The European Servers are back online - Thursday, 11th November 2010

Greetings all,

We have an important announcement for our EU players.

On 11th November 2010 we will be moving our four European servers to a new data centre in the United States. As part of this migration, we will be taking the servers down starting at 5:00 a.m. Pacific Time (1:00 p.m. British Time / 14:00 Central European Time).This migration is expected to take approximately 6 hours, but it could end sooner or later. Check back for updates on the downtime.

This migration will help to centralize the City of Heroes servers allowing for higher quality and more efficient systems management. One location for all of the City of Heroes game servers will make it easier to support and upgrade the hardware. For example, as part of the migration, all of the EU game servers will be upgraded to brand new hardware. Also, it will improve our ability to respond to performance issues and streamline processes for keeping all servers up to date and online.

With the new data centre being located in the United States, it is possible that some of our European customers could experience additional lag when connecting to the game servers. However, the hardware is much newer, more efficient and our testing in most cases has shown no impact on performance. Additionally, customers in Europe will now consistently connect to the game servers through a more robust Internet pipeline. This means that our European players may actually notice improvements to their overall game experience.

This move does not impact your account, characters or game client. You existing account and user information will all be preserved. There is no work necessary on your part to prepare for this migration.

Please note that City of Heroes European game servers can only be accessed by European accounts, and City of Heroes North American game servers can only be accessed by North American accounts. There will be no server list merge or server merge as part of this migration.

Thank you very much for your patience with this matter; we appreciate your continued support of City of Heroes!

Some responses from the EU community;

"Great Chesus!"
"Finally!"
"Amen."

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwillinger GG, I would tell you that "I am killing you with my mind", but I couldn't find an emoticon to properly express my sentiment.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Captain_Photon NOTE: The Incarnate System is basically farming for IOs on a larger scale, and with more obtrusive lore.

It's a start!

When you say no work is needed on our part, would it help/be prudent if we cleared mail and such before hand?

A nice move!
Should quieten the angry mob we've got going for a couple of weeks. Then they'll start on server list merges again.

Is it just me who thinks 6 hours is far too long! infact its a bloody ridiculous amount of time... and on my day off too.
Plus why bring back NCSOFT EU and then move servers are they all gunna be out of a job again or what.
I am sceptical too that our lag wont sky rocket, the reason I got EU version was cause its ....EU! Granted that was 5 years ago and things change but it cant be called EU and be in Ammy



Edit

Good news for the UK players, I guess.

I hope the connection from continental europe to the US has improved in the last few years, because the game was nearly unplayable for me on NA Trial accounts due to heavy lag back in '07.

Okay, the servers are going to be in the U.S.... in the same data center with the U.S. servers. Yet only EU accounts can access EU Servers and US accounts can access U.S. servers.

Yeeeeeeeaaaaaaahhhhh... *tsk*

It seems like the EU guys are really happy about this, but from an IT perspective it sounds pretty dumb, why not just give 'em the whole steak rather than a bone and let 'em access the US servers if'n they want? I'll even go so far as to say EU account holders could have exclusive access to the EU servers.

For me, Superheroes have always been about multiculturalism, so seeing a German, French, or UK SGs running around on my server would be a wonderful thing.

There is a god!

Thank you... finally...

Next stop is to merge accounts and globals and we have one world... one game...

I agree with Liz, this definately sounds like a step towards a server list merge, and in general, I am quite looking forward to this change.

6 hours sounds like a reasonable time to download every data base pertaining to every account thats ever existed on EU, transfer it and verify it. I'm off too, well on a night shift, so I won't be able to play, but im not sad, its one day I can do something different.

Quote:

Originally Posted by VoodooGirl [*]Watching out for the Spinning Disco Portal of D00M!*

Thank you for the post Avatea, this is certainly good news in terms of connectivity and reducing the lag many of us EU players suffer.

Now, although it doesn't say server list merge, this is certainly a step in the right direction. I can only hope that finally bringing this community together as one is on the cards.

I'm shocked, stunned and surprised. And also at a loss for words. I don't know what to say really... It's all in a good way though. Thanks Avatea and others responsible for this.

Whoop whoop, good start. Lets hope it gets better with a list merge in the future.

With the expectation of a server list merge 'any day now' - I have always suspected that if all EU and US account holders could access all of the servers then at some point someone will say - "Hang on! Seth's US account cost's less than mine per month, bla bla bla" or, what would be even worse for NCSoft is if when the exchange rate changes, as it does daily, that there a myriad of US subscribers who refuse to pay anymore on the basis that the EU based accounts were getting a better deal.

I suspect if they do merge accounts NCSoft would have to take some kind of revenue 'hit' to be consistent in price, not easy to implement in a global economy.

prepares himself for pings over 200 and a hilarious gameplay since it was lagging on the european servers with a ping of 110-500 when beeing logged in from germany. so sending the data over the atlantic will definetly improve my ingame perfomance