Positron

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We've added a TON more datamining hooks exclusively for Mission Architect as well, so we can easily see spikes in aberrant behavior. Spikes point us to exploits, which points us to log files, which reveal the identities of exploiters. So if you find a really big exploit in the system, I'd encourage you to PM me or another Dev and try to get your Bug Hunter badge, as the alternative is not pretty.

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I really realy really don't like the wording here. I wonder just what is considered an expliot. You called running KHTF once every three hours an expliot so I wondering what "exactly" is meant here by expliot?

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If your personal moral compass flip flops or even wavers a little while doing something in the game that is obvious to you is not intended behavior, it's probably an exploit.

Re: Badges, and why they don't count

This Mission Architect primary purpose is for telling stories. We do not want people to spend days making a great story only to find it shuffled into a list of missions with titles like "Get your Rikti Monkey badge here", "10 badges in 5 minutes", "Down on the AV Farm", etc. etc.

That said there are a lot of badges available to earn in Mission Architect. A good chunk of them are only in "test mode", so if you REALLY just want to farm those badges, you don't need to publish the mission (actually you CAN'T publish the mission) in order to earn it.

Re: Ratings

Yes, your rating is preserved when you re-publish a mission. This allows for an author to fix a typo without worrying about losing his 5 star rating.

HOWEVER.

The threshold for "pull for inappropriate content" IS reset. So if you make a 5 star mission arc, pull it, and change every text field into random entries from Urban Dictionary, it will get pulled down just as fast as a brand new arc. Probably faster, since it has greater exposure. Oh and you'll probably get banned for griefing too.

Re: Unrated stuff

I believe there are badges for rating unrated arcs, or arcs with a low amount of ratings, to encourage people to play them and rate them. I need to double check if these made it into the feature complete feature list.

Re: Dev Choice Badge

Expect to see a LOT more Dev Choice badges than Bug Hunter badges. We give out 10 or so BH badges a year. We expect to be Dev Choice-ing a LOT more arcs than that.

Re: Ticket System

This system is in place so that we can better control the non-XP, non-Inf. rewards that are handed out by the system. Since the Architect determines a lot of the details of the mission, this puts a great amount of control over drops into their hands. With tickets, we can set a threshold that is simply unsurpassable.

That said, we want the ticket system to mirror in quality and quantity of reward as compared to the bulk of the normal game as much as possible. The idea being that if you levelled a character from 1 to 50 exclusively in Mission Architect, you won't be gimped or OP as compared to a level 50 that never touched the system.

Re: Exploitive Behavior

Now, I am not going to say we've covered EVERY edge case, but we've covered every edge case we could think up. Suffice it to say that if you have read everything here and have a "great idea on how to break the system", chances are we've thought of it and made it impossible.

We've added a TON more datamining hooks exclusively for Mission Architect as well, so we can easily see spikes in aberrant behavior. Spikes point us to exploits, which points us to log files, which reveal the identities of exploiters. So if you find a really big exploit in the system, I'd encourage you to PM me or another Dev and try to get your Bug Hunter badge, as the alternative is not pretty.

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Looking better all the time but I didn't see an answer on the statement below. (I could have missed it, lots of posts!)

At what level s the MA useable?

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City of Heroes
Issue 14: Architect

snip......


At the high level we allow you to create your own stories and share them with others in the game.


snip.......



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(Yes, not everyone has a level 50. I played too many other games over the years!)

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You can create stories and play them as early as level 1.

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Will players have to complete arcs before they are able to rate them (please, please, to make it harder to grief or game the system).

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If they have to complete them before rating them, how do they give low ratings to ones that can't be beaten?

(See your previous post for an example of when they'd want to do this.)

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You do not need to complete the arc to rate it. If you start an arc and find that the creator put in random characters into all the text fields, and there are no mission goals written for you, you can 1 star it immediately and exit and get on with doing something fun.

Oh.

And you can't publish a mission that can't be "beaten". It might be hard, but the error checking makes sure that whatever you make is possible to complete.

Here’s some detail into the badge systems that several of you have deduced through reasoning and sometimes nefarious means.

When badges were introduced back in issue 2, we had the ability to give them a Name and a Description, and all the badges got these (of course). When City of Villains was in development, it was determined for those characters to use the same badge system as the original one for clarity sake (no sense in having two datasets floating around). We added a couple more fields to the database: V_Name and V_Description. These are used when your character has the “villain” bit turned on.

Now back then, I was the one in charge of all the badges, so I went and looked at all of them and wrote villainous names and descriptions for the badges that villains would be able to earn. In the process I had come across several badges that were “impossible” for the other side to get, “Positron’s Ally”, “Villainous”, etc.

I discussed with Jack and Poz what to do, and we had a plan back then. We knew it would someday be possible for a villain to turn into a hero or vice versa, so it was decided that the “impossible to get” badges should have titles and descriptions entered that reflected your “going rogue” status.

Thus (for example) “Positron’s Ally” has a V_Name of “Positron’s Betrayer”. “Villainous” is the V_Name, and so the Name (as seen by hero) is “Reformed”. The descriptions were entered to reflect a character that started on one side and switched to the other. There are literally dozens of badges with this sort of nomenclature in them.

These went through testing and betas and launched with Issue 6: Along Came a Spider. It wasn’t until the badge system got the pounding of the entire playerbase that a lot of cracks in the system became exposed. Most of these got shored up between issue 6 and issue 7, a couple persisted through to later issues, and one was thought to be fixed, but wasn’t really. That was the infamous Reformed badge. A badge which was able to be earned through a Villain character hitting a Hero character with Confuse while in Siren’s Call, enabling the Hero to now attack, and defeat, Longbow, and thus earn credit for the badge.

Fast forward to Issue 10: Invasion. We now introduced a mission that heroes could take that involves them going up against rogue Longbow agents. Suddenly there was a “legitimate” way to earn the badge. I use quotes around that because earning the badge involves farming the mission over and over to get the requisite 1000 defeats needed for it.

Fast Forward to Issue 13: Power and Responsibility. I am no longer “the man” when it comes to badges. Phil “Synapse” Zeleski has the dubious task of managing these and a lot of the other reward systems in CoH/V. I know how much work this is and how hard it is, and when Phil started delving into the datafiles he had a lot of questions. The Reformed badge was one of them, and I (wrongly) told him that it shouldn’t be available to Heroes at all. Dutifully Phil then put a “requires = villain” on the badge, thus killing any chance Heroes had of getting the badge, however the progress bar’s requirement was left to “any”, so Heroes would see their progress bar, just not be able to actually achieve the badge.

Again Phil asked me how to handle this: remove the meter, or let Heroes get the badge. I made the wrong decision (again!), and had Phil simply remove the progress meter. Yes, I had heard the concerns of a few vocal badge aficionados, and I fell on the wrong side of the argument (it’s amazing, but sometimes being insulted makes you feel MORE right than you probably should).

After sitting down with Phil and going over the history of EVERYTHING badge related with this issue, Phil and I decided to go back and reinstate the Reformed badge for Heroes. This will be in Issue 14: Architect, but your credit should still be being counted from now until that releases. Of course, you have no progress bar, and something might have happened elsewhere that I don’t know about, so if you really want to make progress towards the badge, I would wait until Issue 14 is released to do it.

In a recent patch, we removed the ability to have the conversion of old base-salvage to new invention salvage count towards the overall “crafting” badges. This is a change to the methods I had previously said would count towards earning those overall crafting badges.

The reasoning behind this change was it made these badges a little TOO easy to get, there is a lot of Base Salvage sitting around in storage racks gathering database dust. Crafting the actual base items still count towards the badge (as they always have), it’s simply the conversion from Base-to-Invention that has been removed from counting.

We’re going to see what this does to the numbers of characters earning the Crafting badges through datamining. If, by the time Issue 14 is getting ready to launch, we see that it is now too hard to achieve those badges, then we will make another change to them (not saying that we will make the conversion count again, but that remains an option on the table in that case.)

Here’s a bit of a teaser: We have big plans for these (and other) badges, and we really want them to mean something to your character. If you are in a dialog tree that involves creating something, we have the ability to look at your badges and see if you have taken the effort to prove yourself as a crafter. This effort would be rewarded with special options in the dialog tree that earn you better results, enable you to skip steps, etc. For this system to work, we’ll need them to be a reasonable indicator of the amount of work a crafter has put into crafting. And it’s not just dialog trees that are going to look at badges, and it’s not just crafting badges that will be looked at, so you guys can speculate away!

A lot of concern was voiced about the last patch going live with several issues in it still not fixed.

While these issues are worthy of our attention, and are being worked on, there were several behind-the-scenes fixes that were not apparent to players. Some client crash bugs were fixed, as well as a couple of server stability issues.

We had a small, very small, window in order to get these fixes to the live servers in time for Double XP weekend. To ensure our players would have the smoothest experience possible for that weekend, we made sure that the client and servers had as many of their game-killing issues fixed as possible.

With Double XP weekend now in the past, we can now go ahead with releasing fixes for some of the bigger, more obvious, yet not game-killing, bugs on the known issues list. We’re also rapidly moving towards getting Issue 14 beta onto the Training Room, and when that happens, further Issue 13 fixes will need to be rolled into Issue 14. We don’t want to close out 13 until we feel that we have nailed all the big-ticket issues, but we also don’t want Issue 14 to be kept out of your hands any longer than is absolutely necessary.

Several players have noted that some patch notes do not show up on the Training Room and somehow the fixes themselves make it to Live.

We have the ability to mark some patch notes as “Exploit Fixes”. What this means is that the patch note is suppressed on training room, but revealed when the notes are posted when it hits the live servers.

Why?

It’s simple. Even though there might be exploits, and you know about them, and you think EVERYONE knows about them, that’s not always the case. There are some exploits that only one or two people have discovered and reported (it usually earns them the Bug Hunter badge for doing so). For example, if the Training Room patch notes had the following:

• Using the “/em newspaper” emote while talking to Ms. Liberty and putting an enhancement slot into Rest will no longer level your character to 50.

You can bet that on each and every Live server there would be 20 instances of Atlas Park with characters talking to Ms. Liberty that very night.

Now marking something as an Exploit is a judgment call from the person writing the patch note. We’ve gone to great lengths to ensure players are as informed as possible, but we usually err on the side of caution, especially when we don’t know how long a patch will be sitting on Training Room before hitting live. We’re not out to screw you, we’re just trying to preserve the integrity of the game, and sometimes we can be a little overzealous when it comes to that.

Oh, and don’t go and try the “newspaper trick” on Ms. Liberty. I made that up as an extreme example. I am sure some of you are going to try it anyway, though. All you will end up doing is putting a slot into Rest while reading a newspaper.

Actually, it means you can SKIP taking the first or second power in the Travel Power Pools and, at level 6, pick the travel power immediately. No pre-requisites.

Hey Mac Players!

The Mac version of City of Heroes is now in Open Beta. This means that the Mac clients can only access the Training Room, and we have lifted all the restrictions for PC users who can also access to the Training Room. You will start to see a lot of new faces as more and more Mac players come in for their first taste of City of Heroes.

If you are one of those new faces, I would like to say “welcome!” I was very excited when our partner TransGaming showed us what they could do to get City of Heroes running on the Mac, and immediately wanted to get this into the hands of Mac players as soon as possible. Of course, we also want to make sure we have worked out as many of the kinks and bugs in the Mac client as possible, and unfortunately that has caused us to push the full release of the Mac version of City of Heroes to January, 2009. We are very confident that by that time we will be able to offer you the best in super-powered massively multiplayer gaming for the Mac.

Once again, welcome to the new players, and I hope you enjoy our game and our player community!


-Matt “Positron” Miller

Hey all,

I have been reading the thread that Ex set up with all your questions about the Merit system, why we are doing what we did and what our future plans for it are.

Phil "Synapse" Zeleski is the guy with all the answers. He and I have gone over your questions and he speaks for the entire design team on this subject.

With that said, take it away Synapse...

Good day everyone!

As you can all see now, Issue 13: Power and Responsibility is now in Open Beta. This means that anyone and everyone who has an active City of Heroes account can try out the issue on the Training Room server. We’re just a few short weeks away from releasing this to the Live servers, so we are hoping you will all try Issue 13 and report any bugs you find so we can have a smooth release. If you aren’t familiar with connecting to the Training Room Test Server, you can find instructions on how to do that on the Training Room Forums.

I’d like to take this time to go into more on the designs for some of the new stuff in Issue 13.

Patron and Epic Power Pools:
First off, we’ve made some changes to the Villain Patron and Hero Epic Power Pools. We know that these have been out of balance for a while, so in bringing Patron pools up to the same level as Hero pools, we’ve made a lot of changes to both side’s high level powers. We did extensive datamining on power choices, how they were being utilized, and damage outputs. In the end we tweaked several powers and removed some, replacing them with (what we think) are far more useful ones. We were very cautious in removing powers; it’s not something we ever do lightly. We only do it where there was a huge disparity in how often it is chosen over another power. That to us points to severe problems with that power even being in that pool to begin with.

Merit System:
Next up, we have a new Merit System for playing through content in the game. Players will no longer need to “farm” particular missions or Task Forces for a specific IO. Now you can accumulate Merits and simply purchase that IO outright from the new Merit Vendors sprinkled throughout Paragon City and the Rogue Isles. Practically everything you do in the game earns you Merits now and the amount you earn is based on our datamines on how long particular things take to accomplish in our game. This means that really fast Task Forces or Trials will earn you fewer Merits than ones that take longer to complete. Merits don’t have a level associated with them either, so you can earn Merits in your low-level career, and save them up to purchase IOs that will be most useful when you are level 50. The choice is now in your hands, and out of the random drop tables these missions had previously.

Bases:
We’ve made some changes to the way players deal with bases. Overall things got a lot less expensive, Prestige-wise, in bases. This means that smaller SGs should be able to accomplish more with their bases now. If your SG wants to take advantage of the new, lower, prices, you’re going to have to do a little work in selling the older items, and buying the new, lower priced items. It’s an unfortunate artifact of the way the base system was designed that we can’t just refund your SG the difference straight away. We’ve also eliminated the need for Base Salvage. Now everything in bases can be built with Invention Salvage. You will even be able to convert all that extra Base Salvage into Invention Salvage to help get rid of the extraneous items your SG has probably accumulated. This change will help smaller SGs build cooler stuff faster, as well as give large SGs a benefit for all their hard work so far. Don’t worry, the storage containers in bases will now be able to hold a small amount of Invention Salvage as well now.

Leveling Pact:
We’re adding in a brand new feature for new characters and new players to get acclimated to the game with Leveling Pacts. Characters that are level 5 and under can form a permanent bond that will evenly split all XP they ever earn, keeping them in perfect level sync their entire careers (unless they decide to break the Pact). It’s superior to Sidekicking because the split happens even if one half of the duo isn’t on-line! They will be able to log in later and be treated to the XP they would have earned had they been on-line and playing with their partner anyway. This is the perfect way for a couple of close knit buddies to make sure they always have characters “in sync” even if one plays more often, or at different times, than the others. This feature will initially launch with the low-level limit on initiating Pacts, as well as only being able to Pact two characters together. It’s a brand new way of dealing with our reward system, so once we are happy with how things are working out, we can look into raising the maximum entry level on Pacting as well as the number of characters that can be Pacted together.

PvP Changes:
We’ve also overhauled our PvP system in such a way that the changes do not affect PvE. We’ve ignored PvP as “good enough” for long enough. The previous systems were “ok” and have a very vocal and devoted fan-base, but we plan on incorporating more and more PvP features into City of Heroes and City of Villains. In order for us to do that we really need a solid foundation of the core PvP gameplay. We are trying to make PvP more accessible to new players, while giving experienced PvP’ers the advantage that comes with formulating tactics around the new systems we’re putting in place. PvP from now on will be on our priority list. If something isn’t working out, we’ll be in there tweaking it and making it work, for the entire future of the product, not just Issue 13.

Multi Builds:
Be sure to check out the new “Multi-build” feature. You can access this feature by visiting any level-up Trainer in the game. Here you can make an alternate build, or switch between the builds that you have. We are initially launching this feature with only two builds available to work with, but the feature has the capability of dealing with more, should we ever find a need for third, fourth, or more, builds.

Day Jobs
Finally, I want to talk about Day Jobs. These are rewards your character earns for logging out for extended periods in certain in-game locations. These rewards are varied, depending on the job your character was working on. I hope that you all find these as fun and exciting as we had in designing them. I look forward to the role-playing that players will do incorporating their “Day Job” into their crime fighting (or crime committing) regime.

Play Issue 13 Open Beta Now On the Training Room!
I am sure you will hear from me more as we get closer to launching Issue 13 to the Live servers, but for now, have a blast trying out these features and helping us polish them up for their final launch to Live in the coming weeks.

Matt “Positron" Miller
Lead Designer


For Open Beta Patch Notes, Known Issues and Discussion, please visit the following forums:

The Training Room (Test Server)
Issue 13 Feedback & Discussion (Open)
Issue 13 Bugs (Open)

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This is what i want to know. A friend of mine plays COH in her Mac through Bootcamp and she's dealing with crash issues. Will she have to rebuy the game to get the Mac version or can she just download the mac client from her account page?

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She can download the Mac client for free when it is released.

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Stark, you raise a good point. They did say you don't have to open a new account, but do we need to buy the package anyway? Good question.

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No, you will be able to just download the client for Mac, with no cost involved (no "exclusive goodies" if you do though). If you have an active CoH subscription, you can play on Mac or PC.

And to answer another question while I am here...

Yes, these are all on the same servers as the PC players. There are no "Mac only" servers. PC users will be able to play and team with their Mac friends.

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How will this affect people who have macs and already have accounts? (I dont have a Mac, I'm just wondering)

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Your game account will work no matter which client you are using.

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How does the counter work? If I am logged out for 8 hours do I get a 1/3 of a day credit, or do I need to be logged out the full day. I assume it's the first

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The counter is based on seconds, so every second you are logged out you are getting credit.

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i remember seeing some where that the day job badges were linked to costumes

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Day job badges are NOT linked to costumes.

The day job related costumes are free, unlocked at the start, content in Issue 13.

And the 30 days is what we are initially going with. The values may change in beta.

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Positron the thirty days is cumulative and not consecutive right?

Poison Pill

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Not consecutive.

You can log out for 6 days, play for a couple hours, then log out for 6 more days, and you will have 12 days progress towards your badge/accolade.

As for people worried that this won't get tested during Beta... you forget we have access to Mender Silos, Ouroboros, and the Pillar of Ice and Flame... we can manipulate time. It's a perk.

(For those who do get into beta, you will notice that the "Time to Earn" is DRAMATICALLY reduced, for exactly the reason of testing the rewards and badges. Around the time of Open Beta, the times will be restored to a far less accelerated state, and we can ensure those are working before we go to Live)

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i remember seeing some where that the day job badges were linked to costumes

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Day job badges are NOT linked to costumes.

The day job related costumes are free, unlocked at the start, content in Issue 13.

And the 30 days is what we are initially going with. The values may change in beta.

Good morning! When we announced Issue 13: Architect a couple weeks back, we were overwhelmed by the positive response. Much of the feedback was centered around the Mission Architect system which allows players to create their own missions and story arcs. We have been actively following forum threads and private messages about the feature, and have even discussed it with players in person at the Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle.

It became apparent that you guys really want this feature, but in order to fully realize your dreams of writing your own missions you need creative control in one more key area: The ability to create “customized” characters to fight with or against in your missions. Adding custom characters has always been on our Mission Architect feature list, but we had considered it a “stretch goal.” That is, we could launch the system without this feature because our confidence was high that the rest of the system was incredibly robust.

But after listening to you guys, we realize that this feature simply must be in at launch. You have convinced us that it is an integral part of the Mission Architect, and we have reworked schedules and timelines to accomplish this. Rather than push the launch of Issue 13 out completely for one (albeit really cool and very complex) feature, the Mission Architect is going to see a slight delay. What is not going to be delayed is the rest of Issue 13. To that end, the previously announced feature set for Issue 13, together with new features that we are announcing today, will become Issue 13 and Issue 14.

Issue 14 will take on the name "Architect" and contain the Mission Architect feature along with other features we'll announce at a later date. We are planning Issue 14: Architect to be released in the first Quarter of 2009. Issue 13 is now called "Issue 13: Power and Responsibility" and be launched in the Fall of 2008.

Issue 13: Power and Responsibility
Issue 13: Power and Responsibility will contain the bulk of features we've announced previously, including:

• Shield and Pain Domination powersets
• Merit Reward system
• Day Jobs (that include a suite of new costume pieces)
• Additional Cimerora and Midnight Squad mission arcs

In addition, we have some other new exciting features to reveal that will be included in Issue 13: Power and Responsibility. These include:

• Leveling Pact
• Multi-Builds
• PvE & PvP Powers rebalancing
• Villain Patron Power Respec
• Supergroup Base Repricing

Over the coming weeks we’ll be providing more details about the above points, but let me give you an overview of some of them now.

The Leveling Pact: A new innovation to MMOs, this groundbreaking system allows you and a buddy to create new characters and have your XP be permanently in sync, whether both characters are online or not. You will always be the same level, even if your buddy plays ten times more often than you do! It’s sort of like “Extreme Sidekicking.”

Multi-Builds: Another innovation to City of Heroes, we are delivering the ability to have two different build-outs of each character, including which powers are selected and which Enhancements are slotted. This will now be possible for characters who want to take advantage of it. By visiting any Trainer you can switch the entire build of your character to an alternate one. You can use this separate build for whatever you like. If you wish to use different power selections for soloing and groups, you can do that. This even makes it possible to have different IO sets slotted for PVP and PVE. It’s up to you.

PvE and PvP Powers Rebalancing: Floyd “Castle” Grubb and the powers designers have been hard at work in finding ways to strike a better balance between the many powers in the game. The scope of what they are doing is too broad to go into details here, but we're very excited and we’ll share more information soon. Suffice it to say that we know that you don’t want your PvE powers adjusted because of how they play in PvP, so we’re taking a new tact in power balancing with Issue 13.

Summary
Issue 13 was so big we had to turn it into two releases, Issue 13: Power and Responsibility and Issue 14: Architect. Issue 13 will be going into beta soon and launching this Fall. It will include most of the previously announced features of Issue 13, and then some. Issue 14: Architect will include the full-featured Mission Architect and is scheduled to launch to the live servers in Q1, 2009. I am really looking forward to getting Issue 13 into your hands as soon as possible, and starting off a kick-[censored] 2009 with the release of Mission Architect.

Matt "Positron" Miller
Lead Designer, City of Heroes/Villains

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Dear Positron,

Good afternoon. Thank you for responding to our questions for more information about Issue 13.

And on a side note. Please fix the store so that I can purchase Booster Packs for other players as gifts. I'd like to purchase 10 or so of these for my friends that also play. Plus I'd like to give you my money to help with the development of my favorite game. However, since I only have 1 account and I can't very well purchase 10 Cyborg Packs for 1 account then I guess that I'll have to keep the money that I would have liked to have given to your company.

P.S. Rocket Pack costume items please.

Thank You.

- Peregrine Falcon

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Dear Peregrine Falcon,

Thank you for your feedback. We would LOVE to come up with a way for players to "gift" our Super Boosters to other players. The real problem with this lies in credit card fraud. It may seem like a simple problem, but it's really very complex. Once we have a workable solution that Billing and Customer Service can sign off on, we will allow players to gift Microtransactions post haste.

Yes, yes, Rocket Packs are on Sexy Jay's todo list, I just am not exactly clear on when they will be done.

Hope this clears things up for you a little bit.

Ok, we know.

We should have had said something more by now, about Issue 13. But… like all great architectural endeavors, Issue 13 is taking on a life of its own and we’re not quite ready to spill forth all the information.

So, just a quick note to say thanks for your patience, even though we know you may not really be patient. Trust us, it’s coming; we’re working on it – and there’s more great stuff coming (like you haven’t heard that before, but really, we mean it!)



Thanks!

Just a quick follow up:

We have no plans of getting rid of freespecs. Each Issue that brings with it major power changes (which is pretty much every single one, eh?) will bring a freespec with it.

We have no plans of getting rid of the respec trials.

We have no plans of getting rid of the dropped Respec Recipes.

We have no plans of getting rid of the Veteran Respecs that your account earns.

This is simply another way to get a Respec onto your character.

NCsoft NorCal Studios is pleased to announce the pricing and details for the coming Optional Additional Character Slot feature. As we previously announced, we heard the request for a system to allow more characters on a single server and this is our answer. City of Heroes is a unique game that offers many playstyle options; options that are growing in a large way due to Powerset Proliferation and the addition of the Villain Epic Archetypes in the next free expansion, Issue 12: Midnight Hour. To accommodate playing more characters on your favorite server, we will be including the following features in Issue 12:
<ul type="square">[*] All current subscribers will receive 2 free character slots, each of which can be used on the specific server of their choice. This is to help you make new characters to take advantage of the new features of Issue 12, even if you already have maxed out your “home” server’s character slots.
[*] 1 free character slot will be granted retroactively on a yearly basis through the current Veteran Reward system. Every 12 months that a subscription is maintained will unlock an additional free character slot that the user can apply to the server of their choice. Thus, existing players will be eligible for up to 4 additional character slots at the launch of Issue 12. This will continue into the future for Veteran Rewards given out every 12 months, so you get another slot for 5 years, another one for 6 years, etc.
[*] Additional Optional Character Slots will be available on a purchasable basis. These are one-time fees, not an addition to your monthly subscription rate. The additional slots can be had at the following price points:

• 1 Optional Character Slot for a one-time fee of $5.99
• 2 Optional Character Slots for a one-time fee of $9.99
• 5 Optional Character Slots for a one-time fee of $19.99
[*] Players can have up to 36 slots per server, with an update to the character selection screen that lets you re-organize your character list by Drag and Drop, as well as easily flip between up to three pages of characters available on that server. All customers benefit from these great new User Interface features included with the revisions for Optional Character Slots.[/list]The above features are planned to be made available at the launch of Issue 12: Midnight Hour, which is currently in closed beta testing. Be sure to check out this feature, along with the rest of Issue 12 when we enter the open beta testing period that should be starting in several more weeks.

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Have to fix BAB's list for accuracy:

Cryptic:
1. Positron
2. BAB
3. Castle
4. Ghost Widow
5. War Witch
6. Constellation replaced by Hero 1 (story bible)
7. JLove
8. Ken Morse (Art Lead)
9. Nick replaced by Don Pham (environmental/3D artist)
10. Brett replaced by Graham
11. Blue Steel (design support)
12. Serdar replaced by Mynx (Producer)
13. Richard (AP/Build Engineer)
14. Aaron (Lead programmer)
15. Garth (who moved over to Core Tech before the acquistion)

I think that is everyone.

Office support, HR, and Senior Management were all handled by Cryptic proper.

Issue 9 got a lot of attention from Jack, Poz, and Mike Lewis simply because the Invention System and Auction House was SO huge, and unlike anything we had done before. It took a village to raise that child.

John Yoo left RIGHT before the 15 person pair-down.

As for the comment about the two teams not stealing resources from one another. It is true. Anyone who left the project (Serdar, Constellation, Nick, Brett) was replaced by a new hire.

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Ack...forgot about Brett.

Still, I was close.

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And Aaron, but, you know, he's only the Lead Programmer and all.

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What was the reason for the reduction if that wasn't it?

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That answer is probably covered by either a Cryptic or NCsoft NDA. It should be left at that.