Golden Girl

But quite a few players will start playing on Vigilance - the same thing happened when the 4 European servers were added to the American sevrer list - the players on the American servers suddenly had access to two new English langauge servers with Defiant and Union, and several of them started playing there.
And now, English speaking players are going to have 2 more English language severs when the changes are made to Vigilance and Zukunft, so there's no reason why the same increase in populaiton won't happen there too.

At least half the replies seem to be in on it

You thought right

Telling players that if they hit 50 in a couple of hours they'd have those avatars banned is hardly crazy, or nasty - something drastic needed to be done to get the exploiters' attention and show them that cheating on that scale wasn't acceptable.

Why? She's not a Villain.

SSA1 and I21 and I22 suggests that they're quite capabale of producing high quality episodic content as well as high quality regular Issue content at the same time.

It's always been that way - that's why the game's still alive and kicking after 8 years
Design decisions are business decisions - everything done by the developers of an MMO revolves around retaining and expanding the customer base, otherwise there's no MMO left to develop.

Not sure if serious...

There will still be plenty of French speakers on Vigilance, but there's also going to be quite a few English speakers who are going to start playing on the server - so I think that there's going to be an active English speaking community on Vigilance too, which will, eventually, be bigger than the French speaking community.

The governments of the world probably secrety ordered all the cellphone companies to add a special device to their products so that no matter how many millions of people now own a cellphone, and no matter how sharp their pictures and videos now are, the special device will make them always go blurry the moment they get within a certain distance of any aliens.

You're forgetting to count the half-Issues in between, and the SSAs

They're a little easier to spot

I think it'll be quite a bit before August - if they've already put up a private version of I23 on beta at the end of March, then opening it up at the end of April after the Player Summit seems quite likely - that leaves way too big a testing gap until a launch in August.
I think that a late May/early June launch for I23 would be a more reasonable timescale, leaving July/August free for the new Summer Blockbuster event.
I24 should go into player beta around September/October, with a November launch before the Winter event starts in December.

All VIPs get to beta test new Issues - it's another one of our perks

Positron said recently that a Kings Row revamp would be his personal choice for the next zone revamp, because of the big break between it and the new Atlas content.

I think it'd be really cool - it could become out Gotham, and would make a nice turn to the darker side of the city after the bright face players first see in Atlas park - and once KR was done, players could head back to the brighter stuff in Steel Canyon, or stick with the urban decay in Skyway City.
But there are several design/financial problems with revamping KR, starting with with co-op problems - the devs have said that they prefer to add co-op environments to get the most bang for their buck - but the level range of KR makes it hard to see what kind of epic threat there could be there that'd need Heroes and Villains to team up.
One solution could be to have 2 versions of it for each side, like Ouroboros.
The next problem is its level range - the Atlas and Mercy revamps were needed as the first intro to the game for new players - but spending the same amount of time and effort on KR when low level progress is so fast mightn't be seen as a good return on their investment.
A financial problem would be the way that they seem to be going with the plan of VIPs getting new zone content for free, while non-VIPs pay for it - that's not a problem for DA, as it's a unique Incarnate zone, and Talos was already overflowing with content before First Ward was added - but having KR be a purchasable content zone feels like it'd be not only too early, coming right after the opening zone, but also that there's not really another free zone for non-VIPs to use instead, unlike Talos as the alternative to First Ward.

KR is bacically hard to make into a co-op zone, is at the level where it can be blasted through very quickly, and is also at the level where it'd be difficult to charge non-VIPs for its content.

Yeah - it seems like the new Trial that they're going to show off at the Player Summit is going to be in I23 - and as that's a summit perk, I think that probably means that the I23 beta won't start until after the summit.

Positron is still the lead designer

You're not