I think the surprise was in how players would respond; as we were largely in unknown territory, we honestly didn't know whether enough of them would be interested to make future content of this manner viable.
While the steep learning curve undoubtedly makes the game a little different than people might expect from an MMO in this day and age, it's also the thing that gives us something to differentiate us from the ever-growing crowd of virtual worlds on the market.

Jonric: Since massively multiplayer games have to evolve by adding new content on an ongoing basis, how are you fulfilling this need?

Craig Morrison: Since the last full expansion, Lost Eden, we have moved to a production model that has a stronger focus on bringing more content more rapidly. Previously, we tended to concentrate on larger expansions every 18 months or so, and the free content updates in between were quite far part. Now, we are able to produce content for updates every eight weeks or so to provide players with a more constant stream of new fun. In addition, we are working towards paid content updates - more like booster packs than full expansions - with the aim of providing these slightly larger additions a couple of times a year.

I think this plan has been particularly well received, and we have been very encouraged by how well the players have responded to the new content schedules.

Jonric: When did you start to consider adding item sales? At that time, what potential obstacles did you see, and how did you end up addressing them?

Craig Morrison: We have been discussing the idea of micro-transactions and item sales for some time. It has been a dominant trend in the eastern MMO markets for a few years now, and was always going to become a factor for western audiences as well. I think the main pitfall we observed was that the latter had an inherent distrust of anything that allowed your progress in the game to be directly affected by your ability to purchase items, and I feel that still holds true. This guided how we thought about introducing item sales, and we quickly decided that if we were to proceed, we would have to be inventive and find ways to introduce the model so the items were still attractive while not directly influencing people's actual ability to progress.

Luckily, Anarchy Credits has very strong social aspects, and related items that don't necessarily have any impact on the play have always been popular as collectibles in the game. This allowed us to target this area, and to build some interesting and really cool items that players can now purchase with the new paid points system.