UberGuy

Using Sysinternals ProcMon: to log what the installer was doing, I logged out and back in. The attached happened after I logged in. "8:47:16.4355314 PM","launcher.exe","22260","SetDispositionInformationFile","D:\City of Heroes Beta\assets\issue24\fonts.pigg","CANNOT DELETE","Delete: True" ... < this continues for every pigg file in the i24 folder. It's failing because I marked it read only > ... "8:47:16.4391322 PM","launcher.exe","22260","SetDispositionInformationFile","D:\City of Heroes Beta\assets\cryptic\bin_minimap.pigg","SUCCESS","Delete: True" ... < this continues for every cryptic file, and at the end the binaries and piggs are all gone > It also rewrites the settings file into a default state, forgetting what I had configured previously in terms of what was hidden and which versions of the game this installer is managing.

D:\City of Heroes Beta They are not in a protected folder. I am a an IT professional with many years of admin experience with Windows. All my games are installed on their own drive, I created and set the recursive ownership of the installation root to full control for my user before running the installer and pointing it at those folders. Moreover, that explanation would make no sense for a previously working installation. If I was trying to use the installer in a protected folder, it would never have worked at all without my running it as an administrator. This happened only when I logged out. The installer partially deleted an existing installation.

Bug(?) Apologies if this has been reported before - there's a lot of chatter in the thread. I occasionally encounter the problem, previously reported, where the launcher thinks I'm patched up but am not. So I log out and back in. However, this resets my settings. Hidden installations of the game are unhidden, and Closed Beta-specific assets/* installations are removed. (This is the bug I'm reporting.) I don't think the installer should forget existing installation information in this way when you log out. In combination with whatever gets the installer out of synch with login, requiring you to log in and out, this behavior is a fairly significant inconvenience. While my base beta installation and data files remained, I had to entirely re-download assets/issue24 and assets/cryptic, which is 4.4GB of data. I am lucky and have GB internet, but lots of folks don't. Notes I have a custom installation directory, in case it matters

During installation file copying, the "Cancel" button on the progress window is unresponsive, and thus does nothing. I realized I'd typo'd the target directory and tried to cancel, but could not.

This name was a perhaps understandable but still pretty ludicrous effort on the part of the Cryptic devs to sell the introduction of diminishing returns to a playerbase the devs knew would react badly to it. The name and the announcement that it came with, sent to players in the I6/CoV Beta, was meant to suggest that this was a good thing for them, as now they could slot less damage and more of other things, thus "diversifying" their enhancement. (Prior to the introduction of ED, it was common to slot 1 accuracy and 5 damage SOs, and some builds just went straight to 6 damage SOs.) While "ED" certainly makes sense for "endurance drain", I've never heard anyone use that acronym for it consistently. The history behind "ED" meaning "enhancement diversification" probably has something to do with that.

Simply put, "Pre-ED" is the raw total of the enhancements you've slotted, before the diminishing returns from ED are applied. While I agree that it's an advanced thing to display, I disagree strongly that its age is a valid reason for removing it. In my view it's much harder to reason about what effect a change in enhancement will have if all you can see is the "post-ED" value. If you know how ED works (for Schedule A, soft decrease in benefit above 70%, harder decrease above 90%, massive decrease above 100%) you can tell quickly what will happen if, say, you've got 105% damage enhancement and remove something that gives 25%. I would not mind the "pre-ED" thing being an option one has to turn on, but I'd not like to see it removed.