All U.S. and International servers will come down for an update at 7am PDT on Thursday, April 28, 2011 (3pm BST/4pm CET). The expected downtime for all affected servers is three hours. This update will bring multiple house ownership to the Live servers along with patching in several bug fixes.

The full patch notes are available after the hop.

UPDATE: Expect a longer downtime then the original estimation for this update. The following was announced by Dave "Smokejumper" Georgeson at 9:15am PDT:

Today's housing feature has to do a lot of massaging of the house database elements. This takes a considerable amount of time (a bit like a world merge, actually).

This means that when we take servers down, they will be down for 2 or 3 hours while we do that process. We should have all the servers up by mid-afternoon sometime (Pacific time).

The servers that are currently running are Antonia Bayle, Barren Sky, Harla Dar, Guk, Everfrost, and Unrest.

The next batch will be Splitpaw, Butcherblock, Nagafen, Freeport, Permafrost, Oasis, Crushbone, Valor, Storms, Sebilis, The Bazaar and Vox.

So be patient with us a bit. Multiple House Ownership and Prestige Homes will be here today!

HOUSING UPDATES

• Each character can now own up to 10 houses of any combination (as long as he or she meets the house prerequisites).
• House purchases are now based on alignment rather than citizenship.
• The marketplace house item limit increasers now only apply to a single house. Additionally, the marketplace house item limit increaser will no longer stick with your house as you move from house to house, but it still stacks with the tradeskilled house item limit increaser.

More information and FAQ can be found here on the Official Forums.

GENERAL

• Fixed a client crash bug that sometimes occurs on shutdown.
• Fixed a client crash that sometimes occurred when setting your appearance on the character select window.

USER INTERFACE

• The Character Window has undergone a facelift to make room for additional Housing info and future expansions.
• Target Next/Previous command will no longer clear your existing target if there are no targets in range or in line of sight.
• Fixed a bug when players delete a repeatable quest from their journal the quest wouldn't clean up properly.

POPULATION / ZONE PROGRESSION

• Tower of Frozen Shadow (Raid)
• Necretia Widowmaker should now properly reset when her encounter is failed.
• Adds spawned during the Necretia Widowmaker encounter should no longer double spawn.

Tower of Frozen Shadow: Umbral Halls

• The evil severed hand of your groupmate should no longer spawn multiple times if you have failed to defeat the encounter previously.

Forgotten Pools

• Defeating Lord Doljonijiarnimorinar should now correctly grant the achievement.

ITEMS

• The Coldain Insignia Ring items have had their icons changed.
• Chronoportal Vendor Items:  These items should now only have the Heirloom tag.  Any Lore or No-Trade tags should now be removed.
• The Gore-Imbued Bands pattern should now properly unpack.
• Several Yellow, Red, and War Rune adornment procs will now trigger on both spell and melee hits.

QUESTS

Public Quests

• Completing the highest difficulty level of the Storm Gorge Public Quest now has a chance to grant an adornment pattern selector, instead of a random adornment.

Heritage

• The Embalmer’s Skinning Knife subquests (Besought Baubles and Unhappily Ever After) will only grant experience the first time they are completed.

Hold of Rime: The Fortress Spire

• The third stage of The Contraband Collector can now be updated by defeating the Rime ambush near the docks.

Forgotten Pools

• The quest "Dominance of Velketor's Labyrinth" should now update for the group when one person completes the final boss event.
• The quest "Defeat Lord Doljonijiarnimorinar" should now update for the group when one person completes the final boss event.
• The quest "The Immortal Pest" should now update for the group when one person completes the final boss event.

Source: Station Launcher