Hello everyone.

Next week we will be making some major changes to Echo Bazaar. These include several rebalances, a bunch of new items for sale at the Bazaar, and an enormous tranche of new and rather sexy content. We’re also raising the Shadowy cap to 110.

However, the really big deal is this: we’re introducing Exceptional Friends, a cheap subscription model for fans who want more daily actions than the game currently allows.

Initially, Exceptional Friends subscribers get the following benefits:

A second candle, which allows you to play 20 actions at a time rather than 10.
No more advertisements for other games.
A daily action cap of 80, with an additional 20 actions available for echoing to your social network, bringing the daily total to 100 actions.

We will be adding more benefits as Exceptional Friends grows. The price of a monthly subscription will be 35 Fate – that’s around $2 USD per week in real money. This is the same price as our existing second candle option. So, not only do you get your second candle, you get 100 actions a day and no more ads, for the same price.

To provide greater value to our Exceptional Friends, we will be reducing the daily action cap for free players to 40 actions per day, with an extra 10 actions for an echo to your social network, as usual. So 50 in total. We feel this is a reasonable number for casual players.

Any player who has ever bought any Fate will get a week of Exceptional Friend membership for free, automatically. We just want to say thanks for supporting the game, and we hope you’ll continue to do so.

OK, that’s the announcement. We’ll do our best to anticipate your questions below. If you have queries that aren’t covered here, post them below and we’ll try to address any concerns.

When’s all this happening?
Wednesday 23rd February. Exact time to be announced.

What if I already bought a candle? Do I get a free trial as well?
Of course! Your existing candle will last a week longer than usual and from 23rd February you’ll enjoy all the benefits of Exceptional Friend membership. Thanks for supporting the game, we really appreciate it.
What if I buy in February? Do I get less time because of the shorter month?

A monthly subscription lasts for 31 days, no matter what vicissitudes the calendar may throw at us. [EDIT: if you've bought one and see '30 days left', it means '30 days, 23 hours and 59 minutes'. We'll round to nearest day when we get a moment.]

What’s all this about rebalancing?
All the menace thresholds are going up to 8. We're adding a lot of new items to the Bazaar, especially for low level players, and we’re tweaking numbers throughout the game, in ways that will make the play experience smoother and friendlier for free and paying players alike.

WTF dudes, you totally sold us out!
We really didn’t. Echo Bazaar still has more than 350,000 words of completely free-to-play content – that’s about four novels – and we expect that figure to double before we reach the ending (endings, actually, but that’s another story). We offer that content for nothing.
As it happens, we think our game is actually worth a bit of money now and again. But if you don't, well, you can still play the huge amounts of free stuff, and we’ll keep adding more free stuff as we go along. We just don't have the option of giving unlimited actions to everyone and making all content free. If we do that, the game closes and everyone loses.

I’ve never bought Fate, but if I buy some now, do I qualify for the week’s free membership?
Yup. Anyone who buys or has bought any Fate before midnight GMT on 22nd February gets a free week.

Why only 40 actions for free players?
First off, it’s actually 50 with an echo. Second, the premium model of 80 actions and a 20 action refresh is as many daily actions as we can offer subscribers without cutting our own throats. 40 is half of 80. It’s a straightforward arrangement that’s easy to explain to new and old players.

Never mind all that, what about this new content?
Glad you asked. This is the biggest content release we’ve ever done. Those of you exiled from the Empress’s Court or seeking more Shadowy work will find a new life in Mahogany Hall, Spite’s foremost destination for vaudeville and magic. Players may choose their side in the gathering Wars of Illusion: favouring either the mystical mediums of the Shroud or the tricksy magicians of the Glass. Plus, the secret of the Kashmiri Princess, the cult of Theosophistry, the next instalment in The Affair of the Box, the terrible Clay twins Jasper & Frank, the secret of the Fingerkings and much more.