Lighthouse_NA

We wanted to update everyone with the status of Character Transfer.

We should be pushing out version 15.20070813.12T to the live servers tomorrow, Tuesday Oct. 2nd. That version contains the client correction for the current issue with Character Transfer that has it turned off. Once we test that out under the Live environment and if everything looks good, we will officially launch the Character Transfer and Character Rename services.

Thanks for your patience waiting for these services to be brought live.

I posted earlier about the Consignment Markets being offline. Upon receiving further details it appears that the issue is being caused by a network connectivity issue between the various server data centers (Europe, East Coast and West Coast US).

This may result in users having longer than expected update times or in game experiences that may appear that the Consignment Markets are not responding, however they are still up. Thanks for your patience while we work to resolve the issue.

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Curse seems to be down. Load/bandwidth issues?


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Hi gang,

I was talking to the good folks over at Curse.com. They let me know that their site is down for a quick maintenance and should be back up shortly and apologize for the downtime.

Get a first look at the new Powersets coming in Issue 11, the next free expansion for City of Heroes and City of Villains.

Curse.com delivers some quick cuts of the new offensive set, Dual Blades.

Badge-Hunter.com muscles up a few views of the new defensive set, Willpower.

Both new powersets will be available to the Brute, Scrapper, Stalker and Tanker Archetypes as part of Issue 11. While further details of these powersets are still unreleased, join the discussion about them at the links below on the Official Message Forums:

New Powerset Discussion

Willpower Screenshot Discussion

Dual Blades Screenshot and Announcement Discussion

Use the below thread to discuss the following announcement:


Get a first look at the new Powersets coming in Issue 11, the next free expansion for City of Heroes and City of Villains.

Badge-Hunter.com muscles up a few views of the new defensive set, Willpower.

Curse.com delivers some quick cuts of the new offensive set, Dual Blades.

Both new powersets will be available to the Brute, Scrapper, Stalker and Tanker Archetypes as part of Issue 11. While further details of these powersets are still unreleased, join the discussion about them at the links below on the Official Message Forums:

New Powerset Discussion

Willpower Screenshot Discussion

Use this thread to discuss the below article:


This issue of the Paragon Times brings you news from the Rogue Isles.

From the headlines:

President Marchand Celebrates 70th Year In Office!

SPIDER CITY, Grandville, Rogue Isles, September 27th -- The Rogue Isles celebrated today in honor of President Marchand reaching his 70th year in office. Festivities to mark his seven decades in power began last night in Marchand’s home region of Grandville, and are expected to carry through the entire island chain for the next several weeks. Citizens of the Rogue Isles will be treated to concerts, arena competitions, and lavish feasts, all for free.

Read the full paper here.


This issue of the Paragon Times was the work of Arctic Sun.

This issue of the Paragon Times brings you news from the Rogue Isles.

From the headlines:

President Marchand Celebrates 70th Year In Office!

SPIDER CITY, Grandville, Rogue Isles, September 27th -- The Rogue Isles celebrated today in honor of President Marchand reaching his 70th year in office. Festivities to mark his seven decades in power began last night in Marchand’s home region of Grandville, and are expected to carry through the entire island chain for the next several weeks. Citizens of the Rogue Isles will be treated to concerts, arena competitions, and lavish feasts, all for free.

Read the full paper here.

Discuss this article here.

This issue of the Paragon Times was the work of Arctic Sun.

We are looking for user feedback on their experience using the Character Rename feature over Sept. 25th and 26th.

We are specifically looking for your opinion on the performance of Character Rename and how quickly it proceeded through the process to rename your character. The Character Rename button can be found at server select screen and costs $9.99 per use.

If you have used the Character Rename feature on Tuesday, Sept. 25th or Wednesday, Sept. 26th, please visit this thread to provide your feedback.

If you are not familiar with the Character Rename feature you may wish to review this previous Announcement.

To follow up on this, the discussion thread above has more posts over the course of Thursday. The gist of it all is we brought the services back up in their current state over Thursday, Sept. 20th to allow for more testing and scrutiny by the Engineering Team. We still don't have things working as well as we want, or you expect, and the services are back off for the evening. We will update again tomorrow with developments as they arise there.

We know people are eager for these services and appreciate your patience.

For those who are curious about the Character Transfer and Character Rename features, we have an update on their status. Originally, we planned to bring these two features live on the morning of Wednesday, Sept. 19th, as you can see from our previous announcement thread.

Unfortunately, when the services came up in the Live environment, several issues appeared that were not anticipated or encountered in our test scenarios on the Training Room Test Server. We left the services up in an “unannounced” fashion to allow our Team to trouble shoot the problems as they were happening on Live.

We have since disabled all access to these services on the current Live servers.

We are continuing to work on the issues causing these problems behind the scenes. Our goal is to bring them out in the best possible state and as quickly as possible. In the discussion thread, some users speculated that we did not make adequate provisions for hardware or infrastructure to handle the load incurred in the initial stampede. This is not accurate, as we were prepared for a strong initial demand. Unfortunately, how the system was working itself was the problem. All the horses in the world won’t help you move something quickly if the bearings in the wheels aren’t rolling right.

Thanks for everyone’s patience and understanding. We know people are eager to make use of these services and are working hard to bring them to you as quickly as possible. We will make further announcements once we have the systems ready for you.


To discuss this announcement, please use this thread.

EDIT:For the latest information, please see the bottom of this thread


Original Announcement

Briefly, Character Rename will allow you to rename individual characters while Character Transfer will allow you to move characters from one server to another, both available for the fee of $9.99 USD.

If you are not familiar with these features, take a look over our original testing announcement here.

Once these services are enabled we will have more extensive explanations, walkthroughs to using the features and FAQs available on the City of Heroes web site.

Each year there are a number of holidays we support with special events in the world of City of Heroes; Halloween being one of them. To ensure that our special event for this year’s festivities is all in working order, we will be conducting a test of the event on the Training Room Test Server on Tuesday, September 18th starting at 3 PM Eastern (Noon Pacific).

If you are not familiar with the Training Room Test Server, please visit this thread that contains instructions about connecting and also instructions on how to copy your characters to that server.

The event will run for a minimum of 4 hours today, so from 3 PM to 7 PM Eastern.

EDIT: For today's test, we are looking to hear about player's experience with trick or treating, badges they are obtaining and the temporary powers they receive that turn them into different "looks."

Please reply to this thread with your input on the Event experience and base that input on your actual play experience.

Should you encounter a bug, please make use of the in game /bug command to let us know about it and/or post about it here.

Thank you for helping to test out the Halloween Event!


To discuss the Halloween Event, please join us on the Training Room Test Forums.

We have two maintenance windows to inform you of:

Tuesday, September 18th, City of Heroes and City of Villains servers will come down starting at 6 AM Eastern (3 AM Pacific) for an extended maintenance period. We anticipate the servers to be offline and unavailable for 6 hours.

Wednesday, September 19th, the servers will come down starting at 6 AM Eastern (3 AM Pacific). We anticipate the maintenance on Wednesday to take 5 hours.

During the above two downtimes, character names we will be un-reserved for characters below level 6 only on accounts that have been inactive and not subscribed for over 90 days.

For more information about the un-reserving of inactive account names, visit this thread about the City of Heroes Character Name policy.

Our apologies for these extended maintenance periods. In this process, we are freeing up millions of character names. At the end of this process, if everything proceeds according to plan, we will be enabling the Character Transfer and Character Rename features. For more information on these features, please visit the Testing Announcement for Character Transfer and Character Rename Discussion Thread on the Official Forums.

To discuss this announcement please visit this thread.

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I understand the update and know we are getting closer to the character transfer feature. My question is any idea how close we are getting to the point of going live?

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Soon™ Thanks for your patience

Less TR please, more HEROES! and Villainous stuff!

As for the Devs, Issue 11 has them all chained to their desks, sorry!

Edit: typo, sorry.

The City of Heroes Development Team wants to extend their congratulations to “The Defuser” for his victory in winning the reality TV show “Who Wants To Be A Superhero?” The Defuser is also known here on the forums as Detective2416 and has been a long time player of the game.

Gaming site 1up.com also covers the Defuser's win.

To check out the show, take a look at the Who Wants to be a Superhero website.

Or, join us on the Comic and Hero/Villain Culture Forms to congratulate The Defuser on his win!

There are other "behind the scenes" operations with the /ignore_spammer command. It's not posturing, it does stuff!

However, rather than elaborate on those mechanics, it's much more straightforward for the messaging to everyone to be:

"If you are receiving spam tells, rather than use /ignore or /gignore, please use /ignore_spammer to place them on ignore. Then, please follow up with a /petition to better fill our Customer Support Team in on the nature of the annoyance that led you to use the /ignore_spammer command so that we can better and more quickly address the situation."

Thanks!

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<QR>
Can we get one thing clarified, please. If I'm doing /ignore_spammer because of an RMT tell, is that enough to get the folks dealt with or do you really want us to send a /petition too? I can understand needing the follow-up petition for other types of "disruptive behavior", but for things as blatant as RMT tells I really don't think anything beyond /ignore_spammer should be necessary.

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A petition to follow up, in whatever case, is always ideal.

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This automatically alerts CS, despite the seemingly redundant suggestion to /petition as well.

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Actually, if you follow up with a petition where you can add details about what happened, it will greatly help Customer Support to address the situation properly. While the /ignore_spammer command is helpful in letting CS know there is an issue, without additional input, they can be blind as to the extent of your complaint about the spamming or the nature of it.

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Im curious, is the name wipe part of the "behind the scenes"?



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Hi Cloud Runner,

We are still testing the process that will un-reserve names of characters below level 6 who are on accounts that have been inactive (not paid) for over 90 days. So, no, that process has not gone on the Live servers yet.

Read more about that test process here.

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Patch Notes not appearing yet ...

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Patch notes won't appear until after the update, which, as of this post at 5:18 PM Pacific on Monday, is about 13 hours off.

Thanks for your patience.

The City of Heroes and City of Villains servers will be coming down on Tuesday, September 11th starting at 6 AM Pacific (9 AM Eastern) to update the game to version 15.20070813.4T. While this version contains the "behind the scenes" goodies for the Character Transfer and Character Rename features, those features will not be going live with this update.

Detailed notes of the changes included in this update will be found by following the Patch Notes link once the update is complete.


To discuss this announcement join us on the forums here.

Please use the below thread to discuss the following announcement:


The City of Heroes and City of Villains servers will be coming down on Tuesday, September 11th starting at 6 AM Pacific (9 AM Eastern) to update the game to version 15.20070813.4T. While this version contains the "behind the scenes" goodies for the Character Transfer and Character Rename features, those features will not be going live with this update.

Detailed notes of the changes included in this update will be found by following the Patch Notes link once the update is complete.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this, but I just found this hastily scribbled note on my desk from the City Scoop, our player publication for Supers, by Supers. It says:

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"Don't have long. They're coming. No Scoop this week. Send our regards.

-Scoop staff"

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Don your tinfoil hats, bring your conspiracy theories and join us on the discussion forums to talk this one up!

Please use this thread to discuss the below announcement:


I'm not quite sure what to make of this, but I just found this hastily scribbled note on my desk from the City Scoop, our player publication for Supers, by Supers. It says:

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"Don't have long. They're coming. No Scoop this week. Send our regards.

-Scoop staff"

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