happen, rather like what's happening with Donatra right now.