Beta Testing Shards

The Training Room (aka Test Server) is a test server where developers deploy beta version of City of Heroes before moving the version to the live servers. It is a sandbox where players may test changes to their characters or play new content before it is pushed out to the general public.

Reasons to Play in the Training Room

There are four main reasons players may want to play in the Training Room instead of a live server:

• To test permanent changes to their characters before those changes are actually made. For example, if a player earns a powers respecification, he or she can copy that character to the Training Room, respecify his or her powers, and try them out. If the player is unsatisfied, the changes are not reflected on the live servers. If a player wishes to test a different respecification, he or she may delete the character on the Training Room, recopy the character from the live server, and test further changes.

• To play new content. The Training Room receives new content before it is pushed to the live server. If a player wants to play the latest and greatest publicly available content with the knowledge that his or her characters in the Training Room cannot be copied to the live server, the program may be a bit buggy, and the Training Room sometimes gets wiped clean, he or she may play there.

• To engage in Arena PvP. There is a thriving Arena scene on test, with both pickup play and scheduled SG vs SG matches. This is really the only place for a Supergroup to battle a Supergroup from another server.

• To participate in an event. Many community events, including some official events, take place in the Training Room since players can bring characters from any server to it.

How to Play in the Training Room

Important note: You must have space on your hard drive to handle a completely separate copy of City of Heroes for this process to work!

To play City of Heroes in the Training Room, copy the existing icon for the City of Heroes program executable. In the copy, edit the properties so that the target contains the parameter -test at the end. The command line should appear as:

"(path)\CohUpdater.exe" -test

When this shortcut is run, City of Heroes will prompt you for a path, and a new copy, possibly beta, of City of Heroes is downloaded and installed to the path specified. When this program is run after installation and a player logs in, he or she will see only one entry in the server list: Training Room. Select this server and play as normal.

By default, the installation path of the normal City of Heroes game client is C:\Program Files\City of Heores. When the CohUpdater.exe file is run with the -test parameter, the default installation path for the testing client is C:\Program Files\CoHTest.

The test client's installation may be significantly sped up by using the following process:

1. Run cohupdater.exe -test and let the download go for about 2 minutes.
2. Cancel the updater (click Quit in the lower right hand corner)
3. Copy the contents of the piggs subdirectory of the normal client's installation folder (C:\Program Files\City of Heroes\piggs\ by default) to the test client's piggs subdirectory (C:\Program Files\CoHTest\piggs\ by default).
4. Run cohupdater.exe -test again.

The updater then 'fixes' the files in the \piggs\ folder with any modifications currently being tested, which is significantly faster than downloading a new version of every file.

Copying a Character to the Training Room

In addition to simply creating new characters in the Training Room, a player may opt to copy an existing character to the Training Room. This process is a one-way copy only; characters cannot be copied from the Training Room to any live server.

To copy a character, log in to the CoH Character Transfer page and follow the instructions. After a few minutes, your character will show up in the Training Room.

One may copy a character to the Training Room server multiple times, and a unique copy will be created each time. If the character name already exists on the Training Room server, a sequential number will be appended to the characters name. Note that even if a character is copied only once, his or her name may still have a number because characters with duplicate names may be copied from other servers to the Training Room.

Notes

• As of February 2, 2006, characters will retain their influence/infamy when copied from a live server to the Training Room.
• A player's global chat name in the Training Room may be different from his or her global chat name on the live servers. By default, it will be the same as the first character that a player uses in the Training Room. If that character's name has a number appended to it because of the above note, so will the player's global chat handle. Just as on the live servers, a player's global chat handle may be changed once in the Training Room. No chat may take place between live servers and the Training Room.
• It is possible for an existing character to immediately obtain new badges due to the copying process because of lowered requirements on existing badges or because of requirements for new badges already being met.

External Links

• CoH Character Transfer page
• FAQ article about copying characters to the Training Room