Lighthouse_NA

Please use this thread to discuss the below announcement:


The February 12th update to City of Heroes and City of Villains includes new features to the User Interface designed to reveal the "Real Numbers" that drive the game’s combat systems. Programmer CW Bennett answers some questions about these new features in this short Q&A.

Click here to read the feature.

The February 12th update to City of Heroes and City of Villains includes new features to the User Interface designed to reveal the "Real Numbers" that drive the game’s combat systems. Programmer CW Bennett answers some questions about these new features in this short Q&A.

Click here to read the feature.


To discuss this announcement, please join us here.

On Tuesday, February 12th, the game was updated to a new version which includes many new improvements, corrections and refinements. Chief among the changes are the new “Real Numbers” user interface addition and the “XP Smoothing” features. For more information about these two features, read the following Q&A sessions with the developers behind them:

• Matt "Positron" Miller talks about XP Curve Smoothing.
• Programmer CW Bennett answers questions about the Real Numbers feature.

For all the details visit the Patch Notes page.

Over the weekend of February 8th through the 10th the City of Heroes and City of Villains servers saw some record numbers of recent concurrent players as super heroes and super villains logged on to enjoy the exciting times of Double XP! Characters playing during this weekend reaped the rewards of advancing their characters at twice the normal speed! While there were some issues of overcrowding that plagued the Freedom server, overall, a lot of fun was had by all!

When we look at the message forums, we see a lot of ensuing discussion about the weekend. Mindscythe, in his thread Thank you for the weekend, talks about his 40 hour marathon play session. UnSub ponders the Top Ten Things the Double XP Weekend Achieved. Other posters deal more with the joys of extended gaming play sessions and our City of Heroes gamers prove they are no different than others. In the thread Double XP Accomplishments! _Shadow_ remarks that he accomplished “Eating Cheerios at 1:22 AM” and Doomlord goes on to regale his “…creative side by making sculptures out of the pile of Mountain Dew cans filling my desk while waiting for people to zone.”

We want to thank everyone for making this Double XP weekend so memorable! We are certainly looking forward to the next one, later this year!

~ The City of Heroes Development Team


To discuss this announcement, please join us here.

Please use this thread to discuss the below announcement:


Over the weekend of February 8th through the 10th the City of Heroes and City of Villains servers saw some record numbers of recent concurrent players as super heroes and super villains logged on to enjoy the exciting times of Double XP! Characters playing during this weekend reaped the rewards of advancing their characters at twice the normal speed! While there were some issues of overcrowding that plagued the Freedom server, overall, a lot of fun was had by all!

When we look at the message forums, we see a lot of ensuing discussion about the weekend. Mindscythe, in his thread Thank you for the weekend, talks about his 40 hour marathon play session. UnSub ponders the Top Ten Things the Double XP Weekend Achieved. Other posters deal more with the joys of extended gaming play sessions and our City of Heroes gamers prove they are no different than others. In the thread Double XP Accomplishments! _Shadow_ remarks that he accomplished “Eating Cheerios at 1:22 AM” and Doomlord goes on to regale his “…creative side by making sculptures out of the pile of Mountain Dew cans filling my desk while waiting for people to zone.”

We want to thank everyone for making this Double XP weekend so memorable! We are certainly looking forward to the next one, later this year!

~ The City of Heroes Development Team

RevolutionSF, an online magazine dedicated to celebrating the best in science fiction, fantasy, comics and gaming, takes a long look at City of Heroes and City of Villains. In their recent article, they contrast the good and the bad of the game. Overall, they have a lot of great things to say:

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City of Heroes/City of Villains is nearly four years old, but is still stuffed full of more fun than a lot of new games. I get to save the city, or try and destroy it, while running around solo or with my friends. The game is still my favorite MMORPG, and I will keep putting on my cyber spandex as long as those servers still run.

[/ QUOTE ]

Click here to read the full article.


To discuss this announcement, please join us here.

Please use this thread to discuss the below announcement:


RevolutionSF, an online magazine dedicated to celebrating the best in science fiction, fantasy, comics and gaming, takes a long look at City of Heroes and City of Villains. In their recent article, they contrast the good and the bad of the game. Overall, they have a lot of great things to say:

[ QUOTE ]
City of Heroes/City of Villains is nearly four years old, but is still stuffed full of more fun than a lot of new games. I get to save the city, or try and destroy it, while running around solo or with my friends. The game is still my favorite MMORPG, and I will keep putting on my cyber spandex as long as those servers still run.

[/ QUOTE ]

Click here to read the full article.

On Tuesday, February 12th the City of Heroes / City of Villains servers will come down for maintenance starting at 6 AM Pacific (9 AM Eastern).

The estimated downtime of this maintenance period is 2 hours.

When the servers come back up we will be running on the latest version of the game that has been in testing. You can view the testing patch notes on the Training Room Forums or visit the Patch Notes web page for the details once the patch is applied.

As a general reminder to everyone, Training Room01 may NOT always be available. The Training Room01 Test Server may be taken offline at anytime with no notice.

Therefore, if you transfer characters to it that you don't want to lose, be sure to transfer them back to the regular Training Room!

Thanks!

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Keep in mind that throwing more hardware at something can't fix every problem when it comes to database/server load. There are also limits in the software to consider as well (either OS, language, or codebase limitations). For the sake of adminstration and maintainence (as well as avoiding having bugs crop up on just one server) they likely use the same hardware configuration for all servers

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In terms of the "Freedom needs to be bigger" argument, Grazel is correct that scaling the server up isn't as simple as throwing additional hardware at it. If it was that simple, we'd already have the game on on big 'ol server and everyone playing on the same thing.

However, the nice thing is that this bottleneck really only comes up during Double XP weekends. The other 359 days out of the year, it's smooth sailing!

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Over the weekend I only played on Virtue and it was always during red times. I had very little lag, and only had one temporary mapserver disconnect (it didn't kick me out of mission and after a couple of seconds resynched). This was much better performance than I'd seen during events. This was also villainside which in general is more laggy than heroside (other than maybe Atlas Park).

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Despite the need to population cap Freedom, we're really happy with the overall performance of the new server hardware and the additional changes and modifications that have been made along with it. Things have been running great and we can see more areas from this weekend where we can improve even further. Thanks again for the feedback and your continued support.

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I can understand frustration, but really it's just one weekend.

I think I wouldn't mind transferring my toons to another server. However, I can't transfer my SG base and all its yummy teleporters.

So, I'm stuck on Virtue and will hope that if I attempt to log on, I'll be able to.

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Just to be clear, Virtue has not hit the population cap so far. Given that we are tapering off after "peak" hours, it's not likely to until peak times tomorrow night.

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know how you solve it? Take the last 500 peeps who joined the server with new toons and move them to another, after that do it again if you have to. I been here since inception on the same server so is unfair that i get screwed.

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I don't know that those people forcibly moved would be very happy about that solution either.

Folks, the bottom line is that we've accommodated more people playing than we ever have before. In the last Double XP, the server would lag out and simply drop you or people would log in disgust over a poor play experience. The gameplay experience is significantly improved over that and with significantly more people playing.

Yes, server transfers are something we will be looking at. However, they are there so people can play where they want to play. We don't want to force someone to not be able to play with their friends. While it is certainly less than optimal to resort to a server cap for a few peak hours on a double XP weekend, we feel that allowing people to move where they want for 99.9% of the rest of the time is a very nice feature.

Ultimately, we will continue to review how the service is run and make the choices we feel will benefit our customers as best as possible. Hopefully more of you will agree than not. Again, our thanks for your continued patronage and support.

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no its not

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Well, as it goes unlocked, people who are refreshing the server list going "open, open, open" and then immediately pile on, will push it back over the population limit.

However, we are heading out of the peak of prime time and I expect the server will be available again soon as more people are logging out for the night.

Thanks in advance for your patience and understanding.

Hey, Freedom is unlocked and available to log in as of this post... have fun!

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We've been monitoring the performance of all servers throughout the day and early evening, and based upon recent data from Freedom, we're going to throttle down the maximum number of players that will be able to access the Freedom and Virtue servers for the remainder of the weekend.

Players will not get kicked off the server while we make this adjustment. However, if you log off, you may not be able to log back into the server (i.e. it will appear grayed out on the Server Selection screen).

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Just out of curiosity, can you tell us what that maximum number is?

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Sorry, but we do not make specific numbers publicly available outside of shareholder's information.

New Record!
The Freedom server is accommodating more players than it, or any other City of Heroes server has, ever has before in recent history. In reviewing the last several years of log files I can’t find where we’ve even been within 30% of the new number. We’re very excited with this new peak in maximum concurrency and it’s a testament to the hard work and investment back into the server’s infrastructure and hardware.

Server Cap
Unfortunately, as we recently announced, the game server’s capabilities are not limitless. Rather than allow the player count to keep going to a point where it can make an impact on everyone playing, or worse, cause instability or crashing, we are locking the amount of players who can connect to any one server. You will be able to tell if a server is locked by it being gray at server select and “Full” will come up if you hover your mouse over it.

Overall, the servers are holding more people and running smoother than our recent previous Double XP and special events (Halloween, Winter Event, etc.). Our sincere apologies to anyone who is inconvenienced by the use of the server cap.



To discuss this announcement, please join us on the Technical Forums.

Just to be clear, we did not do a re-activation promotion with this Double XP weekend.

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Its 9:23AM where I am and I can't seem to log in at all.

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Server Maintanance: 9-11 AM EST

(servers went down about half an hour ago)

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True, but based on prior statements (from Lighthouse, I think) I was expecting the maintanence window to be very short today. I didn't think it would last even a half-hour and I'd still be surprised if it actually took till 11.

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Things took 50 minutes today (as opposed to the hour and 50 they usually take). Servers were down at 6 AM Pacific and cycled back up by 6:50 AM Pacific.

Thanks for your patience and have fun with double xp!

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At any rate, based on the announcement, I believe 2XP is "guaranteed" until ... 12pm EST(I think?) Sunday night... But it usually runs til server maintenance on Monday morning.

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Correct. We guarantee it will run till 11:59 PM Eastern on Sunday night. Anything that may happen after that is gravy.

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At exactly what time (PST) will Double XP weekend END on Sunday Feb. 10th? I am planning an all weekend LAN party...

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The servers will come down for their normal maintenance starting at 6 AM Pacific (9 AM Eastern). Because of the maintenance done yesterday, this should be a quick bounce and be back up well under the 2 hours we reserve.

Sorry I can't be more specific, but that's as close as I can get without giving you a time (which I can't guarantee so, I won't).

I would like to encourage people discussing this to please remain constructive and friendly. Overly negative, attacking or otherwise flame inducing posts will be removed and the poster sent a friendly reminder.

Thanks!

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The servers were not locked for previous double XP weekends because, as I understand it, they did not have the ability to do so.

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We've always had the ability to lock servers. That is not new functionality and has always been around. However, previously we didn't really consider it an option, since locking it at a low number probably would have done less good than harm.

We may not need to this time around - but we are doing you the courtesy of informing you that we might. We are working and positioning ourselves to have the most people possible have the best gaming experience possible (at least from a server performance standpoint).

Ultimately, the proof will be in the pudding (so to speak). We'll see how things go as we progress through prime time on Friday and into the weekend. Know that we will be monitoring things very closely and we'll keep you informed here via the forums.

As always, thanks for your patronage and continued support

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Do they still reactivate old cancelled accounts during these events to attempt to get people to resubscribe?

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We are not doing a free reactivation with Double XP. We generally do those around new Issue launches to let former players check out all the new goodies.

Please use this thread to discuss the below announcement:


City of Heroes Team Lead Designer Matt "Positron" Miller answers questions about the coming changes to the experience rewards and the smoothing of the “XP Curve.”

Click here to read the full article.

To check out the patch notes of the version that contains this change, join us on the Training Room Test Server Forums.

City of Heroes Team Lead Designer Matt "Positron" Miller answers questions about the coming changes to the experience rewards and the smoothing of the “XP Curve.”

Click here to read the full article.

To check out the patch notes of the version that contains this change, join us on the Training Room Test Server Forums.