Red Tomax's Guide to City of Heroes

City of Data has now been updated to build 17.20080821.9T4 which went live September 24 2008.

After a couple of months working through my backlog of missions to put into the database I'm finally up to date on that front, which means it's time for an update to the City of Data project at last.

So if you've ever fancied being a Night Widow but don't have time to spend on the Test server you can get a glimpse of what's in store for you when i12 goes live over at City of Data.

You'll also notice I've put a lot of work into tidying up the display of powers to hopefully make it a lot easier on the eye. The most obvious example is when looking at a power which grants an enhancement to a set of damage types/defense types. Now, instead of listing the an effect for each damage type, the effects are grouped into one item.

Hopefully I'll be able to keep the site up to date with the changes asIssue 12 evolves on Test server.

Discuss this over in the forum or visit my thread on the official City of Heroes forum.

Four Issues have passed since the creation of the City of Data project. Iakona has since moved on, but thankfully there are other clever folks around who are just as interested in how the game works as he. Thanks to them (and recent changes to the game itself) I am finally able to update City of Data whilst retaining it's focus on accuracy.

As always, if you have any feature requests, or found a bug let me know on the RedTomax.com forums -- generally stuff get's done a lot quicker if someone specifically asks for it :)

I don't know why you'd be interested, but I've been meaning to share these Analytics reports for a while now. 17'250 unique vistors this past month; I wonder what percentage of the "City of" playerbase that equates to?

What's more, in total you guys spent the equivalent of 198 days using the site last month, which I personally find to be an absolutely mind-boggling statistic.

And the site was mostly broken for the best part of the last 4 weeks to boot :)

According to the visitor stats IE is still more popular than Firefox, although only by the smallest margin now. Visitors to the site came from 79 different countries around the world ("Hello" to my 1 visitor from Trinidad & Tobago). At the other end of the scale 71% of all vists originated from the United States; 7% from here in the UK; and in third place, contributing 6% of all visits last month; Canada.

Red Tomax is certainly more popular than Dread Tomax, with over 75% of all page views coming from the City of Heroes subdomain, mind you poor old Dread still hasn't made it out of the 20's in-game so he's used to being the black sheep of the Tomax family I guess.

Interestingly 40% of all traffic to the site is direct, so I guess I've made it into a lot of your bookmarks/favourites; a further 20% of the traffic arrived from Google, and another 10% each from ParagonWiki and the official City of forums.

As you may have noticed I haven't been around much lately and the site has been a bit poorly. I'm in the middle of changing jobs at work (and the small matter of a wedding to organise) so haven't had much time for the site over the past month, in accordance with Murphy's law, everything that could go wrong did go wrong during those weeks.

Here's a quick rundown of some of the fixes put in place today:

• Fixed the problem with non UTF-8 characters getting into the Digest RSS Feeds (the original posts are all ISO-8859-1 encoded)
• Added a link to the original forum post to the RSS feed descriptions, you now can visit the post on the forums directly rather than through the page on RT.com (but please do stop by anyway)
• Fixed issues with Titan Network news not displaying on RT.com.
• Fixed issues with Titan Network authentication not working, added code to better handle it in the future so that if Titan Network authentication is unavailable local account authentication is still possible.

Who knows, I may even finally get the Issue 11 update to City of Data done sometime this week too!

To all my friends on Infinity; I'll be seeing you again soon!