I went out and bought City of Villains last weekend and installed it, which, of course, installs City of Heroes as well. I played CoV for a while before I decided to try CoH (trial accounts for both) for a while as well.
I decided last night to go back and work on some villains for a while again, but when I get to the character creation screens, the whole thing switches to CoH! I get the Heroes creation screens instead of the Villains…
What gives here? Why won’t it let me play CoV?
The screens should have whatever graphicky goodness of whichever side (Hero or Villain) that you last used.
On the character select screen, there is an icon beside each character depicting whether it is a villain (red spidery Arachnos symbol) or a hero (Statesman’s star).
Yeah the background art is whichever side (hero/villain) you used last time. Ignore it and make, or selct, the character you want – it’ll change to match your current faction.
And have fun out there!
Sailboat
No, I get the CoV Character Select Screen, with the red borders and all. But when I click on an empty slot, it shoves me over to Paragon City to make a hero character instead of letting me make a villain. I have Blaster/Controller/Defender/Scrapper/Tanker instead of Brute/Mastermind/Dominator/Corruptor.
I’m attempting to reinstall right now, to see if that helps. Downloading updates at the moment… zzzz
When you actually try to create a character, you should be asked if you want to make a hero or a villian. If you don’t, and you think your accounts are in order, e-mail support@plaync.com. I’ve never had any account problems, but others I know who have say the support staff is really quite good.
Say hello in-game on the CECIL global chat. It was formed for our SDMB supergroup C.E.C.I.L. (Cecil’s Extraordinary Counter-Ignorance League. There’s a Villian group as well–The Urban Legends), but it is a way for both heroes and villians in and out of groups to talk. There are some guys one there that know everything about these games, so it’s a handy place to ask stupid questions (I do it all the time).
Grrrr…I reinstalled but while the updates are downloading, I get a checksum error message. If I keep clicking “OK” to continue download, I eventually end up (according to the updater) downloading way past the “end amount” (for example, 428M/399M) and a HUGE estimated download time (on the order of double-digit hours).
What’s going on NOW?!
Saltire, are the groups still active? On which server(s)?
I’m pissed now. (That’s the American “pissed”, not the British)
I just wasted my entire free-est night of the week uninstalling and reinstalling and trying to patch this damn game and I AM OVER IT!
I’m tired and frustrated and hating this damn updater that keeps giving me checksum errors and doing goofy things with the time and filesizes and I hate it! NCSoft apparently keeps a tight proprietary hold over their updates because I can’t find a downloadable version on FileFront or FilePlanet so I can bypass this buggy updater. They just lost a potential subscription…
They were having updater problems last night. Apparently quite a few people were having problems getting online. You just had the bad luck to hit things when that was going on. 
Some people had to flush DNS, then reboot, then flush DNS again to clear it up once the updater was fixed.
As for your problems starting a new character, are you sure you have both your COV and COH accounts on the same account? When you started the COH part, you needed to upgrade the COV account, not add a new account. If you added instead of upgrading, you will need to contact customer support to have them put the 2 together. If you did upgrade, you should have 12 character slots on each server. Otherwise you will only have 8.
Both CECIL and Urban Legends are still active. I have only been getting on 1 or 2 times a week, work has been really busy lately, but there are still people that show up a lot. CECIL is mostly active on Virtue, Urban Legends on Protector. You can join the CECIL global chat channel from any server and talk with anyone that is online.
In your OP, you said you had trial accounts for both. Is it possible that the trial period ran out for CoV, but not yet for CoH?
Oh yeah - regarding CECIL, The Urban Legends, and the CECIL global chat.
I’m on at least three to four nights a week. I’ve mostly been playing Stage Manager, my Merc/Trap Mastermind. We took out Sliver Mantis and a hero named LeoKnight last night.
No, it’s not that. I just registered the trials this past Saturday. I should have a little more than a week on the CoH and I think the CoV was the initial 30-day account that comes with the game.
Now, I DON’T have both on the same account…is that possible, to have a legit trial account piggyback on the initial 30-day account for CoV?
Besides which, with the updater problems I was having last night (corrupted files, checksum errors), the problem I began this thread with is the least of my Hero/Villains worries…
How does one flush DNS?
Assuming you’re running Windows 2000 or XP?
Start, run, ipconfig /flushdns
Okay - The account is an easy fix. Just contact NCSoft support and tell them you had accidentally added your trial CoH account to your master account rather then upgrading your CoV account. Depending on work load, it should take a couple of hours to fix it. (When I had done the same during CoV launch, it took a day for them to fix.)
For you other problem, a quick scan of the CoH boards brought up the suggestion to delete your coh.checksum file, and let the updater fix it.
E-Sabbath covered the DNS flush for you. And Maus took the other. I need to stop sleeping so late. 
Thanks, folks! Now that I’m home I’m trying the remedies you suggested. Just flushed the DNS and deleted the checksum.coh, and I’m trying the update again. I also emailed Support to get my accounts smooshed together.
Ah, the newest twist being thrown my way…
Apparently, my texWorldBC.pigg file is “corrupted and unreadable”. I’m doing another uninstall and see if there’s something wrong with my disc (the DVD collector’s edition).
Okay, we’re on our way…did a chkdsk, which removed the corrupted .pigg file, then reinstalled and the updater worked fine once I found a patch server that wasn’t asleep.
I won’t be able to play until after dinner and Survivor, but at least I know it works again!