Paragon Market crash: Is this only affecting *me*?

I posted about this earlier when the problem first cropped up, in this thread (and got no response here). To sum up the problem: Attempting to access the Paragon Market (PM) brings up the PM window with a blank, black content area, and then immediately freezes and crashes my game client with an "Assertion Failure" error message.

Fortunately, I can still play the game without problems, as long as I don't try to access the PM. OTOH, my main character is "stuck" with the PM window open, so simply logging in that character causes an immediate crash. So that character has been unavailable to me since Feb. 24. Likewise, I'm now locked out of a second character after inadvertently clicking the "Shop" button in the Wentworth's interface, thus bringing up the PM window and crashing, leaving that character "stuck" with the PM window open.

I have a ticket in with tech support and they're looking into it; I've tried everything they've suggested, and tried several other things on my own, but nothing has worked. And I haven't heard anything new from them since March 14. Naturally, I'm getting a little frustrated. Not only am I locked out of two of my favorite characters, but I also can't buy anything from the store (and I really want to get my hands on that Imperial Dynasty costume pack).

It's been about 40 days now since this issue came up, and I'm despairing of a solution being found, considering that we Mac users are already a small minority in a small-playerbase game. And if I'm the one-and-only Mac user having this trouble, it's going to be even harder to find the problem. So I gotta ask - are any other Mac users experiencing this issue? "Circumstantial evidence" points to something in the small patch we got on Feb. 23 being the root of the problem, since I was able to access the PM the day before that patch, and the crashes started the day after. Nothing else changed on my machine between 2/22 and 2/24.

i did have a similar problem last month. but unlike yours, mine went away on its own...

it was during 2xp weekend -- clicking the PM market button on either of my accts would cause the exact same crash you experienced. however, mine wasn't getting "stuck" with the blank PM window open, so after restarting each time i could log back in properly. and since 2xp weekend, the problem hasn't resurfaced. so maybe it was due more to people bombing the market for xp boosters that weekend than anything on my end.

sorry i don't have any more more useful feedback for you. good luck getting this resolved, it sounds like a terrible PITA :-/

I have not experienced this problem.

Does it continue to persist when you log into the affected characters? By that I mean, have you logged into the characters since the last couple patches? Perhaps one may have fixed the problem?

If you have, perhaps you could let us know what Customer Service has advised you to do already, so that we don't end up repeating information?

While not to the extent of what you describe, I've had something similar happen once or twice. For me, when you sit in the Market too long it causes the client to crash. Very rarely it takes down the whole system, which is a whole other tread to ***** about. Anyways, a few times it caused this loop where the Market screen was automatically open when the character launched and if I didn't close it right away it would cause another crash.

Once I had to just do a repair of the program through the NC Launcher and then relaunch the character again. When the Market screen popped up I just closed it as fast as I could.

I hope you get it worked out, that must be very frustrating. The Market is buggy for sure, but not to be able to use it like how you describe is just plain awful. My suggestion? Open contents of the package and save any Logs and Screenshots you wish to keep and then trash the CoH client. Download a new one and hope for the best. It sounds like something didn't update properly and now you are in this horrible loop. That is my $0.02.

I know this is spinning the wheels but every detail helps: what type of mac are you on and what version of OSX are you running (version number found with Apple>About This Mac)

You could download the free Windows 8 preview and install that on a boot camp partition or try the free virtualbox vm software. I don't know if CoH will run inside virtualbox, but it may be enough to free up the stuck char. If it doesn't work then try the boot camp install. At least neither of these options cost money - just time.

I sometimes have the market crash, but a restart always works and doesn't try to reopen the market window.

Just a quick update - the Market still crashes on my Mac, but I can play those two characters now. I went by my storage unit to go ahead and grab my Windows PC, and discovered it had been broken into and cleaned out*. I consoled myself by buying an inexpensive Windows 7 laptop from Wal-Mart, installed the game on it, and closed the dang Market window on that. (And I was surprised to discover that this inexpensive laptop is capable of running Aion, so I've been trying that out too.)

*They took everything of value, including my entire comic book collection - over 3000 comics with a replacement value of about $10k

I have had a similar issue. It seems that I can be in the Paragon Market for a short period but it seems to crash if I try to go to the wishlist or some other page after the initial page. I HAVE been able to quickly close the window upon restart and avoid another crash.

Will test a bit more but it seems that this has been going on for the last couple weeks.

Anyone else have similar issues?

I have had a couple market crashes recently, when I've had none before. I'd say it started within the last week or two. I haven't experimented to see the exact hows and whens.

I've been resisting trying to troubleshoot this because the stuff that makes up the Paragon Market is a tangled mess even on Windows, and twice so via Cider. Untangling it is no fun.

But in case we're missing something obvious here, what OSX version and Mac are you using, and which video chipset does it have? What kind of internet connection do you have?

Also try creating a new user on your Mac and running CoH from there, and see if you still have a problem. That should rule out preference issues or conflicts at least.

I'm having this problem, too. Sometimes I can make the market work fine, and others it completely locks the game, forcing a hard reboot. Here's some symptoms:

1) The background music starts skipping every second or two, resulting in a kind of clicking noise.
2) I can still see the game interface behind the shop window. Animations are still running and the endurance bar is still moving up and down, so the game isn't completely frozen, just the shop window.
3) I can't click on any buttons in the shop window or move the window or close it.
4) I may or may not be able to type text into the search box, but submitting the search query has no effect; the screen doesn't change at all.

I'm not sure, but I think trying to run a search can trigger the freeze ... sometimes. I've run successful searches in the past without a problem.

For reference, my system has these specs:

Model Name: MacBook Air
Model Identifier: MacBookAir4,1
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 1.8 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 2

Running Mac OS X 10.7.4.

Graphics Specs:

Chipset Model: Intel HD Graphics 3000
Type: GPU
Bus: Built-In
VRAM (Total): 384 MB

I am not at home, so I can't post exact specs for my Mac, but I have a similar issue. When the game client has been open for a while, if I have the store open for longer than 5 minutes, it will often crash the game client. This happens more frequently if the computer has been in use for a while before I began playing the game.

I haven't done much experimentation with it, as in all cases that this has occurred, ican simply relaunch the game and log back into the character. The store will still be open, but I can always finish what I was doing and then close it, without any difficulties. If I continue to browse the store longer than five minutes again, it will crash again, but I can, once again, relaunch and reload without problem.

I am running a 2007 iMac with Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, Radeon 1600 graphics, latest version of Snow Leopard (10.6.x), 3GB RAM.

It makes sense that it would have something to do with the graphics card. I've got tunnel vision, so I can't see much of the screen at once, so I've taken to playing the game in windowed mode. Smaller portion of the screen==easier to keep track of things.

I haven't had the Paragon Market crash once on me since starting to use Windowed Mode.

I don't know exactly what this implies, whether the windowed/full screen mode has some implications for which fonts or used or whether it's just easier on the graphics card in my Macbook Air.

Will update if the situation changes.

I posted a tentative solution that seems to have fixed the problem for me:

http://boards.cityofheroes.com/showthread.php?t=292468