Hello and welcome to episode two of the official NCsoft Europe podcast.  My name is Stephen ‘Rockjaw’ Reid, and you might remember me from previous podcasts, like, episode one!  And you can tell that we’re still calling it the Official NCsoft Europe Podcast because, well I’m afraid nobody came up with a better name!  So if you want to come up with a better name for the podcast, then feel free to email me; rockjaw@ncsoft.com.

In episode two we have got loads of stuff for you.  We came back about two weeks ago from this massive European player meet that we did here in Birmingham (UK) which was taking place all over the Easter weekend, so we’ve got loads of news about that.  In addition we have a little interview with Melissa ‘War Witch’ Bianco, who was our guest of honour at the Heroic Weekend from NCsoft NorCal who is obviously one of the developers on City of Heroes and City of Villains.  And we’ve got some other news on City of Heroes: Issue 12, the Lineage 2 Collector’s Edition and other stuff, so keep listening, and we’ll try to keep it as short and snappy as we can.

So we told you in the first podcast that we were making our way, all the way up from Brighton to Birmingham for the whole of the Easter weekend, and we were doing it because we were hosting, along with Omega Sektor, a massive player meet; the biggest we’ve ever done, which we dubbed “The Ultimate Heroic Weekend”.  It started on Friday 21st March at 8 o’clock in the evening, and it finished, officially, on Monday 24th March at 8 o’clock in the evening, which meant that there was 72 hours of gaming to be had.  So in a nut-shell, was it any good?  Are you kidding me?  It was the best player meet we’ve ever done!  It was absolutely fantastic from start to finish; we had an amazing time, and I know that loads of players had an amazing time too.  Just go on the EU forums and you’ll see them talking about it like it was the best thing that’s ever happened to them!  So we’re extremely glad we did it.  We’re really really glad that everybody came and we really hope to see you again at other events, and of course, hopefully, at some events next year; but stay tuned for some more details about that.  So what was the deal, what was the venue, what was going on?  Well, it all happened at Omega Sektor; a massive LAN gaming centre which is right in the centre of Birmingham.  It’s got over four-hundred equipped gaming PCs which have the latest state-of-the-art graphics cards, all the latest games, and it was really the perfect place to have this event.  They had a bar, they had a massive big [cinema] screen in the bar that we could show movies on all weekend, they had consoles to play on, they had just about everything.  Everything you could want, and that’s important, because some of our players, literally, lived there for the entire weekend, but, we still think they had a pretty good time!

What was going on?  Well apart from the massive “Task Force: Omega” challenge, which we’ll talk about in a lot more detail later on, we also had a whole bunch of other activities going on.  We had a very very special guest, in the form of Melissa ‘War Witch’ Bianco, who you’ll hear from a little bit later on.  War Witch came over, and she gave a couple of Q&As and presentation talks, and talked about all sorts of stuff like the evolution of Faultline, and what’s going on at the studio, what’s going on with City of Heroes, and she was extremely welcoming, and everybody had a great time talking to her.  And even better; if you weren’t there, you missed out on the chance to just hang around and talk with Melissa and just ask her what game development is like, and what the future holds for City of Heroes, and I know she talked to loads of players all weekend, so again Melissa, thank you very very much for coming.

In addition to that, we ran superhero movies round-the-clock in the bar, there was of course, also the guys from Draw the World Together who were down there on Saturday and Sunday sketching away like crazy!  We were extremely happy and lucky this time to have the services of David Nakayama, who would be the artist who drew loads of the City of Heroes official comic book from Top Cow.  David came along and he was drawing what he was calling “busts”, which are colour head [and chest] shots of players’ characters, and every player that was getting one of these busts was basically donating money to Draw the World Together’s chosen charity, which is Everychild, and David did a fantastic job sketching for the entire weekend.  But he wasn’t alone of course.  He was sketching with Andrew Wildman, who is at every one of these events because he’s the founder of Draw the World Together, and Neil Edwards, who also drew loads of sketches for the entire weekend.  We were also joined on Saturday by Andie Tong who came in for a couple of hours and drew some amazing stuff, but all of the artists did an incredible job all weekend, so again, thank you to those guys.  If you’ve never been to one of our events and you want to get a sketch by an artist like these guys then just make sure you come; you’re going to give some money to charity, you’re going to feel good about yourself, and you’re going to get a fantastic unique sketch of your character, from any one of NCsoft’s games, they’ll draw anything!

In addition to all that we of course had an appearance from Ghost Widow and Ms Liberty herself who came in especially from the Rogue Isles and Paragon City, and they were there on Saturday posing for photos raising some more money for the charity, or in Ghost Widow’s case I think, maybe raising some funds for Arachnos!  People were also completeing special quests for them and getting special stickers and souvenirs and memorabilia, so there was all sorts of that sort of stuff going on.  And we also press-ganged them into helping us with “Draw the World Together Live” where the artists sat down and sketched the girls live, from life and then we used those in an auction later on in the day.

The auction, I can’t forget the auction!  On Saturday night we had a massive auction with Draw the World Together and, my word, these guys, these players, they came with their wallets out and open and they gave and they gave and they gave again.  I cannot say enough how generous these players are and it all went to one fantastic, worthy cause.  And it all added up to a massive, record-breaking amount for the entire weekend.  We raised a massive £3,300, and I’m sure you can convert that into your local currency, and that is the biggest amount that we’ve ever earned at any single event.  Our previous record was last year at Memorabilia where we raised £2,300 so, I have to say from the bottom of my heart; thank you to all of our players and anybody who donated when they were at the event because that is a staggering, astounding total, and it will be extremely hard to top!

So overall it was an amazing weekend.  According to the figures that we heard, over 1,300 people passed through the doors and on Saturday afternoon it got so busy there literally was no PC to sit down and play on, but, there was plenty of other stuff going on; we had Q&As going the entire weekend; Q&As with Melissa, I even gave a presentation on how to break into games(!) and there was all sorts of stuff going on all the time.  So if you didn’t come this year I am telling you, you have to make sure you come if we do one again, and stay tuned to hear a little bit more about that later on!

It was really an amazing, fantastic weekend, and we are so glad that we met so many players; many of whom that we’d never met before, many of whom we were meeting again.  Guys, we love you.  Thank you very very much for coming and we hope you had a fantastic time and all the effort and work that we put into it was worth it, and of course, thank you again to everybody from NCsoft who made it happen in such a short period of time.

And I guess that’s as good a place as any to say that we are officially coming back to Omega Sektor next year in 2009.  April 10th – 13th will be, well, we don’t quite know what we’re going to call it yet, but let’s call it “MiniCon 2” for lack of another term.  It will be NCsoft themed this time, as opposed to superhero themed, and will be embracing all of NCsoft’s games and it’ll just be bigger, better; we’ve got loads more time to plan it, so there’ll be loads more going on!  So get your diaries out if you have a diary for 2009, or if not just make a note somewhere; Easter 2009 should be all about NCsoft if you’re a fan of our games you’ll want to get down to Omega Sektor and join us for this amazing four day weekend that we experienced this year.

So while we were at Omega Sektor we took a little bit of time out to try and get a couple of little podcast pieces, so we had a quick chat with Melissa ‘War Witch’ Bianco, and we’re going to hear that now.

Stephen “Rockjaw” Reid: So it’s Monday 24th March and we’re here on the last day of the Omega Sektor MiniCon and we’ve been spending the last few days with Melissa “War Witch” Bianco who is…Senior Designer?

Melissa “War Witch” Bianco: Yeah, they promoted me when they transitioned us from Cryptic to NC NorCal. They were giving titles out for free!

SR: Melissa is Senior Designer at NC North California; NCNorCal who are of course responsible now for the City of Heroes [and City of Villains] franchise; wholly owned by NCsoft.  And Melissa, your job primarily is to do with zone design right?

MB: Zone design, but we’re doing a little bit of cross-over training so I get to do a little bit of mission stuff too, simply because we had so few staff that we really needed to learn each other’s job a little bit to help out where we needed to.  Honestly zone design is my niche but I have done the odd mission here and there too and a lot of mission support too.

SR: We’re very very grateful that you flew all the way from California to be with us!

MB: I’m very grateful I got to come!

SR: Unfortunately we wanted to bring more of the CoH dev team over but they are all busy finalising “Issue 12”.

MB: So was I, hello!  But I came!

SR: So by the time this gets broadcast there’s a strong possibility that Issue 12 will be on test.

MB: I will be going back to the States and I’ll be under some serious crunch mode when I get back to make up for the time.

SR: Sorry!

MB: No, are you kidding?  It’s totally worth it, I’d come back next week!

SR: So how’s the weekend been for you?

MB: It’s been a whirlwind, it’s been really cool. I had no idea that it was going to be as big as it was.  When we did Brighton two years ago, it was kind of nice and low key, kind of quaint and cosy.

SR: We had maybe fifty players in one internet cafe which was very small.

MB: It was pretty small.  So I guess I elevated my expectations just a little bit, but when I got here I just went “Wow”!  This was well beyond what I expected you guys to pull off especially within the six week time frame. I was shocked.

SR: Yes the phrase of the weekend has been “six weeks, six weeks” because we had six weeks prep time.

MB: How long did it take for you guys to organise Brighton?

SR: Probably not much longer!  But there wasn’t very much to it though.  That was a lot smaller.  Everybody turns up, goes into a room and would do some stuff.

MB: There’s a lot of stuff going on this weekend.

SR: And Brighton was one day, and this was four.

MB: And it was good.  I was here late every night, talking to players, hanging out, playing Rock Band.  I got a little time on Rock Band but honestly I’m an embarrassment on the drums. I was like “I think I’m just going to go back on the sidelines”!  It was fantastic.

SR: We’ve been doing this thing all weekend called Task Force: Omega, where we had these players playing through the 6 Task Forces required to get the “Task Force Commander” badge.  And the team that won was Commando Mirage, and they accredited their success to War Witch herself.  So what did you do exactly?

MB: It was so funny because Tia (‘Avatea’) came up to me and said “There are some players that want to meet you. They’ve come all the way from France and Belgium”. So I walked over and said hi and they were so excited, they said “War Witch is so popular in France” so I asked why and they said “She’s everywhere” and I went “Really?” and so I hung out with them for 2 hours, I was checking out their characters, they were showing me their supergroup and everything. So we hung out for a while and they were so excited!  We had to have one of them translate because I haven’t taken French since grade 10. And so they were so jazzed to meet me so I was excited to meet them. We hung out for a couple of hours well into the night and the very next day I found out that they won in 2 task force categories.

SR: They were the first one to finish, and they were overall winners.

MB: Because they had the best overall times.  And I was talking to them and they said “It’s because of you, we were so excited, we were so pumped up”. That was so flattering, I was so happy.

SR: You helped them get through the final nightmare. But we’ll talk about that more separately on the podcast. What other stuff have you learned?  You said you were surprised to see there was such a particular kind of player.

MB: When I was in Brighton I had maybe a couple of hour window to talk to people. A lot of it was “We really love the game”, “Here’s my character” and “You need to fix this”. This time around you have that too but you also actually get a chance to really talk to people and I had no idea that there was such a huge roleplaying population in the European servers, and that it is such a tight-knit community. We had people who flew out here from all different locations. Supergroups know each other in person. They put a lot of personal time, effort and creativity into the Task Force information packs that they were doing, coming up with concepts, back stories and people could give you volumes of information about their characters. And definitely I had no idea that we had a very large roleplaying segment in City of Heroes. And I was just amazed by it. And they asked me “Where’s our “walk” animation?”

SR: That’s all they want, a walking animation?

MB: Well they had a few requests so I’ll be taking those back to the States with me too.  You never really get that stuff when you only have a few minutes to talk to people, but when you get an entire weekend?  People are a little bit shy at first but by the end of the weekend I was talking to everybody. Obviously I’m quite approachable, I hope I am anyway, if I’m not, somebody needs to smack me in the head.

SR: I don’t think it’s been a problem.

MB: No, no one’s smacked me in the head yet so that’s good!  I actually got to know people at a deeper level than I normally would have with only just a few minutes here and there. So that was really awesome, I was really happy about that.

SR: The team that won the best overall team award was actually comprised of roleplayers and they specifically came because they said they wanted to represent the roleplaying community. That was the International Hero Idol team.

MB: I remember them. One supergroup, I feel so bad I can’t remember what their name was, showed me their base, and it was 4 levels of base!  It was so intricate, even I had no idea you could do that with our editor.  I was shocked and amazed.  I was really impressed.

SR: They are as they say, über hardcore!

MB: Absolutely.  They’re the ones that want the walking mode which I did ask about last time I was here.  Somebody asked “What about the walking mode” and I took it back to the States, Chris ‘Back Alley Brawler’ Bruce explained all the intricacies of why it’s not as simple as you’d think it is. People would say “What are you talking about, NPCs walk all the time” and he gave me a big story about animation and tech technology.  And I went “Ok, I guess it’s not as easy as that, otherwise we would have done it.”

SR: Well keep your fingers crossed, you never know.  So what’s really been the highlight?”

MB: Honestly, it’s been meeting everybody.  The location is incredible.  I love coming to Europe.  Probably actually getting the extra time to really hang out with people and talk to them on more than just a superficial level.  Oh and Rock Band, I love Rock band too!  I only played it for 5 minutes!  There was a long line of people waiting to play that.  I don’t know what it is about the community here and I don’t know if it’s because I’m Canadian and we are a commonwealth country or what.  Don’t get me wrong; I love our US players too but I haven’t had as much time to talk to them as I did this weekend.  Everybody here is so approachable and really friendly.  And even when they go “Look at this bug”, it’s not like a nag or like an anonymous person on the forum and they can say whatever they want because they’re not looking at you eye to eye but they always do it in a really positive way.  They say “I love the game but this is what happened to me!” it’s not like “This is broken, you need to fix it”.  Of course we need to fix it and it’s always good to know those things but definitely approach matters.  It’s great that everyone has been so positive with their feedback, and I always appreciate that.

SR: There was one particular bug we were talking about you said you were definitely going to go back and fix.

MB: Oh yeah the Skyway [City] Supa Trolls. Just the wall of trolls in Skyway; I had no idea it was as bad as it was.  And it was so funny too when people say “I really feel heroic when I go into Skyway City with my level 50 and start clearing out trolls so people can start moving again because the lag was so bad.” and I said “Oh man, yeah I’ll fix that on Monday!”.

SR: The heroic busting of lag!  Not necessarily what the game was invented for.

MB: But I actually saw it in-game too.

SR: So let’s just talk briefly about Issue 12…

MB: Okay

SR: …because we spoke a little about it in a presentation that we did here. So you’ve been re-tweaking The Hollows for Issue 12.  Tell us exactly what you did because we covered this but it’s not a complete zone redesign.

MB: Yeah, I definitely didn’t want to set people’s expectations that they’re going to get another Faultline, because quite honestly; because we were doing another new zone this issue, I was kind of doing a lot of mission support.  So we’ve got a new zone, it’s called “Cimerora”, it’s not a huge Atlas Park type zone.  It’s not as small as Ouroboros but, you know, it is a little bit bigger, but it’s not a full-fledged “zone” zone…

SR: Yes, it’s like a “mission zone”.

MB: …so it hasn’t taken me the entire development cycle to do that. So I had some time to; fix bugs first of all, and go through and do some gutting of The Hollows; but only spawns-wise.  So what I’d [did] was basically went and pulled out all the spawns and started from scratch and I added some new villain groups to the zone, fixed all the mission doors, so you’re not hovering all the way over to the “Frostfire” mission…

SR: Yay!

MB: I know!  And I especially tried and make it a little bit more of a decent transition between a city zone and a hazard zone for really new players, because quite honestly you could be in the game for two hours; you never played our game before, and you go from Atlas Park (which for by-and-large doesn’t have a boss in it) and then you’re in The Hollows and you’re pretty much getting beaten senseless within the first two hours of the game.  That’s kind of deflating a little bit.  So I definitely wanted to transition it a little bit better, so you’ve got a couple of neighbourhoods in The Hollows which have now got city-size spawns; I’ve cleared out the streets.  I definitely made a clear path to your contacts, so you’re not going to get jumped while you’re talking to your contact.  I’ve added repeatable missions, because sometimes you don’t have 3 hours or 5 hours to play.  Maybe you just want to get in and get out and you want to feel like you’ve accomplished something.  So I put in the repeatable missions.  That’s our new contact, Meg Mason, she’s there…

SR: Yes, that’s not a newspaper [mission], this is someone you go to but you can use it like - sorry not newspaper!  Police band [mission], I should say.

MB: No, it’s an actual person.  It’s a person that you click on.  She’ll give you a one-off mission.  It’s some kind of a choice; you can choose this, or this.  If you don’t feel like doing one thing, you can do the other.  And I just wanted to add a few villain-groups to the zone.  I mean, it got a little bit repetitive and I just wanted to add a little of life to the zone.

SR: So who are the new groups then?

MB: The new groups, let’s see, there’s Hellions and Skulls just for flavour.  Lost is in there in the beginning areas.  I brought in the Legacy Chain as a foil for the Circle of Thorns, because the Legacy Chain are a “hero"-type group, so as soon as you get a Legacy Chain guy next to a Circle of Thorns guy, “sparks are gonna fly”.  And let’s see…
I brought in some Coralax because Red River was obviously completely absent of spawns and I thought, well, ok, let’s add a few.  And I kind of basically had villain groups that were in certain neighbourhoods and then you didn’t see them later on.  Because what we had done originally was Outcast and Trolls for the entire area and then just Circle of Thorns, so I kind of wanted to add a little bit more flavour to the zone.  So you’ll see a few more.  And I tried to make Grendel’s Gulch a little bit easier and, I mean, don’t get me wrong!  That area is the highest level area [in the zone] but there’s a lot more loiters and you actually see them coming, because there was a lot of ambushes [originally], so it is dark and if you accidentally fell in there, you could honestly be squished.  So I tried to give you the opportunity to see that they’re coming.

SR: And there’s a hospital in there as well now, right?  A field hospital.

MB: Yeah, this is my level-design skills at work; which is basically a couple of gurneys and some sand bags - but yeah!  There’s a hospital now!  So if you die you don’t have to run back all the way from Atlas Park or wherever you started.

SR: That’s good.  Just the combination of mission doors being replaced and a hospital is going to make a lot of people happy.

MB: Yeah, it’s kind of funny, you could theoretically be sent to The Hollows at whatever early level and, it’s quite a daunting zone, if you are brand new [to the game].  So, yeah, I definitely wanted to look at the doors.  Now people are going to be like “Oh, I got a Frostfire mission and it took me 8 seconds to get to it!” because it’s in the same neighbourhood now. I tried to make sure that the mission doors that were appropriate to the missions were in the neighbourhood that your contact was in, so that you were within the realm of your level-range and you weren’t being sent to somewhere where you could just get completely squished.  So that was definitely a big goal of mine, because I ran in there a couple of weeks ago and I was frustrated.

SR: One question that’s come up quite a lot from the players, and I guess because they’d just like to know what’s going on, and we haven’t seen you since the end of 2006 when obviously you were still Cryptic Studios…

MB: Yes.

SR: So now that you’re part of the NCsoft family…

MB: Yes!

SR: So how are thing different and what’s changed and what are you looking forward to now?

MB: It was a bit of a transition for me personally, because quite honestly I was with Cryptic for five years, over five years, actually.  And when the buy-out came (the IP buy-out) and NCsoft offered me a position, I was actually kind of torn; not because I didn’t want to go, but because I felt really bad leaving Cryptic, because they were the ones that have given me my start.  But at the end of the day I was like, I need to stay on City of Heroes, because I love this game, I love our community and it was totally…I mean honestly, it was a no-brain decision because it was a fantastic opportunity and so, once I made the change I was very glad but there was a bit of tugging back and forth before I left. And now it just awesome because we have a lot of freedom in terms of - it’s like one pipeline now; you’re not like publisher / developer going back and forth.  Now it’s just like it’s all in one place.  We’ve made a lot of Quality of Life changes since we became NCsoft and it was amazing how effortless it was.

SR: Was that high on the list from your point of view?  Was it like “Let’s get that stuff in”?

MB: Yeah!  There was a lot of things that we had wanted to do before which for whatever reason we just didn’t have the opportunity [to do] and suddenly, well, I don’t know all the ins-and-outs of what went on, because obviously I’m not “Higher Level”, but things just started happening and I was like “Wow! That’s kind of cool!  Can I fix this?” - “Yeah! Absolutely!”

And it’s not to say we didn’t do that before, it’s just it felt right away, like when we did the 11.5 issue; which was our “Quality of Life” Issue and, yeah, it’s just been really seamless, actually. I thought it would be a bit more tricky getting up-and-running. We’re ramping up our hiring. We already hired a couple of more designers, a couple of more powers guys, and we’ve hired some guys in the art department…

SR: And programming as well?

MB: …and programming as well, yeah.  And Matt ‘Positron’ Miller said that he wanted to at least double the size of the studio by the end of the year.

SR: And you’re about…? How many people are there now?

MB: I think there must be at least twenty by now.  Over twenty.  So, that’s like really exciting because honestly for quite some a while we were quite shoe-string and it’s amazing that our issues were as well received as they were.  We just pretty much decided “OK, we are a skeleton crew right now, we need to make this stuff polished because we do not want to let people know that we’re this small”, because, you know, public perception and then it is like “Well I guess I’ll go to find another game! DOOOOM!”.  So I don’t know what we did, but it feels to me, like we stepped up our game in terms of putting a polished product out to the test server and then from there, really, really, really engaging in feedback with testers and focusing our forums to specific issues within the Issue - which I don’t think we had really done a lot of before.  I mean, maybe we started that with Striga [Isle].  And we really paid attention to what people were saying; we got a lot of bugs.  People were really hardcore playing the content and finding bugs that; honestly as developers in a small team, we could not have done it.  You really need that stress-test community to really get that for you.  And it was awesome and the Issues were really well received.

And so… with the transition, we were really a little nervous, we were curious how it would go, but it’s been awesome, it’s been great, we’ve been really, really excited.  So the new studio has worked out really, really well for us, and especially as NCsoft is so committed to putting a lot of money into the game and really moving the franchise forward.  Because, for a while we kind of felt like we were in a bit of a holding pattern.

We were kind of planning Issue to Issue. Now we have to plan years in advance.  That’s great!  It’s nice having a game-plan.

SR: Yeah, it is a major franchise and it’s going to continue forward.

MB: Yeah!  Absolutely!

SR: That’s all good news!

OK! Anything you want to say to the community?

MB: I’m so grateful to be here.  It is such…I mean, I never really properly conveyed what a big deal it is to come out here, because it is such (and it sounds totally cheesy, but it’s true), it’s such an honour to come out here and meet everybody.  And the fact that you guys fly me out all the way here and treat me so well… You know you could put me in a shack and I would still be super-glad to be here.  And I don’t joke when I say I would come out next week, because I would.  I’d be really super-tired but I would do it anyway.  And I have so much fun at these things and it’s so funny, because what I don’t think people realise is how shy I am, and this kind of stuff is total torture for me!  Like you putting me on camera and interviews… it’s just like *chocking noise*.  I think I’m getting better at it.

SR: You do very, very, well.

MB: I fake it!  Seriously I pretend that I’m more polished than I really am.  So I’m glad that you asked me to come back…

SR: Not a problem.

MB: After Brighton I was like… oh… and then I found out about [this event] and [the guys at NCNorCal] were like “You want to go in a couple of weeks?” and I’m like “Yeah! I’m there!” - I was so excited.  So thank you very, very much!

SR: No problem at all.  And if you’re listening and you’re thinking to yourself that you should have come… of course you should have come…

MB: You should have come!!!  It was awesome!

SR: …we will be doing it again, so hopefully you will get to meet Melissa at one of those events.

MB: Yeah! I’d love to meet you.

SR: Thank you very much Melissa!

MB: Thank you!

So between the last podcast and this one, you have obviously, if you’re a City of Heroes fan, heard about Issue 12: Midnight Hour.  This is possibly one of the biggest and most exciting Issues that we’ve done in quite a long time and I know everybody in the City of Heroes community is really excited about it.

If you haven’t heard; it’s the latest free expansion of City of Heroes; everybody who is a subscriber gets it for free, and it’s going to introduce a bunch of exciting new stuff to the game.

Probably the biggest headline feature of Issue 12 is something that the developers are calling “Powerset Proliferation”, which is basically going to allow every archetype in the game access to new powersets.  And as I understand it; this is a continuing thing and will expand over future Issues, but you can get more details on exactly what archetypes are going to get access to what powers on the official City of Heroes website.

Mission-wise there’s a brand new time-travel mission which is going to take heroes and villains back together to the ancient Mediterranean to fight evil there.  The villains amongst you are also going to be very happy with Issue 12 because we’ve introduced Villain Epic Archetypes.  These are going to be unlocked as soon as you get one villain to level 50 and then they will allow you to level up through the ranks of Arachnos as either a Crab Spider or Night Widow.

There are loads more features in Issue 12, and far too many for us to talk about, but the good news is; it’s coming to the test server soon, so you’ll be able to play them for yourself before too long.  If you want more information about Issue 12 make sure you visit the official City of Heroes website at eu.cityofheroes.com.

For those of you who are fans of Lineage 2: The Chaotic Throne, well, there’s something very exciting happening in April for you, and that’s going to be the introduction of the Lineage 2 Collector’s Edition.

This is the first time a Collector’s Edition has been done for Lineage 2 anywhere outside of Korea.  There’s never been one done in America and this is also the first time it’s happening in Europe, and this is going to be an extremely limited edition, so I would strongly encourage you pre-order this thing if you want it!

It’s an absolutely packed box; it’s probably one of the best Collector’s Editions that we’ve done, and we’ve done some really good ones in the past.  The full contents are going to include, amongst other things; a massive art book, a limited edition Kamael statue, a Kamael mini standee, two collectable game time cards which slot together into one larger image, a soundtrack from the game, two posters, which actually go side-by-side to create one larger image, and also, in just fifty of these Collector’s Editions, scattered somewhere around Europe, you’re going to find an envelope which contains a Golden Ticket.  There’re only fifty of them as I say, but if you are lucky enough to get one of these envelopes, you can exchange it for an extremely limited edition Dark Elf figurine, which is absolutely brilliant; I’ve seen it on people’s desks here at the office; it’s really gorgeous, so if you are lucky, you’ll pick up that figurine, but remember as I say, there’s only fifty of them in the entire production run!

So if you want to get your hands on this fantastic Collector’s Edition you can pre-order it right now.  All you’ve got to do is go to eu.plaync.com and click on the store link, and that’s going to take you right into the store where you can pre-order it.  The price is £59.99 or €79.99.

OK that’s it!  As always, if you want to talk to us about the podcast then feel free to drop us a line.  My email is rockjaw@ncsoft.com and we’d love to hear from you about any aspect of the podcast.  In addition, you should be able to subscribe to us on iTunes, so just go searching for NCsoft and hopefully that’ll find it for you, or click on the RSS link which you should be able to find clearly sign-posted from the European PlayNC website at eu.plaync.com.

Thanks very much for listening, thanks for downloading.  Get in touch if you want to, and we’ll be talking to you again in about a month.