Lighthouse_NA

The update to version 13.20070215.3C went smoothly today. Patch notes can be found here.

All City of Heroes / Villains servers will come down for scheduled maintenance on March 6th, 2007 from 6 AM to 8 AM Pacific (9 AM to 11 AM Eastern).

During this downtime we also plan to apply the update currently on the Training Room for testing that corrects the Known Issue with Trial and Task/Strike Force missions.

In the recent MMORPG.com Developer Diary article by Lead Designer Matt Miller, we announced a closed beta testing stage as part of the process to bring Issue 9: Breakthrough! to the Live servers.

Issue 9 and the Invention System is not a small undertaking. The craftable Enhancements alone consist of thousands of additions to the game. Given this, we are doing everything possible to deliver it to our customers in the best condition possible. This closed beta test is one aspect of that commitment.

Access to the closed beta test will be by invitation only. All participants in this phase of testing will be asked to not disclose the specifics of the test. By controlling just how many are in the beta test, we can better focus and manage testing to get the most out of it. The aim is to deliver a more robust version when entering our open testing phase.

The closed beta is anticipated to last at least two weeks and possibly more. After closed beta, we will be opening up Issue 9 to all players via the Training Room Test Server for a period of at least several weeks.

While we have our internal schedule, I'm being deliberately vague on timeline because it will be impacted by how the testing process proceeds. The bottom line is that we are taking the necessary steps to insure Issue 9 is the best it can be! Our thanks for your understanding and continued support.

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

I'll be making an announcement today regarding the closed testing as well as some further details about the open testing.

Don't worry gang, there is time in the schedule for a LOT of player feedback to help polish the Issue up before release. Everyone who wants to will be given the opportunity.

Matt "Positron" Miller drops by MMORPG.com to give an exclusive developer journal about Issue 9’s coming Invention System.

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We tried to think of new, exciting things that Enhancements could bring to the game. We determined that adding mini-powers to your existing ones had a lot of potential, as the sky would nearly be the limit on what we could accomplish...

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Read the full article on MMORPG.com.

To discuss this article, please join us on the General Discussion Forums.

Matt "Positron" Miller drops by MMORPG.com to give an exclusive developer journal about Issue 9’s coming Invention System.

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We tried to think of new, exciting things that Enhancements could bring to the game. We determined that adding mini-powers to your existing ones had a lot of potential, as the sky would nearly be the limit on what we could accomplish...

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Read the full article on MMORPG.com.

The Pocket D Jubilee event comes to an end. We hope everyone had a great time running the event!

On player pointed out to me that students can get in to the Game Developer Expo on Friday for only $75. If you are in the San Francisco area and are a student interested in attending the expo, check out more information on the Game Developer Conference Web Site.

On February 27th we updated to a new game version. This patch included changes to optimize stability and performance and to standardize animation "rooting" for click powers.

For a complete list of details, be sure to visit the Patch Notes!

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Training Room this weekend to help us test out this new game version. No big issues turned up and we will be promoting it to the Live servers soon.

We have a version of the game that contains a good number of fixes currently on the Training Room Test Server. We are looking to promote this build to the Live servers in the near future. Read the patch notes for what is on Training Room here.

While every new version of the game goes through a rigorous internal testing process, we are always very interested in player feedback. If you haven't transferred characters to the Training Room before, please see this post about how to do that.

After you have played on the Training Room, please visit the Test Server Forum to give us your feedback.

Thanks for helping to test this build!

The City of Heroes / City of Villains Community Team will be attending this year's Game Developer Conference, March 5-9 in San Francisco.

While this is an industry event and not open to the general public, we wanted to put the word out to any of our customers who may be in the area or in attendance. I'll be there along with Ex Libris. NCsoft and Cryptic Studios will be doing private demos for the press showing off Issue 9. We are finalizing our schedule for the show and if you are going to be around, drop me a private message via the forums and let me know. It would be great to meet some other Super Heroes! (or at least gamer geeks)

Hey TonyV, I moved your post over to the Screenshots and Fan Art section. I think you'll find more people here who may be interested in your logo contest.

You might consider just asking for people to submit what they come up with, rather than all 12, and then collect your 12 submissions you like the most and rotate through those. They wouldn't have to all be from one person? Or maybe I read that wrong. Wouldn't be the first time

Have fun!

FileFront's exclusive trial has ended. We hope that everyone who downloaded and tried out the game had fun!

Maintenance has been completed and all servers are online and available.

City of Heroes and City of Villains US Live Servers will undergo server maintenance from 6 AM to 8 AM Pacific Time (9 AM to 11 AM Eastern) on Wednesday, February 21st.

This maintenances is hardware and network related and no change to the game or update will be done.

All issues are resolved and all servers are online and available!

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Thanks again for the clarification.

Do you guys at least understand WHY we're saying this though?

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Yes, we hear you and understand.

Please again take note of Doctor Brainstorm's original post:

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Now I hear you guys... you all seem to dislike the Story Arc aspect of this system. I've had some discussions with the team yesterday about what we could do instead, and still keep the flavor of the four pool system, because having the extra three pools allows us to not only reward risk/reward, but time/reward as well. Takes longer to do a Task Force? Here's a nice bonus you can't get anywhere else. Finish the Respec trial, but already have all your Respecs? Here's a nice reward that carries with it some good inherent value.

Now again, I must stress, the majority of sets, including entire complete sets come from simply defeating enemies. All the costume piece and temp power recipes come from defeating enemies. There are Rare recipes (ones that have a worse chance to drop than others) in Pool A (the defeating enemies pool) as well.

We also will be actively monitoring datamining on every aspect of this system through all of Training Room and into Live.

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Lighthouse, my own personal opinion is this:

If we can't go back and do our story arcs, and there's no way we can sway you from granting reciepes off them, then why can't we just award a reciepes to the whole team, when a story arc is completed? Sure this would cause a lot more reciepes to be accessed, but the chance would still be unlikely that you would get an ultra-rare drop out of it.

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Ok, sure, it would have been best if Inventions had been in the game all along and you got them as you did Story Arcs, but I don't think that should preclude the team from adding extra "stuff" to those arcs.

Of course, we want to give people a way to get that same "stuff" via different methods if you have already done that arc. This is exactly what the good Doctor refers to in his post. The team is looking at that. We certainly appreciate your input on the subject.

All west coast servers will be coming down for a quick reset to correct the above problem.

West Coast servers include: Justice, Virtue, Protector, Champion and Guardian.

These servers should be down by 11 AM Pacific / 2 PM Eastern and be right back up shortly thereafter.

The City of Heroes / Villains Operations Team is currently working to resolve an issue affecting servers in our West Coast Data Center and the ability for players to log in. This issue can cause servers to appear offline at the server select screen.

West Coast servers include: Justice, Virtue, Protector, Champion and Guardian.

Our thanks for your understanding and patience while we work to resolve this issue.

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Lighthouse, my own personal opinion is this:

If we can't go back and do our story arcs, and there's no way we can sway you from granting reciepes off them, then why can't we just award a reciepes to the whole team, when a story arc is completed? Sure this would cause a lot more reciepes to be accessed, but the chance would still be unlikely that you would get an ultra-rare drop out of it.

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I think we are both saying the same thing. We hear you and ze good Doctor understands your feedback. Positron is twiddling at the workbench now. Have faith! Thanks!

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Just so you know. The actual Trials shouldn't take longer than 1.5-2 hours each. Some can be cleared in as little as an hour if you know what you're doing. TFs depend a bit more on which one you're doing, but again, most can be done in 3-4 hours by a team that knows what it's doing.

Even Posi and the Shard TFs. It's obviously still a major commitment but if you're teamed with sane people, chances are noone will complain if you need to take out the occasional 10-15 minutes to address real world concerns. That's just the breaks, and people accept that in my experience.

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Someone is obviously lucky enough to never have to PuG. Good For You. Now How about the rest of the players in the game?

I know that *I* personally want something that is fair to all players and all skills and all capabilities, guilded or unguilded, uber or noob, PL's and Casual, not just the few elite. Give the few elite a Bonus, a Reward, sure, just not exclusive rights.

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Please keep in mind this section of the Original Post:

Now again, I must stress, the majority of sets, including entire complete sets come from simply defeating enemies. All the costume piece and temp power recipes come from defeating enemies. There are Rare recipes (ones that have a worse chance to drop than others) in Pool A (the defeating enemies pool) as well.

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Inventions has been touted as something that shelved level 50's can partake in. Level 50's that have completed all their story arcs already. Please, how can both of those occur? Level 50's can not experience IO's if they are locked out of acheiving specific rewards because they happened to hit the level cap before I9.

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Doctor Brainstorm wrote:
It's like I said, we are looking into other options that keeps the mechanic of the four pool system. Our intention is to not make people feel "gimped" for previously completing all their story arcs.

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Please keep this in mind when posting. No need to get too worked up folks! We appreciate the feedback, thanks!

Issue 9: Breakthrough, the ninth upcoming free expansion since the launch of City of Heroes® in April 2004, introduces a host of innovative features, including the highly-anticipated Inventions system, Auction Houses, and new high-level content.

Read more about Issue 9 here!