B_Samson

Unfortunately, I won't be able to make this one. Good luck though, Triumph.

Hoping to make it with my Ninja/FF MM.

(Can't think of anything to keep me from doing so at the moment, but you never know.)

I'd love to join in for this run. Haven't had the chance to get in on one yet.

Sign me up.

I managed to get him up and running.

First thing we tried was exactly what you suggested. No good. Apparently it looked good at first since it started recalculating the checksum. However, once the checksum had finished it would crash again.

Just to see if the patch had actually been applied, I had him try bypassing the updater. He got as far as the error telling him that his version of the game didn't match the current version on the live servers. Pretty much what I expected, but that at least confirmed for me that the updater was crashing before the patch was applied.

On the third attempt, I emailed him my cohupdater.exe just to see if there was something that had corrupted his EXE file. Had him rename his file just in case, copy mine to his directory, and run. Same crash behavior. So now we knew it wasn't the updater itself.

Next thing we tried was replacing the piggs directory. First, he renamed his existing directory (again, just in case), and then he copied the piggs directory from his test client over into his City of Heroes folder. We deleted the checksum file and tried again. That did the trick. Not too long after that, he was able to log in to the game.

Seems like something got corrupted in the piggs directory the first time the updater tried to install today's patch.

Right. Essentially, the flags are something like this:

24RespecEarned
34RespecEarned
44RespecEarned

And not something like this:

StalwartMedallionEarned
StatesmanStarEarned
FreedomCrossEarned
ThornRobberEarned
ThornThiefEarned
ThornUsurperEarned

I was part of that run. A couple of people got Thorn Robber, a few had no badges offered, and one reported earning the Stalwart Medallion instead.

My assumption up to this point has always been that the game checked to see which respec badges you'd already been granted, and if you hadn't claimed all of those that the trial might award would then check to see if you have a high enough level to make you eligible for the next badge. If you were eligible for a badge awarded by the trial and had not yet claimed that badge, the game would offer you the badge and a respec as an option at the end of the trial. Otherwise you would just get an offer of merits.

(And prior to merits, you would either get the badge and respec or got nothing.)

If that were the case, then the game should have checked to see if we had already claimed the badges we were eligible for. And since at least one character earned a hero respec badge, I could see how I wouldn't be offered any respecs or badges since the game would be checking to see if my Vigilante had already claimed all of the Hero respecs (and I have.) It could have just been a case of not be eligible for Villain respec badges while a Hero.

Or, if there's a check to see how many respecs a character has banked (with three being the maximum allowed), I could also understand not having been offered a badge since I have three respecs banked.

Either way, I can see why I might not have gotted an offer of a badge here.

However, the characters that had made the full transition to Villain should have been offered the badge as a reward if the game were checking against the Villain respec badges. The evidence we have seems to indicate that this is not how the system works.

Instead, it appears more likely that there are a series of three flags on your character that represent a single respec claimed per trial level range - not per badge or per level/trial combination. If this is the case and the game checks those flags instead of the badges you've collected, then once a character has claimed three respec badges, they simply won't be able to earn any more.

A character might even end up with a combination of something like Stalwart Medallion, Thorn Thief, and Freedom Cross as their three badges.

If that's correct, then the question becomes this: Was this an oversight, or is this working as intended?

Edit: And it sounds like that question was brought up several times during beta testing and nothing changed, so the answer is probably "WAI".

Happy belated birthday.

It's a number that was previously unreachable by villain ATs.

I gave that my stomp of approval.

Any pictures that popped into my head were more related to Alien.

I think Rhynwa caught wind that we'd be losing our pretty, pretty rep bars and decided it just wasn't going to be worth staying on the forums without them.

D'oh!

Sundays are usually pretty good for me, but I'll be flying back from a wedding that day, so I won't be able to make it.

I'm bummed.

Take care, Rhyn. We'll leave a light on for ya.

I usually bring my Dark Defender, but I couldn't make it this time around.

Good to hear that the raid went well, though.

Congrats, Triumph!

Nope. Nothing to see in Warburg here.

Sounds like fun, but I can't make it Saturday night.

I might be able to help farm some EoEs on Friday though.

Happy belated birthday, Cath! Hope you had a good one yesterday.

I got you a clown.

That lag was horrendous last night. I was getting in both in and out of the missions.

With all of the lag and the stacked up ambush spawns we had near that door, I had a feeling we weren't all going to make it out of that mission alive. Nothing to really feel bad about at all, Az.

Don't think I'll make it this week. A bunch of us are meeting after work to wish one of our co-workers happy trails as he moves on to a new job out on the East coast.

Happy birthday!