Discussion: May 24th Game Update

Please use this thread to discuss the Announcement of the game update on May 24th.

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Lighthouse
Community Relations Manager

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Damn, LH; that's a wee bit early for you folks to go applying patches, ain't it?

Out of curiosity, any particular reason why?

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Positron: "There are no bugs [in City of Heroes], just varying degrees of features."

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Damn, LH; that's a wee bit early for you folks to go applying patches, ain't it?

Out of curiosity, any particular reason why?

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One of the "behind the scenes" corrections includes a fix for our friends who play on the European servers. The publish time is to simultaneously publish to both the EU servers and the US servers.

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Lighthouse
Community Relations Manager

If you have a specific in game, account, tech or billing problem please contact our Customer Support team via The Knowledge Base "Ask A Question" page.

Ah. Nifty.

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Positron: "There are no bugs [in City of Heroes], just varying degrees of features."

<QR>

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Added kill volumes inside Universities to prevent hostile critters from getting inside. Bad critters!


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What precisely is a kill volume?

And yeah, I'm asking this beacuse I want to make a case that depending on what they are, the game could possibly use a few more of them.

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Scrappers are just like chainsaws. Somewhat hard to handle, EXTREMELY dangerous, and by far the most fun when wielded by the slightly insane.
@Alissara - an Angry Angel
The Angry Angels. When it absolutely positively has to be spanked today.

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What precisely is a kill volume?

And yeah, I'm asking this beacuse I want to make a case that depending on what they are, the game could possibly use a few more of them.

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I'd wager that it's the same kill field surrounding Wentworths and the Black Market. I would have thought that measures were already in place to keep Tsoo Sorcerers and the like from going where they shouldn't, though. You rarely see Sorcerer ambushes in the hospital or stores these days.

And yes, there's a few more places where such fields would be handy, although I'd be happier if they just put up an anti-power field around the consignment houses. Wentworth's is not the place to be running your Sonic toggles!

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Arc #41077 - The Men of State
Arc #48845 - Operation: Dirty Snowball

well hopefully this will not cause anyproblems seeing how we are goning into a 3 day weekend

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Fluffy Bunny 1 Person SG
Rabid Bunny 1 Person VG
Both on Pinnacle
Hobbit's Hole 1 Person SG
Spider's Web 1 Person VG
Both on Freedom

So, in regard to this item:

"Woodsman’s Task Force (the “Eden Trial”) and the Maren MacGregor Task Force (aka the “Sewer Trial”) now have choice tables upon completion. Choice can be a Task Force recipe (i.e. a recipe from the Task Force pool)..."

Is this the official announcement that the Eden Trial and Sewer Trial have been reclassified as Task Forces, or is this imprecise language? And if they are now Task Forces, is the formula that picks the levels of the foes involved going to be adjusted to switch them from the Trial approach to the Task Force approach? (I've been told that one goes off the highest teammate level and the other is fixed; not that I can ever remember which is which since people contradict each other on this point frequently).

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Damn, LH; that's a wee bit early for you folks to go applying patches, ain't it?

Out of curiosity, any particular reason why?

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One of the "behind the scenes" corrections includes a fix for our friends who play on the European servers. The publish time is to simultaneously publish to both the EU servers and the US servers.

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Please if you're going to move the maint time, can you give us a bit more notice. Up to now it has always been the Euro maint time that has moved. I'm in Europe (but started on the US game before the Euro servers), so posting at 3am my time that the servers are coming down at 10am is not much use to me, particularly when I had a TF arranged for the morning.

*edit - the above may not have come across exactly how I meant it, but I would like to emphasize that when the Euro server maint is moved, Bridger usually gives plenty of notice. I'm not against moving the maint, and not saying "always move the Euro maint", but Bridger did say that the occasional moving of Euro maint was the price to pay for having the same consignment house on US and Euro servers.

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It's true. This game is NOT rocket surgery. - BillZBubba

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Please if you're going to move the maint time, can you give us a bit more notice. Up to now it has always been the Euro maint time that has moved. I'm in Europe (but started on the US game before the Euro servers), so posting at 3am my time that the servers are coming down at 10am is not much use to me, particularly when I had a TF arranged for the morning.

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I'd really have liked a bit more notice also.

4 am to 8 am central is my playtime. I enjoy getting my missions in before work. In fact, it is a rare occurrance that I can do anything meaningful w/r to CoH outside this time.

I'm very unhappy about this.

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And yes, there's a few more places where such fields would be handy, although I'd be happier if they just put up an anti-power field around the consignment houses. Wentworth's is not the place to be running your Sonic toggles!

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X2

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/emote drum and /emote drumlow will no longer play sounds (They were impacting performance too much). This is a temporary change to address performance. Look for drum sounds to return in a future build.

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thats nice but what about the howl emote i have a wolf toon that has been rendered mute and it makes him very very very sad

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I'd really have liked a bit more notice also.

4 am to 8 am central is my playtime. I enjoy getting my missions in before work. In fact, it is a rare occurrance that I can do anything meaningful w/r to CoH outside this time.

I'm very unhappy about this.

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I'm afraid this will sound flippant or callous, but no matter when they perform maintenance, someone is going to be inconvenienced. I think you can handle being without CoX for a couple of hours. Gosh, not too many years ago those of us who played online often had games go down unexpectedly for days, even weeks at a time. Of course, we weren't *paying* for the privilege in most cases.

But then what do I know? My total play time here is probably in the range of 6-8 hours per week. Obviously I'm not structuring my life around server uptime.

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I'm afraid this will sound flippant or callous, but no matter when they perform maintenance, someone is going to be inconvenienced. I think you can handle being without CoX for a couple of hours. Gosh, not too many years ago those of us who played online often had games go down unexpectedly for days, even weeks at a time. Of course, we weren't *paying* for the privilege in most cases.

But then what do I know? My total play time here is probably in the range of 6-8 hours per week. Obviously I'm not structuring my life around server uptime.

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I'm aware that hardware/software maintenance is a vital part of maintaining any software system.

Yes, I can live without playing today. I lived without it yesterday because I had to put in overtime yesterday morning.

Yes, people will always be inconvenienced no matter when it is. That is not the issue. The issue is, that this is a deviation from the maintenance pattern that we've come to expect for the past 3 years (Expansions notwithstanding). Furthermore, we got minimal notice on this.

My point:
We players know that every day the server maintenance can occur, but we know WHEN it occurs. In much the same way, WoW players know that Tuesday means no game. In much the same way the last start up I worked at, our customers knew "Oh, it's Friday at midnight, the servers will be down." We got flack when they were down for more than 2 hours.

I'm aware that unexpected outages can and will occur. Its part of life. However, I see nothing here that indicates it is a patch that couldn't be handled the way every previous patch was handled. In fact, the European players have even expressed surprise that the Euro server downtime wasn't moved to coincide with ours. THEY know to expect it.

Therefore, I can say "I don't like this".

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So when are we doing away with negative stealth? The last patch noted that the passive powers like swift and hurdle don't accept sets anymore, which I thought was the entire reason for introducing negative stealth to begin with.

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