IAHgames announces no Hellgate character wipe
IAHgames took their time getting a fresh announcement out today, saying that teleconferences ran overtime, but it's just come through in the last few minutes. The word is no character wipe for Hellgate: London in the Asia-Pacific region. The engineers at Flagship Studios have apparently found a way to migrate from the pre-production (beta) character system to the production (patch0 and later) character system without wiping everything clean.
The problem is pinned on the Asia-Pacific region going live 'simultaneously' with the USA servers. Actually, because they're on the Western side of the dateline, they went live the day before the USA, essentially running beta software.
Patch0, the upgrade to the production system included a clear-down of beta characters as a matter of course, and that's been the basic issue here. The Asia-Pacific region has, essentially, been stuck in paid-beta (and paying more for the game than the USA), while the rest of the world has been patching away in production.
IAHGames says that the update, not just to patch0, but to patch0.1 'should be complete by 22 November, 2007' - but as yet no actual downtime has been scheduled.
Guaranteed, the upgrade to patch0 will change your character build, in minor ways at the very least - but that's better than a wipe, right?
