The next free expansion coming to City of Heroes and City of Villains is now available for testing into the Training Room. An overview of the update is available following this link , while here is the full list of changes.

The Development Team has written an article overviewing the current state of City of Heroes and City of Villains. The article gives a look back to the new features that have been introduced into the game during the past year, particularly with the Issues 9, 10 and 11, and forsee even more new stuff coming during 2008.

Since a few days, the City of Heroes / City of Villains Issue 11 is open for testing in the Training Room. Today the Issue has received an additional update for bugfixing.

Two new pay to use services are now being offered to City of Heroes and City of Villains players: Character Transfer and Character Rename. Additionally, all names belonging to characters below level 6 on accounts that have been inactive and not subscribed for over 90 days, have been put out of the reserved names list, and so are available to everyone.

While players are enjoying the recently released Issue 10: Rikti Invasion, Matt Miller, Lead Designer for City of Heroes and City of Villains, shares a few words about how its development has been, and how bunch of ideas on the paper turned into game features.

Acconding to this City of Heroes forum post , the Issue 10 will also introduce a new Rikti boss, the Rikti Priest.

NCsoft has released this new developer diary talking about the upcoming Issue 10: Invasion that will see heroes and villains joining their forces against a new Rikti invasion.

A COH / COV patch has been released yesterday, fixing some bugged powers for both Heroes and Villains. The classes mostly affected by this patch are Defenders and Corruptors.

The recent release of Issue 9: Breakthrough has also introduced a few more City of Heroes / City of Villains emotes. Check the Matid's website for the animation of most of them, or read ahead for the complete list of available emotes.

City of Heroes/Villains Issue 9: Breakthrough has been officialy released. The highly-anticipated Invention System, a new high-level Statesman’s Task Force for heroes, new Hamidon Encounter for both sides, Consignment Houses and Black Market trading are now all live features.