How to set up the Training Room (Test Server)

The Training Room is the City of Heroes test server. It's where the devs test out patchs, fixes, and major updates before the changes go live. It also comes in handy for you to try out new powers and slotting on a character, without committing yourself until you are satisfied. It's invaluable when respec'ing, too.

Here are instructions for setting up your system to connect to the Training Room. Before you do this, you should make sure that you have enough space on your hard drive; the Training Room is essentially another full, but separate, install of CoH.

• 1) Go to the directory you installed City of Heroes into (usually "C:\Program Files\City of Heroes"). Copy this entire folder into a new folder. You can do this easily by going to "Program Files" and right-clicking on the "City of Heroes" folder, then selecting "Copy". Next, go to the "Edit" menu and select "Paste". This will make a new copy called "Copy of City of Heroes". Rename this folder to whatever you want. In this case, we'll name it "Training Room".
• 2) Go into the "Training Room" folder (or whatever you called it), right-click on "CohUpdater.exe" file, and select "Copy". Then, right-click on your desktop and select "Paste Shortcut". This will create a shortcut to the updater program on your desktop. You can rename this shortcut to whatever you want, too.
• 3) Right-click on the desktop shortcut you just made, and select "Properties". When the properties window appears, go to the line that says "Target:", put a space after the text there, and add "-test" to the line. For example, if your Target is "C:\Program Files\Training Room\CohUpdater.exe", we want it to read "C:\Program Files\Training Room\CohUpdate.exe" -test. Note: The quotes are necessary if your directory path has spaces in it. To avoid problems, you should probably include them anyway.
• 4) Press "OK".
• 5) Double-click on your new Training Room shortcut. The updater should run and ask you for an installation directory. Make sure that the directory you give it is the directory that you copied your Training Room installation into. You don't want to install this into your normal City of Heroes directory!
• 6) Let the patcher do its thing, and you're ready! Log in just like you normally would. For servers you'll have one choice: "Training Room". Pay attention to the size of the patch being downloaded. Full Issue updates can be large, but if you're seeing that it is downloading a gigabyte or more, then it's probable that you made a mistake in the installation path and it is installing the game into a different spot than you copied your files into. Check over the instructions above and make sure you didn't make a spelling error or something.

If you want to copy your existing characters over to the Training Room to use or test there, use this link. Enter the username and password for your PlayNC account and follow the directions. This will put a copy of whatever character you selected onto the test server for you, exactly as they were at the time you copied them. Note, however, that influence is not copied. Anything you do to your character on the Training Room will not be carried over to your live character, so try out powers, change slots, try to solo that archvillain, etc.