Hellgate: London giveths and takeths away

Flagship Studios announced some changes to Hellgate: London in the form of Patch 1.3b, which should resolve issues with the ill-fated Patch 1.3a. Indeed, the month of May has turned out to be HellPatch: London for Flagship and HG: L fans, with the patches even being patched. Some players who logged into the Test Server recently found that their characters were gone and, fearing the worst, assumed (incorrectly) that a character wipe had taken place. This was not the case at all; a Test Center database crash was the culprit, and a restore from backup solved the issue. Now that the updated patch has been rolled out, nightly restarts of the live servers have ceased, as of May 20th. The reboots were a precaution to prevent server instability while issues were being resolved.

A notable change in Patch 1.3b is that HG: L now blocks non-subscribers from party portaling into subscriber-only areas. Although this change will likely disappoint the gamers who play for free, a quest NPC previously available only to paying players is now available to non-subs. Whether or not this balances the scales for the non-subs remains to be seen, but portaling into restricted areas would seem to be an exploit. The other changes and fixes in Patch 1.3b are numerous, and affect non-subscribers and subscribers alike. The complete breakdown is found after the jump:

General

• In-game mail has been updated for speedier service.
  

• The donation reward armor bonus (Ares' Bane) now applies bonuses to shields.
  

• The donation announcement now displays the percentage needed to complete the war drive when a donation is made. Donations of 100,000 Palladium or more also announce the name of the character who made the donation.
  

• Subscribers on the Sydonai (EU) server now get full subscriber benefits on the Test Center server.

Skills

• Engineers now have a 12-second shared cooldown time on the Smackdown, Shock and Awe, and Napalm Strike calldown skills.

Fixes

• Fixed equipped weapon mods being lost in Shared Stash.
  

• Fixed a bug where you could see other characters' attributes under certain conditions.
  

• Fixed non-subscribers (who were once subscribers) being able to party portal to a subscriber only area.
  

• The donation announcement now says "Palladium" instead of "gold".
  

• Russian clients should no longer crash on certain donation announcements.
  

• Sammy, a side quest NPC in St. Paul's Station, is no longer subscriber-only.
  

• Fixed the /wave emote.
  

• Fixed items sometimes getting lost when sent via email.

Despite the past technical issues that Hellgate: London has had, it should be noted that the game has undergone some radical improvements since its launch. The revamped mail system and shared stashes alone have improved the game dramatically. Here's hoping that Flagship Studios will continue to enhance Hellgate: London at the pace they have been.
Via QJ