Closed, since a link to the appropriate thread has been provided

It's based on sales. As long as we keep our line, we won't change the price. In general, the boxes get cheaper and cheaper over time to attract a wider range of more casual players, but it's always based on how much you're selling right now.

Oh, I think you're going to be happy with the dev log action starting tomorrow. :-)

No GDC this year. I stopped going to the actual show years ago, and just hang out in the lobby or the local hotels for meetings. This year, I'm kind of busy. :-)

Sorry, an update. The underdog tools were already being worked on, and as such, they'll be out in 1.2. Yay!

I brought the various issues up at our design meeting today. As usual, design was ahead of me. Also as usual, I'd never heard a peep about this, and so had to box their ears. Here's what's up:

Underdog tools - We have a whole plan for various tools to encourage play on underdog populations on low pop servers. These encompass a variety of different elements, and will be indicated when you're selecting a server so that new players will be tempted into playing different populations. Not only will they help encourage better balance, but they'll also help underdog sides have a better position for nation vs. nation. There's a spec on this that I'll be reading tomorrow morning, and we're looking at scheduling for these items now.

Character transfer - There's a good possibility that it'll be in 1.3, as we're now talking about what to kick out of 1.3 to get character transfers in.

PvP Incentives - I believe we're making changes in 1.2 to better balance risk vs. reward for the PvP.

They didn't understand what was going on. People have a simplistic notion that if something is running slowly, it must require more server hardware. When in fact the servers weren't being stressed, it was the code that was a problem.

As for hosting, Bigpond and Telstra are strangely segemented, but you see that in big companies. Their hosting arm is in some other universe, and the twain do not meet. Still, we're actively looking for local hosting options.

Bigpond was waiting on some info from us to make sure we could get our side done before announcing anything. I expect we'll have something interesting for you to consider by tomorrow or the next day.

The San Mateo Heavy Galleon is a tradeship, and is not in the same class as the others. The writ Hercules outperform their pure stats because of how the combination of stats work together. Historically, all the writ Hercules ships have slaughtered the Fourth Rates they've faced. That includes group PvP, even with no MC or Pirate Hercs present.