Patch Notes for March 14, 2023

The Curator · March 14, 2023

Name Release System

Animations

Fixed an ancient bug in the animation system that could cause powers from non-weapon-based powersets to not properly set the combat stance. The most common trigger for this was beginning an attack chain with Build Up or a similar self-buff while in the non-combat ready state.

Teaming & Task Forces

Players who are solo and have a Mission Architect arc active can no longer be invited to a team by another player. They must quit the AE arc first in order to be eligible for an invite. This is because AE missions are technically task forces, and being invited to a team sometimes leaves some lingering state that can cause issues if the leader starts a different Task Force after inviting them.
Using the LFG queue to teleport to a contact while solo no longer leaves you in a phantom league with only 1 player. This should help prevent various bugs that can occur if you are subsequently invited to a different league.

Costumes

Certain manual edits to costume files to set fields not accessible through the tailor UI are no longer allowed.
While some were harmless and simply reverted upon zoning, others could be abused to crash a zone instance and disconnect players.
Portions of this change were already applied as a hotfix on March 8 to guard against the possibility of exploitation before the normal maintenance shutdown.

Stability & Backend

Fixed an issue in the backend database code that could rarely cause character transfers (as well as restoration of deleted characters by GMs) to fail.
Fix a mapserver crash that could happen if Group Fly or similar powers that affect all pets were detoggled while the player was being followed by certain non-combat NPCs (lab techs in Warburg are one example).
More performance tweaks to the database to avoid some SQL deadlocks we've been seeing.

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