At the Monolith press summit for The Matrix Online, Matrix Online Stratics had the rare opportunity to sit down face-to-face with Lead Designer Toby Ragaini. We asked him some of the questions that you, the community, posted on our forums. Here are the answers.

MxOS: What are the specific benefits of Crew/Faction membership?
TR: We’re playing with different things in the beta, but right now for the Crew, the primary benefit is the hovercraft that they share. As the collective reputation increases, your hovercraft gets access to increasingly better equipment. So, things like enhanced cranial jacks that will give people a small bonus to their different ability levels. At the Faction level, we’re testing in beta the idea of awarding additional XP for leadership.

MxOS: How many players per hovercraft Crew are allowed?
TR: Twelve right now, but that could change before the final release. The Crew is supposed to represent a small, closely knit group of people, and for numbers larger than that, you could combine multiple crews together to create Factions.

MxOS: Will players be able to control/possess geographical territory in the game?
TR: The main world will not be a turf war. The four districts that we described will always be available for everyone to enter. There are certain options that we are investigating right now for having different kinds of separate environments that would be dedicated to control for different factions, but at this point, we are still investigating.

MxOS: Will players be featured in any out-of-game media?
TR: Our intent is that each server world will have its heroes and villains, and we want to feature individual characters, even if it’s as simple as listing their character name for having completed an important task for the story arc.

MxOS: What kinds of unique in-game events are planned?
TR: Working with the Wachowski brothers and Paul Chadwick (creator of the Concrete comic book series), we’ve developed an outline for several months of story arcs, and partly the way players experience those story arcs is through special episodes that reveal new content for the players.

MxOS: Will the story advance individually on each server, or will advancement be an aggregation of the actions taken by players on all servers?
TR: There is not going to be any divergence in the overall storyline, because the Wachowski brothers have a vision in mind. We’re allowing the players to participate and move the story along.

MxOS: How difficult is leveling? What’s the ceiling, and how much playtime do you anticipate it will take to reach the highest level?
TR: We have plans of course, but that’ll be based on the feedback we get from beta. Certainly, we expect players to quickly reach level 10 within a few play sessions. Beyond that, the character advancement is planned to level 50 at launch. Beyond that, that’s something that will be left up to the live team to support and possible future expansion packs.

MxOS: How many characters per server will a subscriber be allowed to create?
TR: The notion that we’re pursuing right now is that characters will have one character per world. We don’t want people making essentially throw away characters that exist to spy on other characters. We feel that the flexibility of the character generation model allows players to experiment without feeling locked in.

Matrix Online Stratics would like to thank Monolith and Warner Brothers for the opportunity to visit and ask these questions. We also appreciate the warm and generous hospitality shown to us during our stay.

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