Ghost Falcon

To clarify.

Currently:
Wentworths encompasses ALL North American and EU servers for Heroes. Similarly, the Black Market encompasses ALL North American and EU servers for Villains.

This essentially means that EU players regularly trade with players on the North American servers. It was a decision/feature we made back when we launched the AH system in Issue 9 (that the markets be a global system).

With the Going Rogue expansion launch on August 17th:
There will be "one" market for ALL North American and European servers that will be accessible to any "alignment" (Hero, Villain, Vigilante, Rogue).

Wentworth and Black Market Bid histories will be 'wiped', and will start with a clean slate.

The network issue has been resolved. We're calling an all-clear on this, and will continue to monitor.

The issue has been resolved. We're going to continue monitoring, but we do not anticipate further problems.

Unfortunately, the timing of running the November 18th Winter Event from 4PM-8PM Pacific / 7PM-11PM Eastern doesn't sync up with an optimal EU window. (Note: We want all tests to be performed simultaneously so as not to affect feedback.)

Additionally, we also looked at the number of EU players that logged in for the 2009 Halloween Event Test on the EU Training Room, and based upon the level of participation then, it was decided to focus this on the North American Training Room.

Both of the items above were the determining factors.

For the Winter Event Test, the Global Chat Channel should be : "Winter 2009"

(Now corrected. My error.)

The fix for that is in the 1600.20091102.3T build, and that will be published to all Live Servers (in North America and Europe) tomorrow morning (Thursday, November 12th).

I'll make sure that the Release Notes for 1600.20091102.3T include Release Notes for both 1600.20091102.1T and 1600.20091102.3T for clarity.

Please check out the Release Notes for today's Training Room publish of Build 1600.20091102.1T (published today at 2PM Pacific/5PM Eastern - Thursday, November 5).

We addressed the cursor issue for Mac users (with the Intel GMA X3100 video card).

This afternoon (at 2:00 PM Pacific- November 5, 2009), we will be publishing a new build to the Training Room that will resolve the following Macintosh issues.

Macintosh Client

• Fixed a mouse cursor issue that affected Macintosh users who had the Intel GMA x3100 video card.
• The “Enter” key on the Macintosh Number keypad will no longer have the same functionality as the “Return” key on the keyboard.
  

I encourage Mac Users who were affected by the Intel GMA X3100 mouse cursor bug to download the Mac CoH Test Client, and check the fixes out.

Thanks for your patience!

Note: If you performed this on the Training Room, the Halloween Event is not running on the Training Room.

I'll kick it off on both North American and EU Training Room servers today.

If you see this behavior on the Live Servers, please do not hesitate to /bug it in-game.

Thanks!

Ghost Falcon

We've been monitoring this thread, and have been looking over the Support Tickets submitted to our Tech Support Team.

I've been hesitant to post an update until we:
a) found out how many users were affected,
b) had identified the cause of the problem,
c) had an expectation of when a fix would be delivered to affected customers.

That said, our Tech Support Team has received several reports from Mac users who are using the Intel GMA 950 and Intel GMA X3100 video cards.

• Our Tech Support Team has been holding off on any response to tickets until we could confirm that the cause of the issue had been determined, and we had an idea of how difficult this would be to fix.
• Please note that if you are using an Intel GMA 950 video card, that card is not supported by the City of Heroes Macintosh client.
  • This is noted on the City of Heroes Macintosh Edition product page, as well as on the NCsoft Store.

At this time, our Mac developers have found the cause of the cursor issue, and are working on a solution.

I cannot give an exact timeline or an ETA of when this fix will be patched to the Live servers, but I will post an update (on the CoH Mac forums and on the Training Room forums) of when the fix is ready to be tested on the Training Room (aka Public Test Server).

If you are a Mac user (with an Intel GMA x3100 video card), please file a Support Ticket via this link.

We are monitoring this thread and the Mac forums for Macintosh-specific issues, but the best way for us to determine how many people are affected is for players to submit a Support Ticket.

There will be "one" Global Server Maintenance for all servers located in North America and Europe.

The Global Maintenance (projected 2 hour) window will occur "one" day a week (every Thursday, beginning October 22, 2009), and those times break down to be:

Thursdays
North American time zones
Pacific: 4:00 AM - 6:00 AM (beginning October 22, 2009)
Mountain: 5:00 AM - 7:00 AM (beginning October 22, 2009)
Central: 6:00 AM - 8:00 AM (beginning October 22, 2009)
Eastern: 7:00 AM - 9:00 AM (beginning October 22, 2009)
---
European time Zones
GMT : 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM (beginning October 22, 2009)
Europe/London 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM (beginning 22-Oct-2009)
Europe/Paris / Berlin 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM (beginning on 22-Oct-2009)
---
Oceanic Time Zones
Australia/Sydney 10:00 PM - 12:00 AM (beginning on 22-Oct-2009)
New Zealand/Auckland 12:00 AM - 2:00 AM (at midnight of Oct 22...12:01 AM = Oct 23rd).

(My apologies for leaving any specific time zone or country out.)

Note: I used a web-based Time converter to determine all equivalent times..., so if there are any errors, I blame the Internet.

Please note that tomorrow, October 20th, we have a Publish of a build (1600.20090930.5T2) that is for the 2009 Halloween Event. We had conducted several tests over the past couple of weeks, and made some improvements based upon player feedback.

We did.

We have another Halloween Event test tomorrow at 11:00 AM Pacific / 2:00 PM Eastern to 1:00 PM Pacific / 4:00 PM Eastern on the North American Training Room.

Yes, North American players will be the least affected by this change.

It's a Global maintenance, so the NA servers will have the same once-a-week maintenance.

Yes, exactly.

...a lot of things that 1) keep me up late at night and 2) just contribute to stress related hair loss.

Since I don't think most players want to become bald, I'm going to keep the risks tight-lipped.

(I had a full head of hair when I started this job in 2004...now, however...there's a reason why I wear a baseball cap.)

We're shifting our twice-a-week Global Maintenance to one day, beginning Thursday, October 22nd.

• The next one will be this Friday, October 16th.
• Monday's (October 19th) maintenance has been cancelled.
• Then on Thursday, October 22nd, we'll start the Hardware/Network Global Server maintenance.

Please note that we did not perform a hardware/network maintenance last Friday (10/9) or last Monday (10/12) due to the Double XP / Reactivation, and we postponed the maintenance to yesterday, October 13th.

On days where we have publishes for builds to the Live servers, Server down time is unavoidable.

• Today (October 14th), we published a build to the North American and EU Live servers that resolved a number of bugs. This build was also made to prepare for the upcoming 2009 Halloween / Deadly Apocalypse Event (that will begin on Tuesday, October 20th).
  • Please note that we will probably have an additional maintenance on Tuesday, October 20th to promote a build that should fix some Halloween Event issues uncovered during yesterday's Halloween Event test on the NA/EU Training Rooms.

In all instances where unexpected maintenance periods occur, we've posted those on the Server Status page.

We're reducing the number of weekly maintenances.

Recently, we shifted our hardware/network maintenance schedule from two separate North American and European server maintenance windows to two "Global" maintenance windows per week.

• Server maintenances occurred on Monday and Friday.
  • Two in North America and two in Europe...four total.
• The recent shift brought our maintenance windows from four to two windows.

We've been monitoring the reactions from our Oceanic and EU players, and have decided to move to only one "Global" maintenance window per week beginning Thursday, October 22nd.

• Please note that we are doing this as a test / trial, and the new single-global-maintenance-window-a-week schedule is going to be heavily monitored and evaluated.

If we find that we need to go back to a two-global-maintenance-windows-a-week schedule, we will do so.

This will not affect players located in North America, and will have a greater impact on Oceanic and European players.

All /petition issues are logged, and escalated as necessary. If the /petition turns out to be a bug, it's forwarded on to the QA team for verification and processing.

It's not entirely necessary.

Bug information received from the /bug command goes into a bug queue.

• Bugs filed by multiple users are combined into a single "bug" and assigned an internal tracking number. If more /bug reports come in for that issue, it gets higher visibility, and is then triaged as needed.

Information from the /petition command goes into another queue that is reviewed by our Game Masters (GMs/Customer Support).

Support Issues filed through the website are routed to appropriate departments (i.e. Billing Support, Tech Support, Customer Support, etc.). If those issues are game-related, and not service related, those issues are forwarded on to the Paragon Studios dev team.

Red Skeleton was covering for me while I was out on paternity leave. He did a great job, but has now resumed his previous role on City of Heroes (CoH QA Lead at NCsoft).

Arbiter Kim is a recent new hire in the Paragon Studios QA organization, and we've been training him up to take a more active role with the City of Heroes community. If he sees a forum bug/issue, and the details are not clear, he'll contact players that posted in that thread for further clarification/reproduction steps.

To clarify Arbiter Kim's role:

• If you find a bug when playing the game, please use the /bug command in-game. Whenever you use /bug, certain player information, server and other data is sent along with your /bug submission. The bug is then reviewed, vetted and entered into our bug tracking system.
  • Note: Whenever you use /bug in the game, those tickets are counted and if all player bug reports are only posted on the web or sent via PMs, those cannot be tracked.
• If you want to post your findings to the forums to clarify the bug further and/or discuss the in-game impact, please post to the Technical or Training Room forum sections.
  • Posting bugs to those Forum sections alerts other players to the issue, and players (and/or devs) can confirm whether it's a bug or working as designed.
  • If you feel that you need to alert Arbiter Kim to a specific issue, please PM him with the link.

So to re-iterate, the introduction of Arbiter Kim does not mean that players should stop using /bug, or only send him Private Messages (PMs) with bugs.

Try now.