weird crash, and no crash

1) Nothing destroys fun more than a poor performing, especially if not working at all, game.
When something destroys fun then we don't pay, so you may want to look into making this game the best running game out there before many of us find a better one.

2) I don't know how you're going to get new free or old premium members to pay any money for this game with crashes and bugs much too often(twice is one time too many let alone more) while giving them no customer support.
Find a way to give them support or you'll lose money with Freedom and probably kill the game as even subscribers have worse performance due to increased load.

Why not try the LOTRO method of at least offering support until 30 days from the use of store points? it gives them support while encouraging monthly purchases. That should be the minimum offered.


3) Why not at least allow us to play the game offline when we pay the box price? You get money and we get to game even when the server is down while costing you no server resources thus saving you money. It would also be much more reliable to have most of the game's processing take place on our computers rather than overloading and burning out the servers unnecessarily.
Give this some thought as the "non-mmo" market is at least 100 times larger than the MMO one, and offline RPGs, of the scope that CoH could be such as Oblivion, are definitely popular.
(Edit: Having the client be more responsible would also mean less support request since support wouldn't be able to do anything and the servers would not be responsible most of the time for errors, bugs and lost items. That saves time and money. I don't care if it is "not how things are" or "a lot of work" because it could be how things should be and would be worth the effort if it results in a better performing game for us all.)





On to the issue....


First, my game has been running perfectly, if at lower graphics than it is capable of due to system issues that have been solved, for a long time, besides the usual lag and occasional server "lost connection to mapserver" mass issues for people all at the same time.
Last night I changed things to get better performance and got better performance than I dreamed. I had professional help from a fellow player who only had me do the safe things that work perfectly. I tested it extensively last night, including on incarnate trials and in Praetoria.

My computer works perfectly and runs CoH better than ever with less lag and never a graphical stutter, now.
I have never been happier with the game than since the changes I made.



But today, I was running a BAF trial on the same character that had tested extensively the night before. I had been, and always do, monitoring my netgraph and fps statistics. I have my maxfps set at 30 for perfectly smooth constant frame rate everywhere except the most demanding areas.
The trial was running about 200 ping, as usual for any place in the game, and a constant 24-30 fps, perfectly smooth and uniform and wonderful looking graphics.

We had a really long BAF run because the league was weak, and when Nightstar and Siege were down to 5% health each, I saw the Windows 7 "working" mouse symbol. "NOOOOOOOO", I screamed. It was a bad time, and the game, which was still sitting their frozen while Windows brought up the error box, showed still perfect fps and netgraph.
I had no warning.

Still, I chocked it up to crap luck with a server hiccup and decided to get back and maybe they would still be up or I would still get the empyrean merit I was after. I started the game back up, which had crashed full out. I logged back in to the character list. I logged my same toon in, but it stopped at less than 10% of the load bar to Pocket D.

I tried again, same result.

I tried a female toon in the Shadow Shard, Firebase Zulu, instead, and I got in without any hiccup or issue.

I relogged to my toon that crashed, but met the same result as before.

I checked for updates, set the launcher to check and repair the game, and booted the game up again. I met with the same result.

I rebooted my entire PC this time just to make sure, and repaired the game again.
I still could not log that character in.

I decided to try other characters. First,
I logged the female toon in the Shadow Shard again without any issues. I then went to try another character to see if I could enter Pocket D and see if it was a zone issue, a character I don't play much. That character couldn't get past loading in at the same point as the one that originally crashed despite being in the Rikti Warzone and not Pocket D.
I decided to try yet another toon who I knew to be in a low load area, the no powers room in Founder Falls AE, but even he could not load in.

Every time I brought the game up after every crash it always still said I was still logged in.

I ended up going back to the female toon in the Shadow Shard to login and see if she still worked, and she was still getting in just fine with no issues.

I'm afraid to make the toon leave the Shadow Shard. I can't tell if the issue is just random characters or male toons only or every zone but the shadow Shard.
The repair tool ran and no errors were brought to my attention, graphics load is fine and the netgraph could not be smoother. Th rest of my PC runs fine.
I'm even posting this while still logged in on that toon that works. My system can handle much more than Firefox and the game at the same time.




I know this isn't my computer, as I can login one toon without a single issue and it has performed better than expected for a very long time as well as absolutely beautifully the past 24 hours.

This is a server issue, perhaps where those characters are stored or those zones they were in are stored. They are all zones that have had changes more recently than the Shadow Shard has.

I don't know what is causing it. I can just say I'm very dissatisfied with the service, the completely impossible to prevent issues and the fact that I just can't play how and when I want even if I have to do so offline(if only I could).

I just want to play this great game without the bugs and crappy code that kills it. It would be light years closer to perfect if only it were more reliable and relied on the clients more rather than having so much on the server and expecting perfect internet connections from clients.



Please please, I'm begging, fix this, greatly improve performance and reliability before Freedom, and allow the free, and us premium vets and new purchasers, to get support when things like this happen so that we have reason to spend money on this game, rather than reason to not spend because of issues going without assistance in solving them.

I waited a half hour, nothing changed and computer was still on the whole time, because I was afraid it would spread to other characters.

I am now logged in on the character that the problem started on without any issues.


If this is an issue on my end then it obviously does not make any sense, but it makes perfect sense if the server ate some of my characters for a little while.

Never mind about the Empyrean Merit. I got it my second run. I feel silly for this post now.


Edit:
I almost crashed the second run again though right at the reward box. It was as if mouse look locked on and the mouse spun.
Could it be that the reward box function is broken?

I think I figured out the issue.


I just crashed again, but this time I had the error where I lost access to powers; they were grayed out.
I crashed shortly after switching builds to clear it.



The bug looks a lot like when you exemplar and all your powers gray out except the really low level ones, but also like when you switch builds and you have to level up(as the level up arrow was blinking on my 50).

I had that happen, but then I switched builds and ran around waiting for the switch timer to end to switch back. I ended up having a weird error where I apparently flew way up in the sky and fell down instantly, not getting hurt, but picking myself up as if I had lost all health for an instant.


It seems to me, since both times I was on a team/league, that this is a bug with the super-side-kicking system treating me as if I was side-kicked to an "indeterminate" level player(my team window blacked out) thus resetting me to level 2 or so.

I suspect I didn't have the error of being temporarily low level the first time because the crash immediately came with the error instead of a short time after.



I'm pretty sure this is a problem with the super-side-kicking system and possible its interaction with leagues, or maybe the level shift of the alpha slot(as my widow was the toon this happened to and he is level shifted).

It could also be a problem with the build switching system, but I had never used that system before this error.

Today was the first time I experienced these errors.




Edit:
Apparently this latest time, I was definitely side-kicked in a team to a level 50 though my character is a 50+1 incarnate.

Edit 2:
This could be related to(recently heard of this) this issue where level 51s were being killed by level 1s some time back.
Maybe level 50+ toons are being treated as 0+.

Maybe there was code in the side-kick system to prevent this from beign an issue and it just breaks with enough lag, as I was lagging a lot.
It makes sense.

Edit 3:
That would also explain why it is apparently only level 50s, likely with level shifts and on incarnate trials, reporting this error.

Hint: In this forum, you're mostly talking to other players, not to NCSoft or Paragon Studios.

If you want action on the issues you've reported here, you need to use the website to submit feedback through the support process, or use Menu - Support in game.

1) Great, assuming you did /bug and not /petition. Also kudos for trying to reproduce it, that's important when it comes to debugging.

2) While in one sense yes as this board's header says "Discuss gameplay / technical issues or bugs here! This is NOT a forum where official technical/QA support is available. For technical assistance email support@coh.com.", it's more of a player resource to give each other a heads up that there is a problem doing X, mission Y has a glitch or new video drive Z is bad than a dev source for harvest bug reports.

More "And don't ride in anything with a Capissen 38 engine, they fall right out of the sky." and less "Ghost slaying axe clips if using zombie hand on huge model".

3) It's a sad truth that on help message boards or the help channel, not everybody is as equally helpful.

I had the first crash again, this time on a Lambda trial.

I noticed that my team and league windows were registering that I had no team this time. I asked if I was still on the league and people replied that I was, but I crashed fairly quickly after that, during the last phase of the Lambda trial.


They did fix one thing though. I got my Empyrean Merit and incarnate salvage choice when I logged back in. I'm very glad for this change, even if the crash sucks.
Of course, I could have just been lucky and actually been online for the end, but I hope this was a change they made.